Product Design | Audio Electronics | Acoustics | DIY | Audio Innovations
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Specification Under Development Will Enable LC3plus High-Resolution Codec in Bluetooth LE Audio
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The Bluetooth LE Audio set of specifications, introducing the LC3 codec as the mandatory option for wireless audio streaming, is an important evolution compared to the current default SBC codec. Nevertheless, unlike the current Bluetooth Classic A2DP profile that specifies optional audio codecs, LE Audio didn't offer any higher quality options. A recent article in the Fraunhofer IIS blog confirms that a new specification is under development to allow support for the LC3plus high-resolution audio codec. Read More
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Audeze New Maxwell Planar Magnetic Wireless Gaming Headphones Support LE Audio and LC3plus
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Audeze has introduced Maxwell, a new ultra-low-latency wireless gaming headset with class-leading 80+ hours of battery life that comes with a Dolby Atmos license for select compatible platforms. With the new model, Audeze introduced a new upgraded, retro-looking earcup design for its planar magnetic drivers, providing better comfort, which could cover all use cases for PC, Xbox, Playstation, and mobile gaming consoles. In doing so, they also designed its ugliest product ever, but at least it already supports Bluetooth LE Audio, adds support for the LC3plus codec, and offers high-resolution audio over USB-C . Read More
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Automotive Audio Ranks High as Consumers See Vehicles as Safe Space
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DTS, a wholly owned subsidiary of Xperi, released a report discussing the increasing importance of the vehicle as a third space, and uncovering drivers’ preferred in-cabin features and functionalities. Safety, comfort, and radio/audio rank highest as vehicle design priorities. According to the report, 91% of Millennials and Gen Zs are interested in mood-sensing technology to adjust in-vehicle audio content. And 69% of drivers are interested in connected applications, including health and diagnostic updates. Read More
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iFi Audio Introduces GO Link USB-C Headphone Hi-Res Audio Adapter
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The latest iFi Audio GO Link is a compact and simple DAC and headphone amplifier, packing in sophisticated technology that outstrips other USB-C to 3.5mm headphone jack adapters, yet at a super-affordable price. Expanding the brand's GO series of ultraportable DAC/headphone amps, the new GO Link headphone dongle delivers high-resolution audio when connected to smartphones, tablets, PCs, and Macs via a USB port. Read More
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Rational Acoustics Smaart Adds Integrated Control for Audient EVO Audio Interfaces
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Rational Acoustics and Audient announced the integration between the recently updated Smaart v9 audio and acoustical measurement software and the Audient EVO line of USB-C audio interfaces. The Smaart 9.1 update integrates the controls for phantom power and gain for Audient’s EVO devices - EVO 4, 8, and 16 - directly from within the Smaart interface. Additionally, gain tracking may be enabled to allow for automatic decibel offset recalculation for calibrated inputs. Read More
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Second-Generation AirPods Pro Launch Expands Apple Market Share in the Global TWS Market
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As overall sales of headphones have decreased 4% in the third quarter of 2022, according to market research firm Canalys, the true wireless stereo (TWS) earbuds category continues to lead in the personal audio space. There are clear signs of increasing market fragmentation among the countless brands present in the market, allowing a select few to gain market share. Among the winners in this extremely competitive, low-margin environment, Apple stands out with the second-generation AirPods Pro generating an important boost in sales in that quarter - and most likely all through the holidays. Read More
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Rotel Launches All-in-One Integrated Amplifier, DAC, and Network Streamer
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Sooner or later, even the most traditional hi-fi component manufacturers realize some users simply want a decent quality music source to connect to some good quality speakers and no fuss. Even Japanese brand Rotel acknowledges the need to offer an updated design that could serve this market, with room to grow. The result is the S14 Integrated Network Streamer, which is effectively a nice integrated amplifier with a color display, offering discerning listeners a high-performance way to access and enjoy online music with ease. Read More
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Gaudio Lab Audio Technologies Recognized with Two CES 2023 Innovation Awards
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Gaudio Lab, the innovative audio technology solutions company from Seoul, South Korea, received two CES 2023 Innovation Awards ahead of the company's presentation at the world's biggest consumer technology trade show, taking place in Las Vegas, NV, January 5-8, 2023. Gaudio Lab was honored with two awards for its Loudness Management 1 (LM1) technology, and for the Gaudio Spatial Audio (GSA) audio software for wireless earbuds. Read More
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Guest Editorial
Joshua Levy
(The Lyceum)
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Simplify Engineering
Building a Collaboration Platform for R&D and Manufacturing
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In my youth, I would experiment with different baseball swinging mechanics to find the right combination to hit a ball over the outfield fence. Today, as a scientist, I’m tweaking experiment variables such as microphone gain stages to optimize audio performance of acoustic systems. Over the years, I have found one thing to be consistent... the more absolute the truth, the more difficult it is to prove.
Absolute truth requires experimentation and a large amount of data. Every company and team that I’ve been on have unique strategies to conduct experiments, collect and manage their data. Herein lies two of my biggest frustrations over my decade-plus experience: inconsistency that leads to re-invention.
Engineers and scientists like myself are tired of burying ourselves in spreadsheets, rewriting code, double-checking other colleagues' work, and wasting their talents on clerical tasks such as finding, reorganizing, and renaming files.
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Receiving the Gold Award during the 2012 AES Student Design Competition www.aes.org/students/awards/design/
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2015 - Working as part of the audio design and development of consumer electronics products at Amazon Lab126 in Sunnyvale, CA.
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Most of my early test validation work at Amazon Lab126 was squandered, chasing down who had worked on similar experiments in the past, where data and equipment could be found, and creating/sharing results with colleagues to produce insightful project direction. I still recall very vividly having to fly to China to set up a test station at a factory, just because there was a discrepancy in calibration.
Therefore, I’ve built the Lyceum. The Lyceum is a software application where scientists, system engineers, and research and development teams can store and post-process large amounts of data, then collaborate with teammates and/or other professionals on project problems.
Currently, the Lyceum can functionally service audio systems engineers in the product development process. It ingests measurement data from software such as Listen Soundcheck or Audio Precision APx, and provides users the ability to graph/visualize, calculate statistics, and generate yield numbers from a manufacturing build. For example, when a company is developing a product to go-to-market, it's often required to baseline the product's performance against its competition. An audio engineer does this by evaluating a metric, such as frequency response, of a speaker they’re developing to current speakers being sold.
So, when a team is developing a product called the “Speaker X,” their requirements are that it performs louder and more clearly than “Speaker Y” and “Speaker Z.” In order to establish a baseline target, they develop a measurement experiment to acquire data of the frequency responses of all three speakers.
After the data is acquired, a user can upload it to the Lyceum via the data ingestor. The data ingestor attaches descriptions, permissions, and even cleans the data properly to be used in post-processing in the future.
Post-process is where the analysis happens. This is handled by the Lyceum by creating a working session, whereby multiple users can access the data and post-processing applications.
The functional applications the Lyceum currently offers will be supplemented by additional tools for more advanced post-processing, as well as contributions by the Lyceum community. The community will be able to submit and use their own data-processing scripts/apps, further enhancing the platform’s capabilities.
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By standardizing the datasets ingested in a single platform and offering users a community to freely store and contribute to data-processing applications on the same platform, I am enthusiastic about how the industry of consumer electronics as well as science in general can benefit from the Lyceum.
I often consider the future of the Lyceum to play a role in any science-based problem, where a user will develop a strategy for experimentation, data-collection, analysis and conclusion, directly on the Lyceum.
This is the Aristotelian scientific-method in a web-based collaboration application. This is the future of scientific knowledge expansion. There is nothing I get more excited about than bringing a scientific method to the general masses. This includes users that may not have professional experience or do have professional experience and wish to leverage the Lyceum’s capabilities to produce more results, better and faster than ever before.
Example scenario:
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Figure 1: Data is uploaded to the Lyceum via the data ingestor, with visual instructions on how to add details, and clean the data.
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Figure 2: Data is graphed to visualize performance. The user can then generate limits based on the distribution of data.
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Figure 3: Manufacturing data is uploaded to the Lyceum, and using the same limits from Figure 2, a pass/fail rate is calculated.
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Please visit www.thelyceum.io for more information about the platform. You can sign up for the beta today, and I will help you during every step of the onboarding process.
About the Author:
I'm a hardware engineer with more than 10 years of experience, based in Southern California. I've worked on products like the Amazon Alexa and Meta Oculus, and I have grown frustrated with the current processes and inefficiencies of the consumer electronics industry. This is why I created the Lyceum, an online collaborative software that facilitates hardware system engineering research and development and manufacturing by automating data-intensive tasks, keeping a track record of historical technical data, and offering tools for online group work. The Lyceum facilitates hardware system engineering team research and development, and manufacturing statistics.
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AES 2022 Automotive Audio International Conference
Immersive and Energized
By Roger Shively
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Over the course of three days and two nights, June 8–10, the Audio Engineering Society’s 2022 International Automotive Audio Conference in Dearborn, MI, served as a great event for everyone in the automotive audio community to reconnect. The event also featured a full track of sessions promoted by the AES Audio Product Education Institute (APEI). This report, written by Roger Shively, the AES Conference Chair, reviews the most important presentation topics discussed and the exciting demonstrations by companies such as Dolby, Fraunhofer, Dirac, Tymphany, and DSP Concepts, among many others. This article was originally published in audioXpress, September 2022. Read the Full Article Now Available Here
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Linear Motor Magnet Assembly and Loudspeaker Unit
By James Croft
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James Croft continues to explore the patents that have been filed and granted to Dutch company Mayht Holding B.V., the startup that was recently acquired by Sonos for $100 million. Having previously reviewed one of the early Mayht patents covering their general bipolar, interleaved multiple motor structure architecture, this article reviews the "Linear Motor Magnet Assembly and Loudspeaker Unit" patent (2022/0191621), which was granted to Timothy Ruben Scheek (Amsterdam, NL) on behalf of Mayht. This patent is the company's most recent US publication (June 16, 2022), which addresses the most dramatic claim for the Mayht transducer technology of the ability to allow a contravention of Hofmann’s Iron Law and provide a greater-than 10x reduction in enclosure volume, while maintaining the same efficiency and bandwidth as compared to the current state of the art. This article was originally published in Voice Coil, August 2022. Read the Full Article Now Available Here
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of Audio Technology
audioXpress features great articles, projects, tips, and techniques for the best in quality audio. It connects manufacturers and distributors with audio engineers and enthusiasts eager for innovative solutions in sound, acoustic, and electronics.
Voice Coil, the periodical for the loudspeaker industry, delivers product reviews, company profiles, industry news, and design tips straight to professional audio engineers and manufacturers who have the authority to make powerful purchasing decisions.
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