Aug 16 2008
When you’re tucked in your car or lounging at home, you’re a cell phone’s best friend because you can easily control the sound in your environment. When you’re outside or in another setting where you’re powerless to the elements, though, a piercing horn from a car or turbulent wind can render your phone call completely futile.
It’s an everyday problem for people everywhere. In fact, analysts say poor sound is one of the top gripes from cell phone users. New cell phone accessories are designed to solve the problem.
The Pain’s Solution
To help heal this pain, a new noise-suppression chip from a Mountain View, Calif.-based start-up company called Audience is now being rolled out for cell phones and other devices. On one hand, the concept is anything but new. On the other, the company says its method is entirely novel.
Thus far, most noise cancellation has relied on chip sets where a group of chips work in tandem. Experts say such chips separate the source from background noise only in a stationary position. Audience’s technology reduces the solution to one chip through means specifically fashioned after the way human hearing works.
“Most cell phones were set up to do a certain amount of noise reduction,” said Will Strauss, president of research firm Forward Concepts and an expert on digital signal processing, in published reports. He says it’s based on a steady noise in the background, though, such as a car engine running in a consistent pattern.
The Audience chip is a “breakthrough,” according to Strauss. He added: “I have seldom been impressed by any sound chip. In this case, I was.”
How Does it Work?
By design, the Audience chip is built to mitigate noise from moving objects such as fire engines or passing cars. Audience CEO Peter Santos says the net result of his company’s chip is that background noise can be trimmed by 20 to 40 decibels.
“The real world is music and people talking and TVs playing in the background,” Santos said in published reports. “To have a noise-reduction system, you have to not only get rid of lots of noise but lots of kinds of noises.”
By the way, 40 decibels is about nine times as loud as 20 decibels. To put into perspective how much Audience’s technology is claiming to combat, a list from Overclock.net follows of some common sounds and the rough decibel rating for them:
- 10 decibels: Normal breathing
- 20 decibels: A mosquito or rustling leaves
- 30 decibels: A whisper
- 40 decibels: A bubbling brook or refrigerator
- 50 decibels: Normal conversation
- 60 decibels: Laughter
- 70 decibels: A vacuum cleaner or hair dryer
- 80 decibels: City traffic or a garbage disposal
- 90 decibels: A motorcycle or lawnmower
Competition
Audience’s technology advisory board is crammed with brawny tech pioneers including Pentium chip designer Robert Colwell. Audience will need all the advantage it can get to break into the market of 1.2 billion cell phones purchased annually, too, as it will clearly have cutthroat competition.
Broadcom, Qualcomm, On Semiconductor and a flock of others are also pursuing technologies to yield improved cell phone sound. Reports say that AMI Semiconductor, which was purchased by On Semiconductor in March 2008, plans to release a chip to directly rival Audience’s voice processor.
While Audience is currently merchandising its chip for about $5 each in sample quantities, the company will need to bring the price down should the chips get hot. Santos says phones embedded with the Audience chip will hit store shelves in May 2008 in Asia. He says they’ll debut in the U.S. shortly thereafter.
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