
Driving Immersive Sound
MPEG-H Audio paves the way to the future of in-car entertainment
Fraunhofer has developed this system, based on the MPEG-H 3D Audio standard, to offer an enhanced sound experience for in-car entertainment, broadcast, and new media services such as UHDTV, immersive music services, 4K video streaming or Virtual Reality.
MPEG-H Audio in Automotive
MPEG-H Audio is a new audio technology providing more realism through sound from above as well as around the listeners, putting them in the middle of the action. It also provides an unprecedented degree of freedom to consumers to personalize the audio experience, to actively engage with the content and adapt it to their own preferences. MPEG-H Audio supports channel-, scene- and object-based audio as well as any combination of these formats. The signaled metadata carries all information needed to enable interactivity. The MPEG-H Audio system provides the highest sound quality and an unmatched user experience on all devices from mobile phones to TV sets to cars.
Future-proof Automotive Audio

Streaming services are the preferred medium of audio content consumption today. Several well-established services such as Amazon Music HD, Tidal, Deezer, nugs.net, and WoWoW offer an immersive audio experience powered by Sony’s 360 Reality Audio format, which is based on MPEG-H Audio. In-car entertainment is a perfect use-case for MPEG-H Audio: Immersive audio content – be it music streaming services with 360 Reality Audio, immersive audio books and podcasts, or rear-seat entertainment – makes it possible to unlock any sound system‘s full potential.

Premium sound systems benefit from discrete 3D audio content that preserves the artists‘ intent, while midrange or entry-level systems still achieve the best possible sound quality with a state-of-the-art downmix and enable consumers to listen to all their streaming services in the car. Rear-seat entertainment applications with installed screens can make use of the interactivity features of MPEG-H Audio that are already well established in streaming and broadcast. The advanced accessibility options of the system make for better speech intelligibility and binaural rendering for connected headphones, which guarantees an immersive experience.

MPEG-H Audio also enables advanced warning sounds with spatially rendered signaling. Audio objects can be positioned freely within an MPEG-H Audio mix. Only one warning sound item needs to be produced across all car models and the warning sound will be rendered at the correct position according to the available playback system.
Automotive Audio Solutions by Fraunhofer IIS
Learn more about our technologies for automotive.