audio-technology
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Sonos Wired the Whole House for Sound - Then Shipped the App That Nearly Unplugged It
The company that made multi-room music feel effortless spent 2024 proving how quickly one software update can undo twenty years of goodwill - and 2025 trying to earn it back.
The Headphone Company That Bet You Would Rather Hear the Traffic
While the rest of the audio world raced to seal your ears shut with noise cancellation, Shokz built a business on the opposite promise - keep them open, and let people hear the world they are moving through.
The Austin Startup That Put a Real Subwoofer in a Lunchbox
Brane Audio spent nine years and 100-plus prototypes trying to break a century-old rule of acoustics. The result is a portable speaker that reviewers keep describing as impossible.
The Family That Wired the World's Stages - And Then Sold the Headphones
Fritz Sennheiser started a lab in a farmhouse in 1945. Eighty years later his grandsons run the microphone company that quietly powers your favorite show - and made a hard call about the headphones on your head.
Bose Built a Business Around the Part of Sound You Cannot See
For six decades, Bose has sold a deceptively simple promise: make the machinery disappear and let the listener feel the result. Its next act stretches that research habit from headphones and car cabins to luxury hi-fi and the software inside other brands' devices.
sensiBel
sensiBel is a Norwegian semiconductor company that makes optical MEMS microphones - tiny chip-scale devices that use a laser and photodetector to sense a diaphragm's motion instead of the electrical (capacitive) method used in almost every microphone for the past century. Its flagship SBM100B is billed as the world's first production optical MEMS microphone, delivering studio-grade specs (80 dBA SNR, 146 dB acoustic overload point, 132 dB dynamic range) in a package small enough for earbuds, laptops and microphone arrays. Spun out of Norwegian research institute SINTEF in 2017, sensiBel sells to audio, consumer-electronics and pro-audio manufacturers and counts Sennheiser among its investors.
Kieran Harney
Kieran Harney is the CEO of sensiBel, an Oslo-based semiconductor company that builds the world's first studio-quality optical MEMS microphone. A three-decade veteran of the MEMS industry, he founded the MEMS microphone business at Analog Devices in 2005, which was acquired by InvenSense in 2013 and later became part of TDK. He joined sensiBel in 2022, rose from COO to Chief Commercial Officer, and took over as CEO in September 2025 with a mandate to scale the company's optical microphone technology from evaluation kits to mass-market production.
Xperi Inc.
Xperi Inc. (NYSE: XPER) is a San Jose-based entertainment technology company whose work hides in plain sight inside the devices people already own. Through its DTS, HD Radio, TiVo and IMAX Enhanced brands, Xperi puts immersive sound in living rooms, smart software on televisions, broadcast and streaming radio in cars, and personalized discovery across pay-TV and IPTV platforms. Spun out of Xperi Holding Corp in 2022 as the product-focused half of the business, the company now reaches hundreds of millions of devices worldwide while pivoting its growth toward a media platform built around TiVo OS and the connected car.
Chin Beckmann
Chin Beckmann is the Co-Founder and CEO of DSP Concepts, the Santa Clara-based global leader in embedded audio software and creator of Audio Weaver — a platform that powers the sound systems in tens of millions of devices from Tesla, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and Samsung. A concert pianist who holds degrees in Computer Engineering from Boston University and an MBA from Northeastern University, Chin co-founded DSP Concepts with her husband and CTO Paul Beckmann, building it from an audio engineering consulting firm's secret weapon into a Series C-funded company with $56.4M raised and revenue growing more than 100% since 2019. She also serves on the Audio Board of the Consumer Technology Association.