spatial-audio
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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 $20 Earbud Company That Sells in a Blue Box You Cannot Miss
Founded in 2005, JLab turned cheap earbuds and a bright blue box into a top-selling audio brand. Here is how a company that refuses the rockstar price built a business worth $370 million.
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.
The 366-Foot Screen That Ate Las Vegas
One company runs the most expensive room ever built in Las Vegas and the cable channel that carries the Knicks. Here is how Sphere Entertainment turned a glowing orb into a business.
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.
SoWork
SoWork is a generative-AI-enhanced virtual office platform that gives distributed teams a persistent, customizable workspace where avatars work side by side, spatial audio recreates hallway serendipity, and AI quietly captures meeting notes and action items. Founded at Harvard by three co-founders and legally incorporated as Sophya, Inc., the company raised a $15M seed round led by Talis Capital in 2021 and counts teams from startups to large enterprises among its users - with a stated mission to move workplaces from the earth to the cloud.
Gather
Gather is a virtual workspace where remote teams can see each other, walk up for spontaneous conversations, and collaborate without scheduling a meeting for everything. Often described as 'Minecraft meets Zoom,' it pairs a customizable 2-D world with spatial audio and video, plus AI meeting notes and async chat. Founded in 2020 and backed by Sequoia and Index, Gather has been used by millions of people for work, conferences, weddings and gatherings.