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.
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.