Hello everyone,
We’re sure that many of you are curious to hear about how we’re doing. As we mentioned in our previous update, several issues needed to be dealt with, in particular, the sleeves which were inconsistent. We’ve worked very hard in the last couple of months to fix these issues, and our efforts have borne fruit. We’re really thrilled about the progress we’ve made, and it’s now time to share all this with you in a comprehensive update.
Fabrics
The issue with the sleeves proved to be quite a nightmare. The main problem with our preferred 3D mesh (or sandwich) fabrics is that it is knitted as a sandwich of 3 different layers. This makes its elasticity (stretch and shrinkage) behave unpredictably, which is difficult to work with in terms of dimensions and tolerances. And since the designs of our products’ housings do not cover the sides of the sleeves the right dimensions are critical for our desired premium look. Our sleeves’ manufacturer thought that they had found the perfect design for the sleeves, but unfortunately during the pilot build we realized that some sleeves showed too much shrinkage when applied to the products. In other words, the scrap rate of the sleeves they had produced turned out too high. A new design of the sleeves had to be found.
That is why in the last couple of months, Jorn has spent over 30 hours at our sleeves’ manufacturer and countless more at the office to try to find a solution. Many of these hours were spent brainstorming, trying different ways to apply the 3D mesh, and even looking into alternative fabrics. However, sourcing a new fabric with the required (quality, mechanical, acoustic and aesthetic) characteristics for our products seemed way too time-consuming. We focused on the 3D mesh and after trying countless ideas and prototypes, we have found a great looking solution last week. Instead of being a closed loop of fabric (like a tube) and applied from the side of the product, the sleeve will be open and wrapped around it. The ends are covered by a nice looking strip. This will allow operators on the assembly line to position the fabric perfectly!
We’re currently getting quotes and timelines for the production of a batch of these new fabrics.
Patent
Getting a patent granted is a long and fastidious job. We first filed for a patent in the Netherlands in October 2014. Then we filed for an “international” patent through what’s called the PCT in October 2015. Then we filed for a United States patent and a European patent in October 2017.
Today, we’re very happy to say that our patent has finally been granted in the United States! The European patent should be granted as well very soon.
Our patent protects the technology we’re developing that allows a listener to be localised in their home, to make the music follow the user from room to room automatically. If you’re interested in reading more about the content of our patent, feel free to visit this link.
Trademark
Our trademark kien has been officially granted in the United States and in the European Union. This means that we can go to market in these regions under the kien brand.
Our trademark has been granted under a specific class, namely class 9, which relates to audio products like speakers, but also to software related to audio.
Accelerace
If you’re following us on social media (Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram), then you must have seen the picture below and wonder what the hype was about.
We’re very happy to say that it’s not just hype. We’ve been selected to a program called the SoundTech Accelerator, organized by Accelerace (https://www.accelerace.io/sound/) and in collaboration with Bang & Olufsen, Harman, and SoundHub Denmark.
The 6-month program will provide us with business mentoring from people with loads of experience in the audio industry.
We will also have access to state-of-the-art testing facilities that Bang & Olufsen uses to develop, test, and tune products. This will allow us to tune our current product even better (more on that below), and it will greatly help with the development of future products.
Tuning
Thanks to the program and the help provided by SoundHub Denmark, we’ll have access to the facilities used by Bang & Olufsen to tune their speakers. One of these facilities is “The Cube”: a 12x12x13 meters room used to make objective acoustic measurements.
For anyone interested in more information about the Cube, we recommend the very extensive article written by Bang & Olufsen’s Tonmeister Geoff Martin.
Other facilities include two listening rooms designed in accordance with the IEC 268–13 standard. These rooms will allow us to do subjective listening and improve the sound of our system even further.
Certifications
On the Certification front, we are happy to announce that our Satellite has passed for FCC (US), and IC (Canada) tests. We have been waiting for CE (Europe) approval which has given us a bit more of a run for our money.To pass FCC and IC certification standards, the product is not allowed to emit more radiation than a specified maximum. This is measured with a very accurate antenna and measurement equipment. In CE certification, these tests are performed, as well as a test where the roles are reversed.The product gets blasted with radiation from the antenna. During this, the product is not allowed to show erroneous behaviour. Unfortunately, our capacitive touch ring has been giving us some headaches in this field: The touch ring was triggering volume and play/pause commands when the product was receiving radiation the antenna. Fortunately though, our new engineer Costas has debugged his way through this problem and has found a solution to the problem. Now we are passing the CE test! Now we have to get the final versions of our electronics boards so we can get the official approval and the actual certificate.
The majority of tests have been done for the subwoofer as well. We don’t foresee any issues for the subwoofer’s certification thus far.
Software
We tested the firmware with the products from the Pilot build and fixed a lot of issues and we’ve started building our app. Xabi is just coming back from a week of work in Barcelona with our app development partner, Hippo. We have been building and testing the Over The Air update mechanism. This will allow us to send a new firmware for your speaker to your app. The app will then be able to update any speaker through Bluetooth Low Energy. With this we can keep refining your sound experience with our speakers.
While working on the capacitive touch ring certification issue, our new software developer Costas has been finetuning the firmware of the capacitive touch ring. It should now work very smoothly with no false detections (inside a certification test chamber or at your house).
Currently Javier is trying to find the best way to put 40 different audio filters into your speaker so you can change the characteristics of your speaker so it sounds perfect when for example the speaker is outside, on a shelf, against a wall, on the floor, and when it’s playing jazz, classical, electronic, and more.
Soon we’re starting to implement and finetune the surround sound capabilities of a 5.1 speaker set.
That’s it for now, we hope that you have enjoyed this update. We’ll be back with another one soon.
The kien team.
