Clarion Full Digital Sound: The Industry's First Fully Digital Audio System

Clarion today announced their revolutionary Full Digital Sound audio system, the industry's first in-car audio system to maintain a digital audio signal from the source to the speaker voice coils, resulting in pristine sounding audio with zero loss in quality and no added noise from analog connections. Shifting away from the realm of ordinary, Clarion's new Full Digital Sound system was designed to deliver unprecedented purity and uncompromising quality for today's high-resolution audio tracks while improving power efficiency and reducing component count.

"Clarion has been at the forefront of cutting edge in-car audio products for more than 75 years and we are proud to announce the world's first completely digital high-resolution car audio system," said Allen H. Gharapetian, Vice President of Marketing and Product Planning for Clarion. "Today, nearly all music is digital, yet every car audio system still converts digital signals into an archaic analog signal for amplification. With Full Digital Sound, Clarion rewrote the rules for what a car audio system should be in order to realize the full benefits offered by today's high-resolution digital formats."

Clarion Full Digital Sound

Featuring multiple custom-developed LSI chipsets, Clarion's Full Digital Sound system is the first audio system specifically designed for the automotive space capable of maintaining a 96kHz/24-Bit digital audio signal from the source to the speakers without ever converting it to analog or passing a signal through a traditional amplifier. The result is a precise reproduction of high-resolution music files exactly as they were mastered with absolutely no degradation in quality.

Traditional audio systems must, at some point, convert digital audio signals to analog simply because traditional loud speakers are analog devices. Full Digital Sound speakers, each equipped with their own LSI chipset, utilize Dnote digital signal processing to transmit six digital signals to the multi-driver's six-layer multi-voice coils, which delivers precision cone strokes that translate to accurate sound and highly efficient performance.

All Full Digital Sound components, including the processor, commander and digital speakers, are elegantly designed and manufactured using the most advanced technologies, and crafted out of premium materials. The new Full Digital Sound system is also extremely versatile with connectivity options for a wide range of devices.

Along with the full digital playback achieved with direct connections to external audio devices and high-resolution compatible smartphones, the Full Digital Sound system has other input options that allow it to work with analog sources, as well as existing car audio source units, both factory installed or aftermarket. Once installed, the system can be simply but expertly tuned using a smartphone or tablet running Clarion's proprietary tuning app. The intuitive app provides end-users with the tools needed to fully customized their audio experience or to let the system be optimally tuned for a specific listening environment.

Clarion FDS Main Features

• Full digital playback with digital-to-digital transmission
• Equipped with proprietary in-car high output LSI designed to support 96kHz/24-bit source audio and provide 256x oversampling.
• High quality audio output, including compatibility with high-resolution audio.
• Digital multi-driver speakers equipped with newly developed six-layer multi-voice coils
• Highly versatile set-up and mix and match flexibility via a wide range of connectivity options
• Fully customizable via an intuitive tuning app available for smartphones and tablets
• Compact and mountable processor
• Stylish commander module featuring intuitive controls

Launching in early Q2, 2016, the first available Full Digital Speaker system components will include:

• Z3: Central processor, commander + two digital tweeters
• Z7: Two 6-3/4-inch six-voice coil digital speakers
• Z25W: One 10-inch six-voice coil digital subwoofer