As vehicle cabins become multi-occupant, multi-experience environments, delivering personalised audio without increasing hardware complexity is a growing challenge. Traditional DSP-based systems are limited by fixed compute, latency constraints, and poor scalability, restricting advanced use cases such as simultaneous multi-zone playback and adaptive sound delivery.
Common approaches, such as scaling DSP performance or adding dedicated hardware, introduce cost, integration burden, and power overhead, while remaining inflexible to evolving software-defined architectures.
An alternative is to utilise underused compute within existing infotainment platforms, including GPUs, NPUs, and APUs, to enable real-time audio processing with sub-millisecond latency. This shift allows complex operations such as spatial modelling and high-order convolution to run efficiently without dedicated DSPs.
By combining this with precise acoustic modelling and wave interference control, distinct audio zones can be created within the cabin, minimising cross-talk and enabling truly personalised listening experiences—without additional hardware.
By engineers, for engineers: A technically grounded guide to the rapidly evolving in-cabin technology industry and companies.
