Application Notes

WOW provides significant audio enhancement benefits to a wide range of products across various product markets:

Television: WOW provides a cost-effective solution to product designers facing challenging design problems that often hinder the sound performance of television sets. These challenges often present themselves as limited chassis space for speakers, rattles caused by larger speaker drivers, vibration of the shadow mask in CRT based sets, poor speaker location choices and limitations on speaker driver sizes. WOW has been used by set makers to actually reduce the cost of existing chassis designs by eliminating the need for larger, bazooka-style bass tubes, reducing chassis size, reducing labor costs associated with assembly, and eliminating annoying rattle issues. WOW can do all of that while also providing new benefits such as a much wider sound image field and deeper, richer bass performance up to an octave below the F0 low frequency of the physical speakers. For big-screen projection televisions, WOW can also be used help reposition the sound image field from the speaker located under the screen to avoid the loss of high frequencies from carpet absorption or hard surface floor reflection. WOW also aids in the immersion of the viewer by locating the image field in the center of the screen allowing better association between the audio and the image.

In flat panel sets WOW can significantly improve the audio performance of the small and thin speakers drivers that are used in these applications, making the perceived audio quality of flat panel products approach that of CRT based sets.

Mobile Phones: WOW has been implemented in mobile phone handsets by leading handset makers worldwide. Generally, WOW has been implemented in the existing DSP or ARM processor to provide dramatical improvement of digitally compressed music and polyphonic ring tones played over stereo headphones or the tiny external mono speaker of the handset. WOW delivers a more immersive sound, reduces the "tinny" sound of digitally compressed audio and small speakers and delivers far deeper, richer bass performance than these small speaker drivers and ear bud headphones can physically reproduce. As the penetration of multimedia enabled handsets continues growing worldwide, WOW provides a total digital audio solution that can provide an intensified listening experience and dramatic increase in perceived audio quality of digital music, polyphonic ring tones, mobile gaming sound effects, streaming audio and video, and MMS. This translates directly to increased customer motivation for purchase of premium multi-media content via the cellular network.

Portable Audio Products: For portable audio and mini-systems, generally the speakers are quite near one another making it nearly impossible to create a wide, spacious sound field. With WOW technology integrated into the product, headphone based products and products with very small speakers can achieve big sound, especially with digitally compressed media such as MP3 or AAC.

Automotive Entertainment: In the automotive audio market, WOW delivers a wide sweet spot, critical in cars, where none of the passengers are likely to be centered between the speakers. WOW presents the driver and passengers with a stable sound field of music in front of them, with vocals in the center and music and ambient cues that gently wrap around them and also provides deep, rich bass up to an octave lower then the F0 frequencies of the speakers themselves. Today, SRS licensees have applied WOW in two different methods. Some apply WOW only to the Left Front and Right Front speakers only and pass through un-processed audio to the rear channels. Others have applied WOW to the Fronts and also apply just the TruBass psychoacoustic bass enhancement to the Rear Left and Rear Right speakers to provide additional low frequency performance without the need for a subwoofer. WOW is a very flexible suite of audio technologies that can significantly aid car audio designers in the production of great car audio performance.

Personal Computers & Laptops: WOW may be implemented in software or hardware to improve audio dynamics, widen the sweet spot, provide the perception of improved low frequency response and reduce the "tinny" sound of digitally compressed audio and small speakers. For years, Microsoft has implemented SRS Labs' WOW technology in the Microsoft Windows Media Player software to improve the overall listening experience of digital audio. Today, over 250 million Media Player users have been exposed to the WOW branding and the improved audio performance provided by WOW. As a result, many universal player software companies and computer designers and manufacturers are planning the implementation of WOW at a much deeper level in the computer architecture so that audio played from any source on the computer (not just in the Media Player) will be able to take advantage of the improved audio benefits provided by WOW.