Bluetooth, Hearables, IoT, Smart Energy and other random Stuff
Wireless things we put in our ears.
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.
It’s hard to imagine that it’s only 100 years since the loudspeaker was invented. On April 1st, 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.
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.)
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.
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?
It’s around a month since Apple received approval from the FDA to sell their AirPods Pro 2 as hearing aids. That announcement caused a flurry of excitement amongst audio industry analysts and journalists, predicting that it would change the hearing aid market. I suspect that may prove to be false. The more interesting debate is whether it will lessen the stigma which is still associated with wearing a hearing aid. Andrew Bellavia and Joao Martins have written well-considered pieces on this. It’s a topic which needs more consideration than the media’s obsession with the technology or manufacturer, as it’s still unclear how we can change society’s attitude to hearing loss.