Consumer audio products have always held a special fascination for me. Indeed, it was my childhood interest in audio gear that largely motivated my pursuit of an engineering career. But during most of my career, mainstream consumer audio technology has been pretty staid territory, with little in the way of exciting technology and few compelling new products.
More recently, though, I’ve been delighted to see what I believe is the beginning of a revolution in consumer audio equipment. The emergence of low-cost chips with heavy-duty digital signal processing capabilities is making it possible to bring new levels of quality, convenience, and functionality to consumer audio products.
Some of the most interesting work in consumer audio is focused on sound reproduction: specifically, using sophisticated signal processing to overcome limitations in listening spaces and loudspeakers. At the recent Audio Engineering Society (AES) conference in Denmark, several companies showed off exciting innovations in this area.
Bang and Olufsen, for example, demonstrated high-end home audio loudspeakers that compensate for imperfections in a room’s acoustics. When these speakers are first installed in a room, they use sensors to gather information about the room’s acoustical properties. Processors in each speaker then run filter-design software to create filters that compensate for defects in the room’s response. The resulting filters process audio signals before they are sent to the speakers’ built-in amplifiers. In this way, the speakers eliminate certain unpleasant acoustical effects, such as the “boominess” that can occur at low frequencies when a speaker is placed in the corner of a room. Today this capability is available only in B&O’s top-of-the-line, super-expensive speakers, but it is likely to trickle down into mainstream consumer audio systems in the not-too-distant future.
Another promising application of signal processing in consumer audio is compensating for imperfections in the speaker driver itself. For decades, manufacturers have worked to improve loudspeakers through better electromechanical design, more advanced materials, and tighter manufacturing tolerances. But for applications where costs must be tightly controlled and where weight and size are highly constrained, it may be more practical to use relatively poor transducers and correct their defects with signal processing. Imagine being able to coax acceptable sound out of the coin-sized speakers in your laptop or symphonic sound from a $100 boom-box. In the coming years, inexpensive signal-processing chips will enable these and many other breakthroughs in consumer audio.
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