Jabra: Designing the future of audio in 360 degrees

DESCRIPTION

“Spatialisation or 3D rendering of sound means that you get the feeling that you are pulling your speakers out of your ears… hearing the sound or music coming from around you instead. It is actually proven through various studies that that is a more natural way of listening. ”

Jabra’s owner company GN is an audio and video communications technology company which was founded over 100 years ago to undertake the epic task of placing the first telephone line between China and Scandinavia. Since then they have continued to innovate in the area of communications and today they design and manufacture communications devices such as wireless earbuds, headsets, intelligent hearing aids and video conferencing solutions.

Their wireless earbuds are full of cutting edge technology such as advanced noise cancellation, wind cancellation and of course essential for the runners, sweat resistance. They even manufacture some of the toughest, most durable headphones on the market.

One of the latest advances though is spatial, or 3D audio, meaning sound it’s just left or right, it can be a 360 experience for the user.

Our producer Lærke Sivkjær went to visit Vice President of Consumer Devices, Morten Urup, at the Jabra offices in Copenhagen. Morton showed her the sound lab where testing for many of the products takes place, including two anechoic chambers which cancel out outside sound completely for a completely controlled audio environment. He also talks about the future of audio innovation and how AI may play a part in driving it forward.

Find out more about Jabra here.

Find out more about Creo here.

Your host is Paul Haimes from industrial software company PTC.

Episodes are released bi-weekly. Follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter for updates.

This is an 18Sixty production for PTC. Executive producer is Jacqui Cook. Sound design and editing by Ollie Guillou. Location recording by Lærke Sivkjær. Music by Rowan Bishop.

Transcript

With the global pandemic hitting us in 2020, many companies were left having to quickly adapt to a new remote working style. It’s hard to imagine a time without Zoom or Teams calls. But for Jabra, who have long been at the forefront of innovation around communications technology, they’d had their eyes on the trend toward remote working for a while. Jabra is an audio and video communications technology company. They develop and manufacture state-of-the-art audio devices like wireless earbuds, headsets, intelligent hearing aids, and video conferencing solutions. Their wireless earbuds are full of sophisticated technology from beamforming microphones to advanced active noise cancellation, even wind cancellation. And there are even earbuds that are tested to be the toughest in the world. 

One of the latest developments though, is spatial audio, in collaboration with Dolby, and it goes beyond traditional stereo to add a new dimension to the listening experience. So the sound isn’t just left or right, it’s 360. We sent our producer Lærke Sivkjær to meet Morten Urup, Jabra’s Vice President of Consumer Products. Morten takes us around the sound lab in the [parent company] GN Group offices in Copenhagen, including a visit inside an anechoic chamber – find out what that is in a moment – where they develop the technology with the end users' experience in mind.

My name is Morten, I am the Vice President of Consumer Products here at GN. I’ve been working here for a number of years, and I’ve been working with product development for the last 25 years or so. GN, which owns the Jabra brand, is a very old company founded by Carl Frederik Tietgen more than 150 years ago. Tietgen got this very challenging idea to place the first telegraph line between China and Scandinavia – that was the start of the company. Ever since, we have been a company focused on communication. Think of the challenges you would have had making the first telegraph line between China and Scandinavia – you’d have to be pretty damn innovative. And with that sort of history, it has always been a core part of what we do. I think the challenge becomes how you make sure that the innovation you do is not just for the sake of innovation, but for the sake of the end user. And I think we see large tech companies out there that are also doing well – and we’re not underestimating that – but it seems a little bit more of a race to have the most features. We would like to see ourselves as a company that not also does tech innovation, but to deliver the right features and also, let’s say, making sure that they work. Because others did true wireless earbuds before us, they just didn’t work as well. Others also later built in heart rate sensors, but they didn’t work quite as well. So how do you transfer this innovation into something that is that is useful and valuable to the end user and keep that focus?

We have been growing and focusing around innovation within communication; particularly our focus on hybrid work has been significant. Where a lot of companies were quite challenged during the pandemic, we managed quite well. We had been monitoring this trend for years of the increase of hybrid working. Then all of a sudden you had a pandemic that accelerated that hugely – everybody needed communication solutions for their home so that they could keep working during the pandemic. That worked in our favour, having those solutions ready and having an awesome supply chain that managed to keep delivering solutions throughout the pandemic where others were more challenged than we were So again, a lot of the focus has been on delivering and developing the world’s best solutions for hybrid work. 

I thought I would show you the laboratories that we have, it’s one of the things that you can see it’s not common knowledge, what it takes to develop particularly high-end devices. And some of the labs are pretty advanced. So I thought I would just take you on a bit of a tour to see at least two of those. Here we have a holograph waiting to show us one of the sound labs that we have. There is different equipment in there. But we can take a look at it when we get in.

Basically, we’re in a square box, we’re standing on a wire grid, so it’s a little bit flexible. And all around us, wherever we look, there are white triangular shapes. So it’s a pretty special experience. And then part of it is, of course, being in here. And if it wasn’t for my voice, there would be total silence. And that is quite unique, because wherever else you go, you will have some sort of background noise. And this is one of the places where you can actually do measurements of internal noise in devices and you can basically remove everything else. And that is quite rare. 

I think I need to drop the headphones for a moment.

It’s pretty weird. Yes, it is a pretty weird experience. This is one of the types of chambers we use for measurement. But we can maybe have Holika show us the other one where we can look at let’s say, directional sound in a different way.

So we are now in one of the other anechoic chambers, we’re standing in the middle of an array of speakers, they’re going all around our heads, and then around us 360 degrees as well. And of course, we can’t actually see, but we’re standing on a wire grid, and under the mesh there are also speakers. So it is a complete sphere where we can then control the sound. Holika, maybe a couple of words on the measurements we plan to do in here, I’m not sure how many we’ve already done.

Holika: You can reproduce a lot of the various sound environments in here. When you record anywhere in real life with a microphone, with a lot of microphones in it, also a spirit microphone, when you replay that in here, you will get the sound from a high number of directions as well. Without moving around, you can sit in the middle and just be positioned there and you can have the sound coming from behind you or from any angle. It’s a very extended version of the 5+1 speaker system you can have at home – this is a 49+4 speaker system, if you do it in those terms, so it’s a bit more.

Morten: But it’s super cool. And one of the things of course, that we are very focused on when we develop is being able to provide our engineers with environments where we can reproduce the same measurement again and again. So, one thing is reproducibility; that is super important. While you develop to see when you tweak somewhere in the code, in the algorithms, whether it’s transmitted so that all the recorded sound, so to speak, can be found, or whether it’s in noise cancellation algorithms that you’re tweaking, being able to then have a reproducible result when you say, “So, what was the result of that?” You need labs like this to be able to do the same measurement again and again. Then, of course, you can say the next challenge becomes how does that then translate into real life? You could not do the reproducible recording in real life because whether it was a bus passing by all of a sudden, or a car or whatever, that will always change. There will always be variables that we cannot control, Here we can control the variables. And, as I said, for the continuous development of an optimization of our solutions, that is super important. And then you can say the next step from here is figuring out how does that translate one-to-one into real life. 

Just now people can’t see us. But the fact that we have a car in here, so we can actually do recordings inside of a real car because again, that also provides a specific environment to do measurements. And so there is a full-size standard Toyota Corolla or whatever it is, maybe a Yaris, parked in here in the sound lab. Now coming up to a couple of months ago for IFA, which is late August, early September in Berlin, one of the big consumer electronics shows, we launched the Elite 8 Active and Elite 10. They are the most recent in a long range of true wireless devices coming out of Jabra. It is a really nice, small earbud that is designed to sit in the ear canal. And they sit there comfortably for hours without needing additional support anywhere else. On one hand, miniaturising them to achieve the comfort has been a significant focus area. And then, of course, our focus on durability. The ones of us who love to do some sort of sport have most likely at some stage had a set of earbuds that died on us because of sweat. Sweat is surprisingly aggressive when it comes to electronics. We have managed, over the years, to build some super durable products. The latest is by far the toughest we have done, so Elite 8 Active is a super tough set of earbuds. We have been putting it through various very, very harsh tests from highly accelerated corrosion tests to various military tests. So we know we can vouch for super great comfort and we can deliver equally great durability on these. One of the later innovations within sound technology has been the fact that you can create a 3D sound, or spatialized sound as it is also called. Interestingly, coming out of the sound lab where you’ve been into a complete sphere of speakers and you’ve heard that, you also in that sense experienced what is typical of any well-designed earbud. Think of a centre line down the middle of your face. That is where the music from standard stereo earbuds meet – that is kind of where it sounds like it is so in the middle of your head. That is where the sound is. Spatialization, or 3D rendering of sound, means that you get the feeling that you’re actually pulling your speakers out of your ears and you’re starting to hear different instruments, but definitely hearing that the sound of music coming from around you instead. It has been proven through various studies that it is a more natural way of listening, just like you would be if you were listening to external speakers or a band playing – it is external, not coming from inside your head. So in terms of the technology, it is to externalise the sound or spatialize the sound, pulling it out of your head in that sense, and making it a more natural listening experience. 

When we consider our future innovation, there are a lot of things happening right now. And of course, I think as with any other tech company at the moment, there is no doubt that AI has to come up. So at the moment, if we look at, for example, conversations and communication in general, there is no doubt that one of the places where AI is showing very, very high potential is the ability to recognise what is voice and what is noise. As soon as you have an AI algorithm that recognises voices from noise, it can very, very efficiently remove the noise. The next generation of that is then recognising your voice. Now, imagine it takes a “fingerprint” of my voice, and then recognises my voice compared to other voices, then it can super efficiently remove other voices. So basically imagine a future where, wherever the processing happens – let’s keep that aside for a second –we can have super crystal clear conversations in pretty much any environment. You will be able to, in most trains, have a pretty decent conversation without your friend necessarily noticing, but in the future, that will be to a degree where she would have no idea where you are. And then I think it comes back to one of the interesting points some people don’t like that. Some people prefer that you have a level of background noise so that I do know that you’re on the train, you are actually on your way home. I think that becomes one of the next levels where you say, “Well, we can do it, but should we do it just because we can?” Or, “What is the right balance of utilising the AI to remove noise versus filtering through a little bit of irrelevant noise?” Because it might be a better experience for you and for the person you speak to that they know where you are. So again, there are opportunities in this tech, but there is a balance to strike of how to use it properly.

Thank you to Morten Urup at Jabra in Denmark. There was a time when a headset was a relatively simple design based on simple geometries that was straightforward for both the designer and the engineer. But today, Jabra headsets are based on super-organic and much more complex designs with as few straight lines as possible. PTC’s 3D CAD solution Creo is an important part of this. Time to meet our expert Brian Thompson. Brian, we’ve spoken before about the capabilities of Creo. But can you give our listeners a better understanding of how a company like GN Audio can use advanced CAD modelling to push the technological boundaries of its products? 

Yes, sure, thank you. It’s cool to hear about how Jabra is using Creo to design some of the most advanced earpieces and headsets you can find anywhere in the world. When you look at something fairly small, particularly a little earpiece, or even a small headset, it’s hard to fully appreciate, unless you talk to the engineers who do the work, just how complex the engineering is to produce the kind of audio that they are trying to produce with such small speakers in such a small amount of space. You hear about all their initiatives around spatial audio, and you know there’s a lot of engineering know-how that’s going into producing these earpieces and headsets. And so, what does that mean for the design engineer in Creo? Well, it ultimately means exceptionally precise control over the flow of the surfaces in these devices, because we all know sound is pressure waves. And so those pressure waves are influenced by the geometric surfaces of the Jabra devices, the ear pieces, headsets, and so forth. And if you don’t get it just right, you’re not going to create that audio field that the user of their devices wants to enjoy as part of their listening experience, whether it’s music or a conference call or what have you. So it turns out that in Creo, the best way to get precise control and incredible flexibility over the surfaces for this kind of application is to use a module in Creo we call ISDX – interactive service design extension. And so, that is ISDX module of Creo allows design engineers to control everything about surfaces. They start with curves, they build surfaces on those curves, and they can really control the flow and the curvature of the surfaces as they connect in an entire design really, really nicely. And these surfaces are parametric surfaces as part of the overall Creo design package, so designs that are a part of the overall headset package that are maybe put together with traditional modelling methods like extrusions and sweeps and so forth in Creo, those can be associatively connected to surfaces built with ISDX that have that precise control for those types of surfaces that you want to interact with the sound waves and give you that spatial audio technique, and in fact for the users of their headsets. Those things are easily connectable in Creo, everything is done fully associative in Creo, so this blending of super-organic precise control over surfaces that are intended to guide the pressure waves to give you the audio effect, blending that with the types of surfaces you might put on the outside to interface for the switchgear and so forth on their headsets, easily done inside Creo. And so it’s really nice to see Jabra taking full advantage of those technologies to deliver best-in-class audio experiences for their customers.