Seven Critical Questions About Audio

Seven Critical Questions to Ask When Selecting a Digital Audio Solution for Your Next Mobile SOC Design

Imagine that you're stepping off the bus in Barcelona, Spain to visit this year's Mobile World Congress (MWC). You look between the twin towers that flank the entrance to the Fira de Barcelona exposition center in downtown Barcelona as a crowd of 50,000 people walk into the event along with you. In your mind's eye, see yourself walk among the immense booths of major mobile product vendors from Europe, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, China, and the US. Feel yourself enveloped in a massive cloud of clashing sounds and images. The cacophony is almost staggering but you're at MWC to choose the next winning phone handsets and mobile consumer products that your company will sell in its stores or catalogs. Your company's success depends on making the right choices.

How Will You Choose?

Take your pick of the many, many market forecasts for smartphone sales from 2010 through 2015. No matter which of the crystal balls you select, there's one figure that's not in doubt: billions of smartphones will be purchased from now to the middle of the decade. Try to imagine a smartphone, or any mobile device for that matter, that omits audio features. Impossible, isn't it? Audio features are essential to every mobile device from smartphones, to Personal Music Players, to GPS navigation units, etc. All of these devices incorporate significant digital-audio playback capabilities. They are uncompetitive if they lack the audio features built into their competition. Every mobile market is packed with competitors and a mobile product without great audio can't be sold.

In such a high-stakes game, the selection of an audio solution for each mobile SOC is a major decision. The wrong decision is decidedly perilous for two major reasons.

1.       The wrong decision will harm playback quality that can be obvious when the end products is demonstrated to the customer.

2.       The wrong decision will shorten battery life and will either make the end product less competitive because it's talk time or playback time will be shorter than the competition or because the end product must be larger and heavier than the competition to accommodate a larger battery.

Of course, you'll consider several factors when selecting a mobile audio solution for a SOC design targeting specific mobile product niches. However, chances are very good that one of the very first factors you'll consider will be how the audio solution will sound. With the advent of multichannel digital audio, sound has returned once more to its prominent place in the consumer consciousness.

Sound started the consumer electronics revolution with the phonograph and AM radio but its importance sank with the introduction of television. Sound's importance rose again with the development of FM stereo and stereo LP records only to be eclipsed once again by the introduction of color TV. Now, with the development of 5.1-channel and 7.1-channel digital theater sound, the rise of the portable media player and the immensely successful Apple iPod, and the evolution of the mobile phone handset into the omnipresent smartphone media player/game console, digital audio has once more attained prominence as a product differentiator in the cutthroat world of consumer electronics.