Sonicblue Anoints TI's DSP

Electronic News, August 27, 2001 by Alex Romanelli

Digital audio company switches to DSP leader for future products

Dallas-based Texas Instruments Inc. last week said its Internet audio DSP is behind Sonicblue Inc.'s Rio One digital audio player.

This makes something of a coup for TI (nyse: TXN). The Rio, Santa Clara, Calif.-based Sonicblue's (nasdaq: SBLU) brand, is the most popular line of digital audio players, and previously the company had exclusively used chips from Cirrus Logic Inc. TI and Cirrus (nasdaq: CRUS) are the two dominant players in the Internet audio DSP chip market.

"When we were looking around, Cirrus did not have a competitive chip in the low-end market for as competitive a price as the TI solution did," said Kirk Ellern, Sonicblue's product marketing manager for the Rio One. "In the case of the Rio One, we were looking for specific capabilities on the chip, including WMA (Windows Media Audio), MP3 and a low price. It was not about performance. In that specific niche, TI looked best."

Even though Cirrus' chips are still being used in Sonicblue's higher-end products, its rival's success is still a blow to the company, said Brian Matas, vice president of Scottsdale, Ariz.-based researcher IC Insights.

"Supplying chips to entertainment applications is (Cirrus Logic's) whole focus right now," Matas said. "It (TI providing chips for the Rio) probably hurts them because Sonicblue is one of the leading players in the industry."

Austin-based Cirrus Logic was unavailable for comment.

"We still work with Cirrus on a number of products and continue to enjoy a good relationship with them," Sonicblue's Ellem said.

TI claims its audio DSP is now designed into products from nine of the top 10 consumer electronics manufacturers.

The Rio One is Sonicblue's first digital audio player offered at less than $100. It has 32Mbytes of built-in memory and can be upgraded using flash memory cards. The built-in memory supports about an hour of playback using the WMA format. The device also supports the MP3 format.

TI said its low-power TMS320C54x DSP allows the device to playback more than 10 hours of music on one AA battery.

"We took a look at what they were trying to do with a lower-end, sub-$100 player," said Chris Schairbaum, worldwide marketing manager of Internet audio at TI. "We were able to offer them a solution that is a little bit lower cost than what the competition was able to offer and still pack in multiple formats and a couple of other features, while still hitting the sub-$100 price-point."

The Rio One is available now from Sonicblue's eStore and is priced at $99.95. The Rio One will hit retail shelves within the next two weeks.