True Wireless Stereo Earbuds
SAR Insight again assisted Qualcomm in the creation of its annual consumer survey – The State of Sound report. This year the audience was extended, to include South Korea and to cover the use of devices in the workplace, for gaming and hearing enhancement. There are lots of interesting results to explore for anyone working […]
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This piece of news touches on two significant points. The new Bose headphones and earbuds are coming LE Audio ready, also packed with an exciting proprietary 3D audio solution. SAR is seeing a steady uptake of the new LE Audio standard amongst vendors, however, there is some hesitancy for low-end TWS vendors to fully commit […]
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MEMS speakers design wins are starting to accelerate, and the technology is being recognised by more media outlets. Recently I was invited to help WSJ journalist Christopher Mims with an article discussing the market, highlighting two vendors xMEMS and uSound. Here are some of the quotes from me, for more details please view the full article […]
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Apple has just released the latest product from their subsidiary, Beats. The new Beats Studio Pro’s, which retail for $349.99, ironically still comes with wired connections. Despite Apple being the company that inspired many others to drop any connection holes from smartphones in the first place. This has been done to allow users to stream […]
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TikTok is attempting to penetrate the already saturated digital music streaming market. The news recently comes as an expansion to beta testing offered in Brazil and Indonesia. According to the news, “TikTok says it’s inviting users in Australia, Mexico and Singapore to participate in the TikTok Music closed beta test starting today.”This is very significant as […]
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Shokz has just announced its first TWS products with a twist. In a similar vein to how they have attempted to offer a safer solution to earbuds in the past without using audio transparency, their new earbuds offer what they are calling Air Conduction, which seems to be either Beamforming or something very similar. The […]
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Qualcomm has announced an update to the Qualcomm S3 Gen 2 Sound platform portfolio, which is optimised for gaming. Latency is perhaps the biggest issue that is holding back widespread adoption of Bluetooth for gaming, many vendors continue to rely on proprietary RF to ensure latency is minimised. SAR Insight has talked about this many times. […]
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Ultimate Ears’ recent UE Premier in-ear monitor (IEM) headphones boast an impressive 21 drivers per earpiece, “to deliver a signature sound with unparalleled fidelity, control and precision”. It is the trend to add more and more drivers (speakers) to IEM earbuds, but SAR has not seen anything quite so dramatic as 21 per earbud before. On closer inspection […]
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Recently there has been coverage of Sony Music CEO, Rob Stringer, making comments on the current state of play for music streaming. As hi-res audio is an area we cover in our Audio Software & IP Service, I thought that this highlights some interesting discussion. Stringer suggests that most streaming services are “watered down by […]
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Swiss headphone company, Unity, has just released a pair of what they are calling the worlds first wireless lossless headphones. The headphones use a proprietary technology called Full-Fidelity that allows the headphones to receive audio which takes advantages of both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to capture audio quality at 24-bit/96kHz. Many would argue that consumer headphones […]
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