What’d he say? AfterMaster’s little black box aims to fix your TV’s terrible sound

By Ted Kritsonis November 19, 2015

We’ve all been there: You’re watching one of your favorite TV show when suddenly the dialog goes quiet and you can’t understand what’s being said. So, you crank up the volume when suddenly an action sequence commences and you’re now getting blasted out of the room. When did watching TV become a game of riding the volume buttons on your remote? AfterMaster TV aims to fix that problem while improving your TV’s sound quality across the board, and it’s going to use celebrity power to do it.

Owned by a group that includes Justin Timberlake, Rodney “Darkchild” Jerkins, Shelly Yakus and Larry Ryckman, the AfterMaster TV device has been developed by “legendary audio engineers, producers, technology leaders and a multi-billion dollar semiconductor manufacturer,” which happens to be ON Semiconductor.

The device itself is a fairly small box which the company hopes to scale down even further to roughly the size of an iPhone . It has a “state-of-the-art” digital signal processing (DSP) semiconductor chip co-developed by AfterMaster and ON Semiconductor that delivers AfterMaster’s proprietary algorithms. It connects to an audio/video source, like a cable box, game console, or directly to a TV via HDMI.

The process helps amplify dialogue to sound clearer no matter what the show or movie is, while boosting the rest of the frequency range for better overall sound quality without distortion. The goal is for dialog to pop out from between the left and right speakers in use.

AfterMaster isn’t going after users with solid outboard audio system, rather those who rely on their TV’s built-in speakers. The device will work with any audio or video source, and the first run of the product will reportedly have a headphone jack and battery power to make it portable enough to use with mobile devices, laptops, and wireless speakers — basically, anything with a 3.5mm jack would be compatible with the AfterMaster TV.

The company’s 30-day Kickstarter campaign has already kicked off and will run until Dec. 20, with device roll-out slated for February 2016, if successful.

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A/V Writer

A tech journalism vet, Ted covers has written for a number of publications in Canada and the U.S. Ted loves hockey, history…

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