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Bongiovi Acoustics unveils miracle DSP chip for car audio
If there were ever a time where we'd need to hear it before we believed it, this would be it. Tony Bongiovi, an audio engineer who's been around the block a time or two (read: he worked with Hendrix), has finally crafted the miracle chip he's been missing for decades. Dubbed the Digital Power Station (DPS, not to be confused with DSP), the microchip is described as a "very sophisticated equalizer," and while it was originally "the size of a refrigerator," he looked to Glenn Zelniker, a specialist in digital signal processing, to program a wee chip to do the same thing. The result is a dynamically programmed microchip based on an off-the-shelf DSP from Freescale Semiconductor, which is housed in special headunits (like JVC's KD-S100) and has more than "120 points of adjustment" to tune the tunes to fill each vehicle perfectly. Reportedly, the chip even turns factory speakers into high-fidelity drivers, as it calculates the dimensions of the vehicle and the abilities of the cones while outputting the audio. The JVC unit will cost "between $700 and $1,000 installed," since you'll have to schedule an appointment with your service department to get the correct software installed for your make and model, but we'd suggest a trial listen before you plunk down your one large.[Via PhysOrg]
