TI announces DA7xx Audio DSPs

[The Big Blue]

http://money.cnn.com:80/news/newsfee...31102007-1.htm

HOUSTON, Oct. 31 /PRNewswire/ -- Committed to innovations that provide the highest performance audio quality, Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) today announced that its audio digital signal processors (DSPs) are the first embedded implementation approved with DTS-HD master audio at 192 kHz for unparalleled audio quality in home theater systems.

[br85]

Well, that's incredibly good news, although I'm not sure why any film studio would waste the space on a 192KHz encode...

I will concede that a slight difference in 48/96KHz can be heard if you listen carefully, but at 192 we are talking about keeping the integrity of sine waves at the very top end of human hearing, and I bet my next paycheck that at least 99% of people can't hear the difference between a square and a sine wave at anything over 15KHz. As far as I'm aware, the only current practical use for 192 is so that if you want to slow a signal down, say, to 25% speed (and therefore, 2 octaves deeper as well), the slowed sound will maintain the high quality of a 48KHz recording, as opposed to sounding like a 12KHz recording.

Still, good to hear that some people finally care about giving us ultra high quality surround sound! I wonder when 5.1/7.1 tube amplifiers (with 6DJ8 preamp tubes and 300B power tubes) will come out... Ah well, we can dream can't we?

[br85]

And hopefully TI will actually embed these dsp processors in with state of the art 7.1 channel word clocks, ultralow THD and MPD amplifiers, gold connectors, as well as i-link (and of course HDMI) connectivity. Would be sweet...