Chipset/Software Combo Enhances Sound Of Stereo Headphones

Ordinary stereo headphones can be made to emulate a 5.1-loudspeaker playback system by using the ADSST-MELODY-1000 Dolby Headphone chipset, a SHARC DSP-based chipset onto which has been implemented Lake Technology's Dolby Headphone. Among the digital audio sources supported by the chipset plus software combo are 5.1-channel Dolby Digital, MPEG2 AAC, MPEG2 Audio Layers 1 and 2, MLP or PCM from DVDs, computers, HDTV, game consoles, and more. The ADSST-MELODY-1000 chipset features a 32-bit, floating-point implementation of Dolby Headphone, a surround sound software solution for headphones. By inserting the chipset immediately before the stereo headphone's D/A converter, the headphone can be made to play back surround sound and stereo audio. Only the chipset plus external SDRAM or SRAM and ROM and a SPI port, as well as three stereo I2S input signals and one stereo I2S output signal, are required to achieve the performance.