Audyssey Seeking Licensees for Audio Calibration Technologies to Be Used in Portable Devices

Facing a slowing AV receiver market as consumer preferences for TV audio morph, Audyssey is looking to expand the opportunities for its ExpertFit audio measurement technology. ExpertFit is based on algorithms derived from Audyssey’s MultEQ and Dynamic EQ technologies used in AV receivers, automotive applications and other audio products. Audyssey is best known to consumers for auto-calibration features in home theater receivers to help correct for room acoustics in surround-sound systems.

"We established ourselves there, but the world is changing,” Audyssey Chief Technology Officer Chris Kyriakakis told us on a press tour in New York. “The speakers are now traveling with you,” he said, citing recent market research indicating music listeners own on average 3.5 headphone sets: one for working out, one for general use and the “down and dirty ones” that come with the phone. Consumers are also connecting soundbars, portable Bluetooth speakers and desktop speakers to their smartphone. “That consumer isn’t inclined to be the home theater geek” that enjoys tweaking a sound system, Kyriakakis said. “They want to plug it in and have it ready to go.”

In the five months ExpertFit has been available, Audyssey has had 875,000 downloads of its apps, Kyriakakis said. Apple headphones have a 22 percent share, and the top five headphone brands represent 50 percent of the downloads, he said.

Audyssey wants to apply the expertise it developed in measuring home theater and automotive spaces to a variety of playback devices that consumers “can’t calibrate themselves,” Kyriakakis said. The target list includes smartphones, TVs, set-top boxes, PCs, headphones, soundbars and audio docks. Audyssey launched ExpertFit in May (CED May 13 p3) with a database of headphone models whose sound can be optimized with an Audyssey app for iOS devices. The database now has more than 260 headphone models from some 70 manufacturers, and the company is expanding the database to include soundbars and portable speakers, he said. “Audyssey can be the enabler of better sound without having to burden the consumer with doing anything” other than identifying the product they own, he said.

In building the headphone equalization database, Audyssey showed the ability to collect and test data from the headphone segment and to develop an “easily deployable solution” that improves on headphone sound and that can be applied to other categories, Kyriakakis said. Kyriakakis called ExpertFit a “differentiator” for companies that want to set their products apart through a “superior listening experience.” The company is pitching both smartphone makers and the content developers who make apps for those phones. Music app maker Songza is Audyssey’s first app developer licensee, he said. Going “inside the apps, we're optimizing for the content that comes from that app,” he said. Because it’s working in the application layer of the phone’s operating system, Audyssey doesn’t have to work directly with Apple or Samsung when working with app developers, he said. The Audyssey license gives app companies “optimized code” that runs the Audyssey filters and access to the cloud database where customers can download the filters for a particular device, he said.

Separately, Audyssey launched AudioZoom, which the company hopes to license to smartphone and tablet makers, also as a feature differentiator. AudioZoom uses the processing power of smartphones to offer a feature not previously possible on mobile devices: the ability to dynamically adjust a mobile device’s audio recording level to match the video zoom on a smartphone camera, Kyriakakis said. With AudioZoom engaged, the recorded audio signal changes to match the video zoom, focusing on the action within the frame and filtering out superfluous, unrelated sounds and noise, he said.

Previous attempts to achieve audio zoom relied on a technique called “beamforming” that required multiple microphones and significant processing power, Kyriakakis said. AudioZoom works with the two microphones found on most smartphones and requires “very low” processing power, he said. That’s especially important as increasingly powerful smartphones have to balance power reserves, he said. AudioZoom correlates the signals from the two microphones in a phone, then enhances the correlated signal from the front and decreases the uncorrelated ambient signals from the side mic “to make the subject in the center of the frame sound closer,” he said. “We took a professional recording technique and successfully applied those principles to the mobile environment for the first time,” creating a “perfect match” between picture and sound, Kyriakakis said.