Category: Hearables

Wireless things we put in our ears.

Arturo Ui, Electric Guitars and Hearing Aids

The Royal Shakespeare Company are currently running an excellent production of Brecht’s play “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui” at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, which I can thoroughly recommend.   What I didn’t expect when I went to see it last week, is that I’d also learn quite a few useful things about user experience design for hearing aids and assisted listening.

The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui is  a parable of Hitler’s rise to power, conceived as a parallel story based on Chicago gangsters fighting for control of the vegetable trade.  It’s an important piece, not least because of the warning of its final line “The beast that bore him is in heat again”.  But enough of UI for the moment.  Here’s what I learnt about User Interfaces for hearing aids.

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Apple’s AirPod dilemma

What do you do if you’ve just designed a great product, but then realised that it’s missing a key feature that everyone is about to start asking for?  That’s the dilemma Apple had with its latest AirPods Max 2 headset, which is missing a new Bluetooth capability called Auracast.  Auracast is rapidly approaching critical mass – appearing in other consumer products a lot faster than Apple had anticipated.

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Image by u_tu0otx0ph2 from Pixabay

TVs take the lead in Audio Innovation

It’s almost ten years since the last major innovation in consumer audio, which was Apple’s launch of its AirPods back in 2016.  Those arrived on the market ten years after the underlying Bluetooth specification which made wireless audio streaming possible, which demonstrates the fact that it can take quite a long time to bring new technologies to market.  This year looks as if it will be the tipping point for the next big audio innovation to go mainstream.  It’s something called Auracast and this time, the innovation is being spearheaded by the TV industry.

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The story of Auracast broadcast audio

If you’ve not heard of Auracast, it won’t be long until you do.  It’s a new audio feature for Bluetooth products which lets lots of people listen to the same audio stream.  The concept came from the hearing aid industry, which wanted to find a way of expanding the experience that people had with Telecoil hearing loops into the wider ecosystem, bringing the ability to share audio from phones and TVs.  They felt that if this could be done with Bluetooth, it would also make it far easier to install hearing assistance in public venues, such as theatres, community halls and churches, as well as providing travel information to your earbuds or headphone at airports, bus shelters and train stations.  Today, thousands of venues around the world have already installed Auracast transmitters.  It’s supported by the latest Samsung and Pixel phones, and is integrated in new Samsung, LG and Panasonic TVs.  The latest hearing aids can listen to these Auracast signals, and a growing range of consumer earbuds and headphones can also receive them.  Although it started as a feature to help people with hearing loss, over the course of its development it’s been enthusiastically supported by the wider audio industry, bringing a new experience to everyone.

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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:

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