CSR Touts Interoperability Testing As It Makes Push With Vibe, AptX Platforms

The first products based on CSR’s VibeHub and VibePlayer multi-room audio platforms will start to roll out next year in time for the holiday season, Jonny McClintock, director-aptX marketing at chip maker CSR, told Consumer Electronics Daily on a press tour in New York. McClintock expects customers to make pre-product launch announcements at CES, where the company will demo the SoCs off-site along with its fledgling aptX Low Latency technology. CSR announced DLNA-based VibeHub and VibePlayer, based on the Sonata media processor, last year at CES. The platform uses Bluetooth for streaming and then distributes audio via Wi-Fi, McClintock said.

NuVo Technologies has been selling an “early variant” of the VibeHub multi-room system in its P100, 200 and P3200 systems that are sold into the custom electronics market, McClintock said. CSR will “sell to anyone who wants to do it,” but the company is hoping to grab a piece of the do-it-yourself market that Sonos currently owns. “Everybody aspires to the Sonos model” because of its “ease of setup out of the box."

"Wireless has proven to be a solution people want,” said McClintock, saying the falloff in the residential housing market created demand for multi-room audio systems that didn’t require pre-wiring or cutting through walls to run wires. In any “eruption” of a product concept, several things have to align, McClintock said. In the case of wireless multi-room audio, it’s the confluence of market conditions, advanced technology and the success of Sonos that have pulled Bose, Lenbrook, Nortek and Samsung into the ring.

With the rush of companies competing for a share of the wireless multi-room audio market, “it’s going to be the Wild West for the next couple of years as everybody else pours time and energy into it,” McClintock said. He envisions a market landscape of 20 companies with their own slant on wireless multi-room audio where “everybody makes a little money from it” before there’s “bloodshed” and “only two companies are left standing."

On the pricing model for CSR’s Vibesolutions, McClintock said, “We won’t be causing undue expense in the BOM (bill of materials), but every manufacturer’s going to have a variation.” Sarah Thombury, communications manager, said the scalability of design will enable CSR-based solutions to work with audio systems from portable Bluetooth systems to multi-room systems. CSR’s hope is that through interoperability testing in Belfast, certified products will be compatible with each other, enabling a high-end system in the living room to work with a mainstream Bluetooth speaker in a child’s room, for example.

The Vibe SoC business is one direction for CSR as the company attempts to broaden its reach. Others that it’s working on through Bluetooth 4.0 include aptX Low Latency for use in headphones and tablets and Bluetooth Smart for use in health and fitness products, McClintock said. The company recently said its aptX Low Latency SoC is built into Monster’s M7 tablet. CSR also licensed Low Latency technology to MadCatz for its GameSmart headsets that were delayed and are now due to ship early next year (CED Nov 12 p12).

Belfast, U.K.-based CSR has been reserved in the past about promoting its technology and it’s now making more of a push for consumer brand recognition. AptX is known among “early adopter audiophiles” for the quality it adds to Bluetooth, but in the next stage the company is hoping to “create more consumer pull-through for the man on the street,” said Thombury. AptX was a small startup when acquired by CSR in July 2010, “yet we were able to sell aptX to some of the world’s major consumer electronics brands,” Thombury said. AptX today has 250 licensees and is deployed in roughly 400 million handsets, McClintock noted.