Harman News Looms On Rebranded Clari-Fi, But Not at N.Y. Auto Show

In advance of the New York International Auto Show that opens this week, Harman held one-on-one demos of its software technology that restores audio detail to compressed music. Harman first showed the technology under the Signal Doctor name at CES, but it since redubbed it Clari-Fi after market research indicated the word “signal” didn’t carry the intended meaning to today’s consumers who associated the term with a traffic signal instead of an audio signal, Jeff Poggi, vice president-global sales and marketing for Harman’s automotive audio group, told us. The new Clari-Fi name is more “approachable” and conveys the message of “clear sound” and hi-fi in one, he said.

But while Harman was in New York demoing the technology in a sporty Fiat 500L, its first announcement of an automotive Clari-Fi partner will be made at the 2014 Beijing auto show next week, Poggi said. That will be followed by the announcement at the end of April of the first mobile device to sport Clari-Fi, he said. As for the logical incorporation of Clari-Fi in Harman-branded products, those announcements will be coming soon, Poggi said. Harman is also hoping to license Clari-Fi to third parties but none has been announced, he said.

Using a tablet with a graphical interface to show the level of sound extraction required for different recordings and codecs, Brandon Wheeler, associate engineer-acoustical systems, showed how Clari-Fi brings out qualities lost during compression such as transients in the bang on a snare drum, reverberation and bandwidth. Clari-Fi is said to automatically analyze the source of the audio -- whether it’s satellite or Internet radio, streaming video or an MP3 or another of dozens of codecs -- and restore what has been lost. He showed the representation of a brick-wall filter in the frequency range where “high-energy” content is chopped off to reduce the size of an audio file.

Clari-Fi technology is “smart enough” to know whether it needs to be on and how much work it needs to do based on the level of compression, Wheeler said. The software detects the brick-wall filter at the upper end of the frequency range where frequencies have been cut out to save space and puts them back in, in an effort to recreate CD-quality sound, he said. The software doesn’t kick in on playback of typical CDs because it’s able to detect varying levels of compression, he said. Harman devised a 1-10 scale to show “how hard Clari-Fi is working” to bring qualities of the music back into a recording, and in our demo, Wheeler showed us a level 7 reading on an AC/DC track recorded at 96 kbps using the AAC codec. We heard an improvement with Clari-Fi -- although a subtle one -- in the openness of the sound and the clarity of the cymbal crash and vocals.

On a 128-kbps iTunes recording by Sarah McLachlan, equivalent to the lowest quality streaming settings from Pandora or Spotify, we heard an improvement in the vocal track from what had been an almost muffled quality. While there was much clearer definition after Clari-Fi, we found the “Clari-Fied” sound had overcompensated, creating an overly “bright” sound. Wheeler said vocals are difficult to compensate for because of their wide frequency range. “You have a very large range to cover,” so extracting all that information and then reproducing it “isn’t easy,” he said. He called Clari-Fi “the first of its kind” but said it’s possible to do “too much of an extraction and go over” because the software is “rebuilding from things it sees in the audio.” Competing sound enhancement technologies designed to compensate for quality loss from compression are “really just boosting treble and bass … not actually restoring or recreating them back into the music,” he said.

In the automotive world, an engineer will be assigned to each vehicle model to ensure that Clari-Fi technology is tuned for each, Wheeler said. But that kind of customizable tuning won’t be available to consumers on AV receivers or powered speakers -- other than possibly to turn the feature on or off, Poggi said. Harman doesn’t want to give consumers control over the software “because it would cause more problems,” Wheeler added. “Most people would just turn them up full throttle,” he said, referring to the various elements of the software. “You can have too much of a good thing because you can extract so many different things from the music,” he said.

Clari-Fi launched first in Harman’s mid- ($599) to high-priced ($999) Authentics wireless speaker systems that came out this year. Poggi also demoed for us Clari-Fi technology on a laptop connected to a pair of Revel loudspeakers at the Harman store. The goal is to extend the technology across a range of products, he said.