Wearable Devices
This is an interesting story as it demonstrates the importance on hi-res audio in China. Here we see the coming together of a major brand, a major audio streaming service and an audio codec vendor, to help drive hi-res audio to the consumer. QQ audio is one of China’s most popular audio streaming services and has supported […]
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Wired earbuds were becoming a thing of the past – until now? There is still growth in the TWS market, which is why sometimes the prospect of wired earbuds goes amiss. However, the concept does make complete sense if you think about it. The Magnesium V3 Entry level IEMs piqued my interest this week. Ear […]
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The SAR audio team visited xMEMS during our recent short tour of the Bay Area. During this time we were treated to a demo from the xMEMS team of its most recent products. SAR has been covering MEMS speakers for a few years now and are well versed on xMEMS products and their competitors. What […]
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Knowles announced its new product to compete in what is commonly known as the “bone conduction” sensor market for TWS (this should not be confused with bone conduction headphones, which transmit audio). This sensor is used to pick up the vibration of the human skull and to assist with voice pick up in noisy or windy […]
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This is another story about the use of UWB for audio streaming, this time with a few more companies added to the mix. Sonical is central to this, offering its CosmOS for use in PSB Speakers’ headphone (due Q1, 2024). Also included is AntennaWare‘s UWB antenna and Qorvo UWB radio chip. MQA has also jumped […]
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STMicroelectronics has announced its latest headphone-focused UI chip, the LSM6DSV16BX, an integrated product that is intended to replace 2 or more components in a TWS device. This combines 3-axis wide band accelerometer and 3-axis gyroscope with an audio accelerometer, electrostatic sensor (Qvar) and processing. It enables multiple functions needed in many TWS devices: Bone conduction for voice activity detection […]
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We hear the term ‘spatial audio’ being used a lot in in the tech world. It’s also sometimes referred to as ‘3D audio’, or ‘immersive audio’. It can get quite confusing, especially when there are two technologies which could both be referred to by any of these terms. As these technologies are relatively new, there are not […]
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Bluetooth will continue to be the primary technology for wireless audio for many years to come. Its massive ecosystem of devices and the continual improvements made by its 1000s of members makes it a formidable force. It does have inherent limitations however, as it is trying to do many things well. One area where Bluetooth […]
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The use of MEMS speakers in TWS devices came another step closer with the announcement that xMEMS has teamed up with Korean speaker vendor Bujeon Electronics. The BEM-1xx and BEM-2xx family of speaker modules will uses a hybrid approach with a MEMS speaker as the tweeter and dynamic speaker as the woofer. It also uses […]
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In a previous post Hear This: ‘Ear-Worn Computing’ Around the Corner, I talked about the next generation of headphones (Headphone 3.0) and how this is likely to impact the market over the next few years. At CES 2023 this vision of the future became a little closer to reality, with several companies demonstrating technology that […]
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