Patent ID: 8914137

Claim:
An audio/video (AV) system comprising: an AV component configured to generate audio data; one or more processing devices configured to implement: an audio processing engine configured to: provide at least a first representation of the audio data in a frequency domain, process the audio data to generate a second representation of the audio data in a perceptual domain according to a perceptual model that models human hearing, the perceptual domain being different from the frequency domain, receive data related to manufacturer's performance specifications of the AV component and data related to a performance of the AV component as a factor of an age of the AV component, and interact with a user-selected audio-processing application to improve the performance of the AV component by processing the data related to manufacturer's performance specifications of the AV component and the data related to a performance of the AV component as a factor of an age of the AV component; and one or more user-selectable audio processing applications that work with the audio processing engine through an application programming interface, and that are each configured to retrieve, from the audio processing engine, one or more of the representations of the audio data, perform audio processing on the one or more retrieved representations of the audio data, and return results of the audio processing back to the audio processing engine, wherein each of the audio processing applications is configured to retrieve and process the one or more representations independently of other audio processing applications.