Jawbone to Ship Bluetooth Speaker With 3D Audio From Princeton

When Jawbone begins selling its Big Jambox on Tuesday, a wireless speaker designed to deliver “big sound” from a portable music player “to fill a much larger space,” it will usher in a new era of 3D audio. The $299 speaker connects wirelessly using Bluetooth to any Bluetooth-enabled device -- including smartphones, tablets and computers -- to stream music, movies, games and phone calls inside or outdoors, the company said. The Big Jambox, which doubles as a speaker phone, is the first to use BAACH filter technology, developed in the 3-D Audio and Applied Acoustics (3D3A) Laboratory at Princeton.

Jawbone has dubbed the BAACH technology built into the Jambox “LiveAudio” and positions it as delivering “three-dimensional sound.” Jawbone is collaborating with artists and producers on music, games and other audio formats that leverage the filter system, the company said. The BAACH-based speaker will be available at AT&T, Best Buy and Sprint when it launches Tuesday, but the BAACH technology has high-end audio aspirations as well.

Specialty music label Chesky Records’ new binaural recording technique, unveiled at the New York Audio and AV Show in New York, debuted earlier this month on tracks sold by high-resolution online music distributor HDtracks. Although Chesky’s Binaural+ Series digital tracks will play through headphones and conventional stereo speaker systems, David Chesky told us that his recordings will realize his ultimate vision for the binaural recordings when played through crosstalk filters that create a 3D soundfield regardless of a listener’s position in a room. He’s working with Edgar Choueiri, head of the 3D3A at Princeton, who devised the filter system called BACCH 3D Sound that can produce an independent 3D audio sweet spot for each listener, regardless of position relative to the speakers.

"We'll be able to do 3D audio out of two speakers,” Chesky said, when the binaural recording technique is used and played back through BACCH filters. The microphones in Chesky’s technique “understand the density of the space they're in and where things are placed in a three-dimensional space,” he said. For now, the type of BAACH filter system required for an in-home scenario has to be custom-designed for a particular room and runs into five figures for implementation.

Choueiri and John Chen, former owner of an audiophile rep firm, go to customers’ homes, log their room dimensions and equipment data, and Choueiri writes the filter algorithm that can be put into a plug-in via PureMusic in iTunes. The last system they installed comprised simply a Mac computer, with the filter algorithm, and a pair of Genelec speakers, Chen said. Chen works with Choueiri basically as a “friend of Princeton,” and he was awed by the demo he heard at the Princeton lab, he said. “He uses this pair of little speakers, and then he plays a demo of sound from a pond,” Chen said. “You hear water coming from all around you in the pond but you can’t localize the sound from the speakers whatsoever."

In the future, Chesky envisions a more broad-based solution that can be installed between the speakers and a stereo system or even in the speakers themselves, he said. “If we can encode this data,” he said, referring to spatial audio cues in the recordings, “then in the future when we play it back, we have all this information to try to do something different” in the form of 3D audio, he said. To get there, Chen said, a processor that could take room measurements would have to be devised along with a database of speaker specifications for particular room environments. “You need to take room measurements to write the filters,” he said.

Choueiri compares his 3D audio concept with that of 3D video in that sound waves, rather than images, arrive at the ears at different times depending on the origin of the sound. The brain uses the difference in arrival time to locate sound and that information is recorded in a binaural recording, he told us. Playing that binaural audio signal through headphones has somewhat of a 3D effect because channels are separated, he said, but loudspeakers corrupt the sound from a binaural recording because the ears are hearing information from both speakers, resulting in crosstalk. “We have to separate the information so the left hear hears only the left channel and the right ear hears only the right channel,” he said. Without crosstalk, binaural stereo recordings can take on a 3D quality, where audio is more natural and has more depth and height than typical stereo recordings, he said. “If a fly buzzes around your head, you hear the fly all the way around your head,” he said. Chesky’s binaural recording available on HDtracks, has the sound of a haircut going all around the listener’s head, he noted.

Chesky’s Binaural+ Series arose out of a test of new recording techniques over the past year and a half to look at new ways to record, Chesky said. Binaural+ Series sessions were recorded in high-resolution 192-kHz/24-bit sound using a “dummy head” with specially calibrated microphones positioned where ear canals would be to “record like we hear,” he told us. Binaural recording isn’t new, but it hasn’t gained widespread acceptance because binaural recordings have had to be played, up until now, through headphones to achieve the proper effect. When played through conventional loudspeakers, resulting crosstalk has made them “nasty,” Chesky said. Chesky’s method of placing speakers inside makeshift ear canals on a dummy head enables the binaural recordings to work through conventional loudspeakers so that “they're still audiophile products … that play back perfectly back on normal stereo speakers.”

Chesky will offer the recording capability to anyone who wants to use it as an alternative to “two-dimensional, flat stereo,” he said. When the recordings are done correctly and played back in a room that’s been aligned with crosstalk filters, the height information of a recording can be perceived, he said. He differentiated binaural recordings from surround-sound, which he described as a “Hula Hoop” effect. “This adds density to the soundfield,” he said, where distances can be detected so that a listener can perceive someone walking toward them, an effect that can’t be perceived with standard stereo recordings, he said.

Chesky also sees an opportunity for the binaural recordings in the booming headphone market, where he hopes to introduce high-end audio to “younger people listening through headphones,” he said. The binaural recordings are priced the same as conventional Chesky recordings at HDtracks: $24.98 for the 192 kHz version and $17.98 for the 96 kHz version.

As a recording engineer and musician, Chesky’s end goal is to “achieve stereo where you would swear you're in the event in the space,” he said, compared with stereo listening now that’s “like someone looking through your window rather than being in your room,” Chesky said. With 3D audio, he said, “there are microphones in your ear so it hears like you hear. If we record like we hear, maybe we can get music to sound real,” he said.

As music CDs continue to regress in shipments and dollars, more high-quality alternatives are beginning to emerge on the streaming side. Dolby announced late Thursday that Onkyo Entertainment Technology Corp., a subsidiary of Onkyo Corp., is the first online music distribution service to encode tracks in Dolby TrueHD 5.1-channel surround sound.

Lossless Dolby TrueHD enables the e-onkyo music service to deliver high-quality audio “at reduced download times and file sizes,” Dolby said. While “CD-quality sound” has long been the standard streaming music companies targeted for acceptable quality music, e-onkyo is setting its sights higher with the Dolby technology, according to Shinsuke Yamashita, president of Onkyo Entertainment Technology. “The evolution of network audio and PC audio means that users can enjoy high-resolution sound with data volumes greater than those that are possible on a CD,” Yamashita said. The service will launch May 30 in Japan with 100 album titles -- approximately 1,000 tracks -- in the 24-bit/96 kHz and 24-bit/192 kHz Dolby TrueHD formats, the company said. Album prices will start at 3,000 yen (about $37.50) for albums and 400 yen ($5) for singles, it said. Onkyo AVR TX-NR818 and TX-NR717 AV receivers will support the service, the company said. Onkyo didn’t respond by our deadline to questions about plans for the U.S. market.