Airsound is a technology designed to steer sound so that a single speaker projects to all listeners a seamless and immersive sound stage – as if they are listening to more speakers and that they are positioned in the sweet spot. This process and technology allows for a better and more immersive listening experience in many situations from fewer speakers – making high quality stereo or spatial audio more accessible to consumers.
The Airsound Principle
Side firing speakers (a number of different designs work) form the foundation of the steering process being arranged as an audio dipole effective at the frequency range that allows humans to locate sounds.
Software analyses the audio being played and uses the main speaker to produce the majority of the sounds required, and dipole speakers to selectively steer audio components so that the listener hears the soundstage as intended.
Why It Works
The inventor of stereo, Alan Blumlein, understood well how we humans hear sound location. Much of our ability to locate sounds comes from having 2 ears that hear sounds at slightly different times (and phase). This ability is amplified by the effect being different at different frequencies. By understanding this in detail, and tuning our steering algorithm, we have developed Airsound to reproduce the effect of hearing sound from different locations. This allows listeners to hear space in sound, well beyond the confines of the speaker box being listened to.
Spatial Audio
Airsound steering technology has been highly successful at enabling single box audio products to produce stereo, but recent advances in spatial audio technology have opened up a new world of rich audio content such as Dolby Atmos®.
The introduction of height steering allows a single speaker to reproduce sound from multiple sound objects.
Our advanced processing algorithm allows any number of speakers (2+) to be used and evenly fills the listening space with spatial audio.