Audio has been growing rapidly in recent years and that growth shows no signs of slowing down. In fact, with total digital audio listenership in the UK set to surpass 40 million by 2024, audio is now addressing the needs of a much more diverse audience. Consequently, it is becoming more sophisticated with the growth in smart speakers and the use of voice-activated devices.
Since the Covid pandemic hit in 2020 the audio space has been rejuvenated and more listeners than ever are consuming a much wider variety of content which is being accessed by connected platforms.
According to Guy Hammett, Head of Audio at Futuresource Consulting, “Over the past three to four years there has been a marked transition in the way that people work and live and the audio sector has mirrored those changes.”
Hammett points to three phases for audio following the onset of Covid with the first seeing a huge downturn in the market as the pandemic hit.
“Consuming and buying music wasn’t seen as important, but by May/June of 2020 sales had started to recover and with the pandemic limiting activities – no one was visiting the cinema or able to go to a concert – many turned to improving the home entertainment experience and there was a huge boom in sales of sound bars, high-end audio solutions, record players and in passive and active loudspeakers.”
That uptick in spending represented the second phase, according to Hammett. The third then saw demand outstripping supply because of vendors having cancelled orders and factories being shut down.
“What we’ve seen in recent years is a shift towards premium audio and a high-quality experience. Consumers want more and better. Audio is, unlike buying a television, for example, very subjective. In terms of a TV 4K is better than 2K, but with audio users need to be able to experience it to understand it better.”
According to Hammett, while the lower end of the market is suffering as consumers have to tighten their belts in the face of recession and rising inflation, the medium and upper end of the market is continuing to grow.
According to Helmuts Bems, CEO of audio measurement specialist Sonarworks, speaking at last year’s Audio Collaborative industry event held in London’s Soho, the “era of convenience” in audio technologies has now changed and been replaced by “attention to quality of the experience.”
Jon Kiachian, VP and general manager for hearing health technologies at Knowles Corporation, speaking at the same event, said that both tethered and wireless earphones had “done a good job” in pushing the benefits of better quality, with research showing more people wanted to hear above approximately 10kHz.
“When we look at where the market is going people might be more cautious but video, audio and media consumption are becoming more important in their day-to-day lives. So there are plenty of opportunities for companies in this space and a need to keep up with the latest tech trends,” said Hammett.
Technology trends
Among those technology trends are expected to be Bluetooth Low Energy, Wi-Fi 6 and wireless charging.
The first Bluetooth LE Audio-compatible devices are now coming on to the market and when paired with a phone that also supports LE Audio, headphones, earbuds, and speakers will be able to use a new default Bluetooth codec called LC3 – which offers lower latency, less complexity and a lower memory imprint – in the process improving the battery performance of devices.
One issue with LE Audio is that the audio quality will still be limited with respect to how much data it can use, consequently there’s growing interest in ultra-wideband technology, or UWB, which can move much more data over very short distances while needing as little as 10% of the power used by Bluetooth.
Apple has UWB chips in all of its iPhones and currently uses the technology to control its AirTag location-tracking devices, as well as the charging case of the AirPods Pro 2, all of which could provide Apple with a competitive advantage over Android handsets that don’t, as yet, use UWB.
Hammett suggested that, “Many more products using Bluetooth LE and Wi-Fi 6 will come on to the market over the course of 2023 as companies look to integrate them with home systems and other devices.”
At the Audio Collaborative conference in London Carsten Olesen, president of consumer audio at HARMAN International, described that past ten years as a “decade of sound” and suggested that both wireless and fibre connectivity had played a part in driving that growth and that the increase in bandwidth was offering consumers, “more availability” when it came to audio.
Olesen also said that high end sound was playing a significant role in the audio market with higher density and immersive capabilities now featuring on listener devices.
“Users are very well aware of spatial and high-quality audio,” he said and he went on to say that both artificial intelligence (AI) and the metaverse would have significant roles to play but that audio could help to humanise these technologies.
“Audio will bring life into the metaverse, which is not to downgrade the video experience,” he said, “but it would mean very little without spatial audio.”
According to Hammett it’s very hard to talk about the audio space without mentioning the metaverse.
“There’s a lot of potential with the metaverse and if it does take off and develops into what Mark Zuckerberg believes it will become, audio will have a crucial role to play – but it will provide vendors not only with opportunities but real challenges.
“Audio is also likely to become more important in gaming, and I expect it to move more into health and well-being, as well as delivering more immersive entertainment experiences.”
Health and well-being
The move into health and well-being was also discussed by a panel at the Audio Collaborative event.
The session which looked at the impact of audio technologies on well-being highted the problems of increased headphone use, quoting World Health Organisation figures that show that 20 percent of the global population currently suffers from some form of hearing loss.
Al Ganeshkumar, an audio system design engineer at Starkey Hearing, said that such impairments “had long term implications for health” from people being not fully engaged to contributing to dementia.
According to Philipp Skribanowitz, CEO of Mimi Hearing Technologies, society needs to look at why we are seeing higher instances of hearing loss, and he suggested that listening to more than eight hours a day of digital audio consumption was an obvious factor.
“We need to start earlier [in alerting people to potential problems] and prevent it,” Skribanowitz added.
In the US new rules have come into force that allow the sale of over-the-counter (OTC) hearing aids and this has triggered a surge in demand with a host of companies now entering the market including well-known brands like Sony and Bose.
Sony has developed a set of tiny hearing aids and has a Bluetooth-enabled model that looks more like traditional earbuds.
Last year USound, a provider of micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) loudspeakers for hearables and wearables, released an audio module designed to enhance the performance of TWS and OTC hearing aids. The module uses physical frequency crossover technology and is a ready-to-use solution for hearing aids and true wireless earbuds and manufacturers can integrate the module into earphones by changing the venting volume to achieve a different sound experience.
Talking about the new module Andrea Rusconi, CTO at USound, said, ”Hearables manufacturers can now create more ergonomic and comfortable hearables, with extended battery life and audio quality. With this module, the form factor of hearing aids and TWS is considerably reduced.”
These new products are helping to destigmatise the use of hearing aids and as more people wear them, so they are likely to become more accepted.
Matt Marchese, a senior director of sales at Tymphany said that more design conscious devices would help to change perceptions.
The increased use of headphones and other in-ear devices was highlighted by Futuresource market analyst Arian Bassari, who said that there had been an 11 percent increase in the global consumer audio market, from $78 billion in 2021 to $86 billion in 2022. Headphones accounted for 64 percent of this rise, with home audio at 28 percent, loudspeaker six percent and gaming two percent.
Professional audio
The professional and live sound market is also seeing greater awareness of technology at both performer and consumer levels and the audio equipment market is expected to register strong growth over the coming few years.
There has been an increased adoption of cloud-based audio workstations and the growing digitisation of instruments which are both likely to drive market growth.
The demand for HD and Ultra HD sound quality is also driving market growth and in response Charcroft Electronics, a specialist distributor and manufacturer of electronic components, has launched the Purity range of ClarityCap audio capacitors that are able to deliver a significantly lower noise floor, with more ‘dark space’ around the audio signal, and an improved dynamic range that will provide greater clarity for audio reproduction as well as improved spatial separation for individual instruments and vocals.
“The feedback from audio engineers who assessed the initial samples of the Purity audio capacitors confirms that the increased tweeter drive transforms the treble for more nuanced reproduction,” said company director Roger Tall.
These capacitors use a CopperConnect technology in the end connection that maximises the high-frequency propagation of the signal across the end-face of the capacitor and minimises the effects of grain-boundary crossings on phasing.
In addition, the silver-coated, multi-strand Van den Hul cable termination used in the Purity capacitors is specified by many high-end loudspeaker manufacturers and adds to the combined increase in surface area to provide an easy path for high frequencies to reach the tweeter and to deliver accurate reproduction of the source.
It’s this type of technological development as well as digitalisation that is helping to propel the professional audio equipment which is also benefitting from the return of live event such as trade shows, motion production and films, exhibitions, music concerts, and sports events.
When it comes to the professional audio space, design and complexity continue to provide challenges when it comes to developing high-efficiency audio equipment, but the main trends expected to impact professional audio space going forward are likely to be DSP, networked audio, software and device management.
Observing not only these trends but the whole audio space, Futuresource director of entertainment and consumer technology Carl Hibbert suggested that audio was a “rising technology” and would likely continue to benefit from a continued appetite for content in terms of both gaming and entertainment.
In short, the boom of the past few years looks set to continue.
