DSEE (Digital Sound Enhancement Engine) is a sound quality improvement technology for lossy compressed music files developed by

Sony is a Japanese multinational conglomerate (company), conglomerate headquartered at Sony City in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. The Sony Group encompasses various businesses, including Sony Corporation (electronics), Sony Semiconductor Solutions (i ...

Variants

DSEE

Introduced in 2006, DSEE is included in Sony's digital

Walkman is a brand of Personal stereo, portable audio players manufactured by Sony since 1979. It was originally introduced as a portable Compact Cassette, cassette player and later expanded to include a range of portable audio products. Since 2011, ...

products and freeware

SonicStage SonicStage is a discontinued software product from Sony that is used for managing portable devices when they are plugged into a computer running Microsoft Windows. It comprises a music player and library manager, similar to iTunes, Windows Media Pl ...

CP (version 4.2 or higher), x-app, and

Music Center for PC Music Center for PC is a music player and transfer software for Microsoft Windows, developed by Sony and first released in 2017. Overview The software was created to replace Media Go and x-APPLICATION (Japanese: x-アプリ). Unlike those, Mus ...

. In operation, it analyzes irreversibly compressed music files such as

MP3 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany under the lead of Karlheinz Brandenburg. It was designed to greatly reduce the amount ...

ATRAC3 Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding (ATRAC) is a family of proprietary audio compression algorithms developed by Sony. MiniDisc was the first commercial product to incorporate ATRAC, in 1992. ATRAC allowed a relatively small disc like MiniDisc to ...

AAC AAC may refer to: Aviation * Advanced Aircraft, a company from Carlsbad, California * Airborne aircraft carrier, a type of aircraft * Alaskan Air Command, a radar network * American Aeronautical Corporation, a company from Port Washington, New ...

, and WMA, and performs predictive calculations to compensate for high-frequency sounds lost due to compression, thereby improving sound quality. If the playing music on a Walkman has a high sound quality (bit rate), or if the sound quality is too low, the system determines that it cannot be enhanced and DSEE is temporarily disabled to save battery.

DSEE HX

DSEE HX appears on

high-resolution audio High-resolution audio is a term for music files with bit depth greater than 16-bit and sampling frequency higher than 44.1 kHz or 48 kHz used in CD and DVD formats. The Audio Engineering Society (AES), Consumer Technology Association ( ...

compatible devices, such as the F880 and ZX1 series Walkman players,

Xperia is a series of and the sole brand name of smartphones marketed by Sony. It also includes various related mobile hardware such as tablet computer, tablets as well as software. Xperia was originally developed by Sony Ericsson before becoming So ...

smartphones, and version 2.x of Music Center for PC. However some products like the HAP-Z1ES hard disk player come with normal DSEE. The Walkman A30 and WM1 series that appeared in 2016 have been expanded to a maximum of 192kHz/32bit, and higher-end models such as the WM1 series and ZX series can now select from 5 modes for each song. The Walkman A50 series is equipped with

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...

technology that automatically determines the type of music being processed and improves high-frequency correction performance.

DSEE Extreme

DSEE Extreme is installed in the WH-1000XM5 to 1000X series of wireless headphones with noise canceling function announced on August 7, 2020, the WF-1000XM5 and WF-1000XM4 series of wireless earbuds, the HT-A9 home theater system, and the HT-A7000, HT-A5000, and HT-A3000 sound bars. It is an improved version of the aforementioned DSEE HX equipped with AI technology. It also now supports transmission using the LDAC codec.

DSEE Ultimate

Sony 1, 5 and 10 series Xperia smartphones feature DSEE Ultimate since the 1 II in 2020. It uses AI from the DSEE HX and DSEE Extreme to process frequency bands up to 192 kHz. In addition, it also applies the same 24-bit depth expansion as Extreme, making it compatible with streaming services, videos, and games. The DSEE Ultimate technology has also been installed into the A100 and ZX500 series Walkman as an update in October 2020. However it only applies when using the W. (Walkman) music playing software and a wired connection. The frequency band processing is 192 kHz, the same as Xperia, but it can also extend the depth to 32 bits. For apps other than W. music, DSEE HX equipped with AI technology operates as before. Walkman WM1ZM2 and WM1AM2 released in March 2022 and A300 and ZX700 series released in January 2023 are equipped with DSEE Ultimate and it now applies to all apps and both wired and Bluetooth connections.

References

{{reflist Sony products Audiovisual introductions in 2006