Hearables Archives - Creative Connectivity

Has the audio industry lost its imagination?

If you read the glossy audio magazines (audio enthusiasts still buy them), or spend some time browsing Amazon, you’ll see an audio industry which appears to be in good health. Depending on your personal preferences you can get something that’s smaller, shinier, lossless, retro, or virtually any adjective you can think of. But if you strip off the marketing glitz, it’s questionable whether audio quality has improved much in the last seventy years.

For the first 25 years, families huddled around horns. Then, in 1925, loudspeakers appeared, bringing sound to everyone in a room. The industry spent the next quarter century improving quality, to the point where most music lovers thought that audio reproduction was about as good as it was going to get. 1950s and 60s novels were populated with characters enthusing about their preamplifiers and graphic equalisers as they listened to the finer points of Mozart and Beethoven.

Then the focus changed. Other priorities took over, as multiple disruptions changed the way we listen to music. What’s interesting is that each of these disruptions was accompanied by a reduction in audio quality, as consumers decided that other features were more important. It’s not a message that the audio industry likes to acknowledge, as trying to push “higher” quality often seems to be the limit of their imagination. But history suggests they may be about to have another shock. So, let’s look at the reality of what happened. It all started in 1957 with:

How a Dead Dog sold Records

It’s one of the best know trademarks in the world, which has been in use for over 125 years. It’s also a surprisingly complicated mark – not many trademarks are oil paintings. If you recognised it, well done. Except it’s not what you thought it was. This is the original painting – not the one that everyone recognises, and it has a strange story.

Today is the centenary of the loudspeaker

It’s hard to imagine that it’s only 100 years since the loudspeaker was invented. On April 1^st, 1925, Edward Wente, of the Western Electric Company, New York, filed patent no 1,812,389 for a practical moving coil loudspeaker, although the patent only refers to it as an “acoustic device”. I doubt that he was aware of just how revolutionary that would be. Within a year, amplifiers with his design of loudspeaker would be on sale, allowing everyone in a room, or even a theatre to hear the same recording, film or radio broadcast. Up until then, everyone had been forced to huddle around horns to listen to their records or the radio.

Hearing Aid Compatibility is coming for all US Phones

At the end of November, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the US issued a mandate that all mobile phones sold in the US will soon need to be able to work with hearing aids. It’s a massive advance for hearing loss advocates and hearing aid manufacturers, who have been working towards this goal for more than a decade. (The full mandate is available on the FCC site.)

Auracast™ Audio. Better than the original?

If you’ve not heard of Auracast™, it’s time to find out about it. It’s part of the new Bluetooth Low Energy Audio specifications which support broadcast audio. What that means is that it allows individuals and places to share an audio stream, so that multiple people can listen to the same thing.

Auracast builds on the telecoil experience, which has been part of hearing aids for many years, but supports a new codec, called LC3. This can be used to generate high quality audio with such a low latency that the Bluetooth stream can reach your ears at the same time as the ambient stream. Last week, Auracast had its first major public demonstration in the US at a performance of Richard Einhorn’s “Voice of Light” in the Lincoln Centre in New York. A number of users, both with and without hearing loss were able to hear how it works. I was one of the lucky few to try it. Talking to others after the performance, it was obvious that not only did it work exceedingly well, but the audio quality was so good that we were starting to have some fundamental questions about how live music is recorded. Andrew Bellavia has already written about the devices which were used. I was fascinated with the resulting experience.

Why can’t the Audio Industry be more inventive?

The audio industry is constantly telling us how great its products are. Their latest wheeze is to push the message that we all need even higher quality. That’s despite the fact that nobody can hear the difference. Unfortunately, the major players so believe their own PR that over the last century they’ve largely missed the fact that there’s more to the listening experience than just extending frequency response. On the few occasions we’ve seen real innovation in audio, it’s almost always come from outside the established audio industry. So how do we put innovation back into audio?