Qualcomm Soundabout Lossless

^M00:00:01 [ Music ] ^M00:00:04 >> All right, hey I'm Donald Bell here, Senior Editor for digital audio and MP3 for CNET here at CES 2008, and I'm here to present one of my nominations for the best of CES awards. It is a new Blue Tooth audio technology called Soundabout Lossless. It is an improvement over the existing Blue Tooth audio streaming technology, and I was shown a little bit of it back in August of this year, but now with me I have David Favreau here to tell me a little bit more about Soundabout Lossless. David here is from Qualcomm correct? >> David Favreau: Yes, thank you very much Donald. I'm Director of Product Management for Qualcomm and responsible for our Blue Tooth and wireless connectivity business. >> Donald: Great to have you here. >> David Favreau: Thanks. >> Donald: So how is Soundabout Lossless an improvement over the existing experience people may have had with streaming audio maybe from an MP3 player or streaming audio in their home entertainment system? >> David Favreau: Great question. Some of your listeners or viewers may not be familiar with the term Lossless so just to briefly define that Lossless allows us to transmit streaming audio technology without any degradation or loss in the original quality relative to the original source content; so the benefit of this to the end user is we get to deliver a wireless audio experience that's comparable to a wired experience; so we see this Lossless audio codec technology eventually as a replacement technology for wired technology for a range of consumer products including Blue Tooth headsets, wireless speakers and things of that type. >> Donald: That's great and I remember when the technology was demoed for me earlier last year. Another great part of the technology from what I remember was the lack of latency involved in transmitting such a higher quality audio stream, so things like movies wouldn't lose lip sync is that correct? >> David Favreau: That's correct; I think that's one of the key benefits we see for this technology is the ability to deliver this streaming audio experience with very low latency, so for multimedia applications or multiple speakers within the home, theater type of environment to deliver a great sound quality synchronized with your video. >> Donald: Thank you David for talking to us about Soundabout Lossless. I look forward to seeing the technology and some products in the upcoming years. I'm Donald Bell and that was my nomination for one of the best of CES for 2008. ^M00:02:29 [ Music ] ^M00:02:32