The highlight of our trip to CES was the visit with Sigmatel. We're jazzed about this company because they bought all of the intellectual property from Rio Audio (which folded operations in 2005) and they also acquired the engineering team that designed the software inside the Rio Karma. As you might be able to tell from our logo, the Karma is a house favorite around here. It's pretty old at this point (released 10/2003), and long out of production, but it has some advanced playback features which have yet to be matched: gapless playback of MP3s, crossfading between tracks (all formats), and a highly-customizable EQ system. The Karma also has a fantastic GUI system. Our hope is that we will see a Karma-like product again in the future... so we've been keeping a close eye on developments at Sigmatel.

You may recall that Rio Audio was very close to releasing several next-generation players when they were shut down and sold off by the parent company, DNNA. This included a MicroDrive based player called the Avalon, which was similiar in size to the Rio Carbon, and a bigger version called the Cubic (aka, Carbon-C) for use with a 1.8-inch type hard drive (30gb). Both of these players were going to have the same style of GUI as the Rio Karma but enhanced with a color screen and additional features like audio recording.

Sigmatel made this investment in order to provide cutting-edge reference designs for thier next-generation chipset. Basically, the goal is to make it easy for ODMs (Original Design Manufacturers) to build a great player which will sell well. If they can sell a lot of players, Sigmatel can sell a lot of chipsets.

This new System on Chip (SoC), the STMP3600, is a 200mhz ARM9 design, with built-in DAC, USB 2.0 and USB OTG, 256kb on-chip RAM, etc. According to the Simgatel reps, the low-power design will allow for about 50% longer playtime than the average DAP. Using the 3600, they estimated that you could get about 30 hours of playback using the same hardware in the Rio Carbon. More information about the chipset is available in this product brief (PDF).

The guy who is heading up development of Sigmatel's reference designs (and software) is Hugo Fiennes, from the Cambridge (UK) branch of Rio Audio, and we had a chance to meet with him at CES. He's a friendly guy, and very enthusiastic. Hugo had with him 2 working samples of the Avalon (8gb), now based on the Sigmatel chipset. The Karma was based on a PortalPlayer chipset so they've had to rework things a bit.

The new Avalon can do everything that the Karma and Carbon could, plus more. It now supports the Speex audio format, the scroll-wheel can be used for pitch-bending, it has a 5-second crossfade, there's animated backgrounds, album art display, additional id3 tag catagories available for sorting music (like Composer), and the menu system appears semi-transparently against the background. It also supports WMA10 DRM (Janus) better than any of the competition, with gapless playback and crossfading possible between tracks.

Besides the Avalon, Hugo gave us more details about the Opal. This was going to be a high-end, audiophile-grade player that would be the undisputed master of sound quality. It was to be the same size and design as the Cubic, but would have an seperate subsystem exlusively for high-end audio which could be switched on and off. When you wanted the best sound quality, you could flip a switch and it would activate a seperate DAC and amplifier... at 96Khz/24bit resolution. Other nifty features included 802.11b WEP/WPA, ability to stream media to other devices, and TV output. This required some kind of crazy 8-layer PCB, stacked thick with chips, pushing the price to somewhere between $ 400-500. A $ 50 dock accessory was going to have optical outputs and 3 different colored LEDs, each pulsing to different frequency ranges during playback (bass, mid, treble). Awesome stuff.

We asked Hugo if he had any idea why no one else seems able or willing to implement the same kind of tricks that their players are capable of. He explained that it has taken a long time and a lot of software development to get where they are at. The guys at Rio had been working on this system since 1998, starting with the Empeg car audio system. The core software system has over a million lines of C++ code now, not including the codecs. It's modular too - parts of the system can be excluded depending on the application. For instance, he estimated the that the Avalon uses about 500k lines of that code.

Besides the Avalon, Sigmatel had a new, original reference design at CES, pictured below. This one is also based on the STMP3600 chipset, but is designed to be a super-slim model using flash memory for storage. Kind of like the iPod Nano but with more features, including MPEG-4 and H.264 video playback at 30fps on a 220x176 color screen. In addition to the usual stuff, this player supports AAC, OGG, WMA10 DRM, and options like USB OTG and FM radio. More info about it can be found in this press release.

The 3600 chipset is in production now, and the first digital audio players based on the Avalon design could be announced as early as Q2 2006 with availability to come later in the year.

For ODMs that want to build any of Sigmatel's reference designs, all they need to do (at the minumum) is to make thier own casing for it. With the PCB design and software supplied by Sigmatel, it would work just like the Avalon. Of course, ODMs can change it however they like... adding some bits, removing others... but really, there shouldn't be much need for changes.

Anyone out there got a few million to invest? Sigmatel's offer is as good as gold, if you ask us.