Targeting portable devices where space is at a premium, the NXP claims its new TFA9887 can deliver 2.6 watts RMS to speakers normally limited to 0.5 watts. In practice this means that tiny speakers can be 5 times louder without the sound deteriorating to garble.According to NXP this is possible to do without damaging the speaker by having the chip monitor and modify the signal to keep it within safe limits. The protection also extends to monitoring the temperature of the speaker through monitoring the current draw of the element and limiting gain before the speaker gets damaged.
These protection features also allow designers to remove the high pass filtering which is typically used to limit the base, and thus the system can deliver an improved audio bandwidth.
A video demonstration and the full press release after the jump
