November 2024

Other Ways Of Listening
Immersive audio, DSP processing, and an interview with Dolby Laboratories.
Editorial By J. Martins

  The great thing about the audio industry is that every day our perceptions are challenged. There are so many different ways to approach sound, so many different audio disciplines. That's what motivates me daily with audioXpress. I get to engage with a huge diversity of professionals and companies, all of which are extremely passionate and dedicated to what they do, and strongly believe in their missions.

For some, it's all about pure enjoyment, for others pure survival. For some, it's about understanding sound, for others, sound reproduction. I can speak to brilliant people who generate, capture, and measure sound and audio signals. They all see things from different perspectives and all are equally engaging and exciting.

Whenever I plan to focus on audio signal processing I am reminded of that. So many uses are possible that it transverses multiple product and application segments. As always, there are still purists who tremble at the mere notion of the use of "DSP," while some are only now enthusiastically embracing digital signal processing (DSP) for things such as active speaker crossovers, which has been done for nearly 30 years... What would be the world today if we hadn't started working on those things decades ago?

All the while, I'm immersed daily in the cutting-edge developments currently happening in voice recognition, transcription, semantic kernels, and Large Language Models (LLM) that are crucial for Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications. Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) are now taking the possibilities of audio signal processing to a whole new level. Our "good-old DSP" powered by neural networks is what enables adaptive audio — the closest we have ever gotten to creating audio systems that closely resemble our own hearing.

The fast-growing "hearables" space is now quickly evolving due to the huge progress in "familiar things" such as noise cancellation, audio source separation and enhancement, voice processing, and audio recognition and classification. Hearables is the most exciting field in audio currently evolving to a whole new level when combined with neural network processing and artificial intelligence.

As we need to constantly follow the progress on these exciting fronts, I am also constantly reminded that things continue to change in other areas. As an example, although we don't talk a lot about sound reinforcement, audio systems are now being set up for immersive, multiarray configurations and moving away from the obvious speaker-reinforced sources. And that's happening for world tours, concert halls, and even for corporate events and club performances.

Beam-steerable loudspeakers have been widely used in critical sound reinforcement applications, and now more sophisticated approaches using beamforming and wavefield synthesis (e.g., Holoplot / Sphere) approaches are being embraced in the installation market for both small and large scale deployments. Nothing like that would be possible without powerful DSP and audio networks.

Another related trend is the departure from traditional stereo sound reproduction. The largest majority of consumers currently listens to content through single, omnidirectional sources, such as wireless speakers or soundbars (which are effectively speaker arrays). Those can enable stereo from a single source but are also evolving for 3D, spatial, or immersive audio.

In this issue of audioXpress, we have articles that reflect all these trends, with Elevear's breakthrough audio technologies for hearables and hearing aids, to the advanced approach by Audioscenic to position-adaptive 3D sound through loudspeakers. Both are extraordinary stories of dedication and achievements that change the way we hear, for enjoyment or survival.

And in this issue there's a story, told in the first person as I interviewed Andreas Ehret, Senior Director, Automotive at Dolby Laboratories. That interview takes us through an extraordinary journey of some of the most important (and somehow unrecognized) developments of the past 30 years, when content evolved from analog to digital, from stereo to surround, from multichannel to object-based sound, and how that evolution is now transforming how we experience content everywhere, including cars. And as I see it, evolution is always a good thing.

J. Martins
Editor-in-Chief

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