Why can’t the Audio Industry be more inventive?

The audio industry is constantly telling us how great its products are. Their latest wheeze is to push the message that we all need even higher quality. That’s despite the fact that nobody can hear the difference. Unfortunately, the major players so believe their own PR that over the last century they’ve largely missed the fact that there’s more to the listening experience than just extending frequency response. On the few occasions we’ve seen real innovation in audio, it’s almost always come from outside the established audio industry. So how do we put innovation back into audio?

Consumer audio started about 150 years ago, with the invention of the gramophone and its flat, shellac Berliner discs. They prompted the creation of two new industries to support the new market – a recording industry which issued and controlled the distribution of music and a consumer electronics industry that made hardware that would play the recordings or broadcasts. At times it has been a fractious relationship, especially as new media formats have made it easier to copy music, but it’s also a very symbiotic one, where the two industries have supported each other to introduce new formats, such as vinyl, cassettes and CDs. In each case, both have profited by persuading customers to buy new hardware and replace their previous collection of recordings.

In the gaps between these format changes, there has been a constant fallback to pushing audio quality, although it’s rarely been clear what that means. Audio quality has and always will improve over time. That’s down to the constant, small improvements in amplifier design, chips, codecs and transducers, as component vendors refine their products as they vie for business with the hardware manufacturers. But audio quality per se has never done much to affect the overall market dynamics.

In contrast, the four most transformative changes in audio history – the introduction of the transistor radio, CDs, the MP3 codec and Bluetooth all sacrificed some of the current audio quality in pursuit of an improved user experience. In each case, users loved the new experience, and these introductions changed the course of audio industry.

What mattered was the new freedom that each of these innovations gave users. Transistor radios sounded terrible, but consumers loved the freedom to listen anywhere. CDs were derided for their poor audio quality, but they were so much easier to use, as well as giving listeners instant access to any track, without the need for fast forward or rewind. MP3 encoded audio files reduced the audio quality even further, but they let users store hundreds of tracks on a music player, as well as enabling new streaming services. The first Bluetooth speakers and headphones had limited audio quality because of limitations with their codec, but the wireless connection made them much easier to use.

With each of these new innovations, consumers voted for the user experience, not the audio quality. In time, the audio quality caught up, but by itself, it never generated a new market or use case. Audio quality today isn’t much different to what it was just before CDs were introduced, which partly explains the resurgence of vinyl and valve amplifiers. In contrast, innovations that concentrated on new ways to experience audio resulted in massive growth in sales, bringing audio to a wider base of users.

We’ve reached the point where audio quality should no longer be an issue for customers or manufacturers. The new psycho-acoustic codecs which have evolved since MP3, such as AptX, LC3 and OPUS already push audio quality to the point where users can’t tell the difference between encoded music and the original. Given the way these codecs work, adding greater bit depth and faster sampling to justify a “hi-res” logo is unlikely to gain anything other than some go-faster stripes on your earbuds and speakers. A quote on the Ziph.com website – the organisation that designs the OPUS codec, explains hi-res as "a solution to a problem that doesn't exist, a business model based on willful ignorance and scamming people." Despite that pithy analysis, hi-res is what the industry thinks consumers need most. The only change most users will experience with hi-res is reduced battery life on their phone and earbuds, but the industry is relying on the “Emperor’s New Clothes” principle, rather than thinking out of the box.

The irony is that another fundamental change in audio usage is about to appear. The latest Bluetooth LE Audio specifications include the new feature of audio sharing, where multiple users can listen to a broadcast audio signal. It’s being promoted as Auracast? and is already attracting interest from a number of companies. You can share music from your phone, use it to listen to your TV, potentially rendering different language streams for different listeners, listen to broadcasts in public places, and apply more efficient audio distribution to whole home systems. There’s a myriad of applications if manufacturers start to think outside the box. A number are starting to do that. You can already buy party speakers, earbuds and hearing aids that use Auracast?. More innovation is on its way, but it does need the industry to step back and consider what users want to do with audio, rather than giving everyone more of the same, assuming that their product marketing departments knows best.

Nobody knows what the next killer application will be for audio, but the technology and specifications to support it are probably already available. What we need now is experimentation, courage and innovation. Instead of asking customers to listen to something they can’t hear, it’s time for the industry to start listening to their customers and find out how to make audio more relevant to our lives.