Topic: Audio technology that sets global standards: From MP3 to Okeanos Home
Speaker: Karlheinz Brandenburg, Brandenburg Labs, TU Ilmenau
Time: Friday, March 20, 2026, 3:00 p.m.
Location: TU Ilmenau, Faraday Lecture Hall, Weimarer Straße 32, entrance on Prof. Schmidt-Straße
Admission: 5 euros
It is rare for an invention from Germany to conquer the world. In the case of audio signal compression, this has been achieved: mp3 is now world-famous. But it was a long road to get there: almost 20 years passed between the initial work and its widespread use. Professor Karlheinz Brandenburg, co-inventor of mp3, talks at the TU Ilmenau Citizens’ Campus about the basic research at the University of Erlangen in the early 1980s, the work in standardization committees, and the arduous development of the mass market in 2000.
But even after Prof. Brandenburg became a professor at the TU Ilmenau, he had no less a goal than to revolutionize audio technology. The world’s first cinema with true surround sound is located in Ilmenau. However, the technology behind it, wave field synthesis, remained commercially unsuccessful. Now Karlheinz Brandenburg is back on the offensive: is it possible to reproduce natural sound completely faithfully through headphones? Initial attempts were made more than 50 years ago, but it is Brandenburg Labs in Ilmenau that has finally succeeded in proving it can be done. The product will be called Okeanos Home - will it conquer the world of audio technology?
Kontakt
Ursula Nirsberger
TU Ilmenau Citizens’ Campus
+ 49 3677 69 4794
buergercampus@tu-ilmenau.de
