DTS to Ship Android-Based Multi-Room Media Distribution System Using Phorus Technology

DTS, which purchased Phorus in July, unveiled the Phorus Android-based wireless audio platform Wednesday in New York. DTS is positioning the uncompressed content distribution technology against Bluetooth and Sonos, while at the same time incorporating Bluetooth into the platform as an all-purpose solution for users who don’t have Android devices. Unlike Bluetooth, a single-room solution with a range of 30 feet, or Sonos with its proprietary mesh network platform, DTS’s Phorus Play-Fi system operates over a home’s Wi-Fi network, Dannie Lau, CEO of Play-Fi developer and DTS subsidiary Phorus, told us.

Play-Fi is about “bringing music back home again,” Lau told us at a demo of the system at the London Hotel in Manhattan. Lau, founder of PhatNoise, which produces automotive MP3 hard disk systems, said, “In many ways the home has been left behind in the digital transition” so Lau’s latest effort is a multi-room playback system. Phorus Play-Fi, using an Android app, taps music from a user’s smartphone, tablet or PC and plays it through speakers throughout the house using the smart handheld devices as controllers.

All three Phorus Play-Fi products utilize DTS’s advanced Play-Fi technology to stream and receive high-definition, lossless audio over Wi-Fi, “a big leap in quality over Bluetooth audio options,” Lau said. Play-Fi enables synchronized streaming of music to eight stereo Play-Fi-enabled speakers at one time, or it can stream separate music tracks from different devices to connected speakers in different rooms, he said. Users only see the rooms they've connected to with their devices, he said.

The smartphone used for a Play-Fi system is “not just a simple remote control” but the source of a user’s content, Lau said, which makes it easier to personalize music to a particular user “because they have their phone with them all the time.” The Bluetooth solutions available to date “are far from elegant, difficult to set up and never sounded good,” Lau said, which led to their “never catching on.” He conceded that that is changing, with the surplus of Bluetooth speakers currently on the market, but he said their recent rise in popularity is “almost by necessity.” Play-Fi was designed for Wi-Fi 802.11n networks, which “have evolved to where with the proper tweaking, we can use standard Wi-Fi to get very reliable audio performance,” he said. The system is backward-compatible with “b” and “n” Wi-Fi networks, but the number of speakers that can run on a system might be limited on an older Wi-Fi network, Lau said. “Maybe they could only support a handful versus eight or 10,” he said. In addition, 802.11b doesn’t have the range of newer 802.11n models, he said.

Play-Fi’s design team comprises engineers specializing in electronics, networking, embedded software and acoustic design, Lau said. The Play-Fi system streams bit-for-bit accurate audio over Wi-Fi to achieve lossless transmission, and the team “did a lot of work for sound quality,” Lau said. Engineers designed the speaker transducers and port design and developed their own DSP algorithms and tuning with the goal of getting “great sound from a small speaker,” Lau said. The system accommodates up to 16 stereo speakers with eight able to play at any given time, he said, and up to four receivers or speakers can be synchronized to create a zone. When a phone call comes in, the system pauses and goes into mute and then resumes when a call ends, he said.

The timing of the Play-Fi launch comes a week after Apple launched iPhone 5 but for now the Play-Fi system is decidedly Android-based, Lau said. The idea for Phorus came to Lau while he was working on an AirPlay speaker two years ago, when he realized nothing similar existed for the Android market and he saw an opportunity, he said. “Android had maybe 2 percent market share at the time and people were questioning whether it would even make it,” Lau said, “but I thought if we get in early and create a great wireless technology optimized for Android, this could be really big.”

Today, the number of Android devices exceeds iOS devices by two to one, but the only wireless technology for the Android devices is Bluetooth, “a 10-year-old technology with lots of warts,” Lau said. Regarding whether ignoring iOS is leaving a lot of potential customers on the table, Chief Financial Officer Sharon Graves said, “There are multi-device households, so we're not limited to Android, but we're starting there.” The system works with Android 2.2 devices and later, which is roughly 92 percent of the Android population, Lau said.

Play-Fi’s three-product portfolio comprises a free app from the Google Play store; a flat, oval-shaped $149 PR1 receiver, “analogous to an AirPort Express,” Lau said; and the $199 PS1 powered stereo speaker. The receiver can plug into a powered speaker with RCA jacks using a “Y” adapter. At our demo, Phorus showed the receiver with a Beatbox, in-ceiling speakers and a powered speaker from Wren. At launch on Oct. 1, the hardware will be available on the Phorus website and at Amazon, Graves said. DTS is seeking additional retail partners, including brick-and-mortar stores, she said, and hopes to announce others before Christmas. Regarding possible relationships with smartphone or tablet companies, there’s “nothing at this point,” she said.

The only outside music service available via the Wi-Fi service at launch is Pandora, Lau said. Any user-owned content stored on tablet or smartphone is available for streaming throughout the house through Google Play or Amazon MP3, both of which sync music to a device so that music is available locally and users don’t have to use the network to download content, he said. As services are added, they'll be updated to the system automatically, Graves added. The company expects to launch several more music services before the holiday season, Lau said.

The barrier to additional content services now is “us getting the work done,” Lau said. The process for adding services takes about three months, Lau said, and the internal team working on securing other services “has implemented the services at other companies for other types of products,” he said. The company needs to get software development kits and application programming interfaces to connect to those companies’ servers, agree on a user interface and complete a certification process to make sure the product conforms to the look and feel the service wants to convey, he said.

On where DTS wants to take Phorus technology next, Lau said “there’s a lot of potential with media over Wi-Fi,” declining to expand on the roadmap. The company is promoting Play-Fi as a platform standard that could be licensed to other CE companies as a “hi-fi over Wi-Fi technology,” including phone and tablet makers, he said. “There are a lot of companies trying to catch up in this space to get better audio, better convenience and multi-room capability,” he said. “This can be a very inexpensive way to do it since we're using standard Wi-Fi radios that in many cases are already built into their products."

On April 26, prior to its purchase by DTS, Phorus submitted an international patent application for its media distribution architecture with the World Intellectual Property Organization. The abstract described the technology as “a wired and wireless media transport technology … that allows for the simultaneous transmission of media to multiple zones while maintaining precise timing synchronization. A user can have a network of speakers, and independently select which ones are actively playing and have their playback synchronized. The media source can be a cell phone, tablet, stereo, set-top box, PC or other device. The media itself can be audio or video. The transmission method of media into the network can be wired, as through an auxiliary cable, or wireless as with Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. The speakers/endpoints themselves are governed in a self-forming network. Audio is injected into the network from a source and the end-point network itself controls audio/video distribution, timing, and rendering,” the application said.