Clocking 20 Years of Audio Innovation
How digital transformed — and continues to transform — the way we listen.
Over the past 20 years, a dizzying number of technological advancements have transformed the way we engage with personalized listening experiences. Many of these innovations — noise cancellation, wireless connectivity, the digitization of music — represent tremendous achievements in human ingenuity. But perhaps even more profound has been their impact on culture. Each advance has incrementally changed the way we listen to and discover music.
On any given day we might take a call in a crowded cafe using noise cancelling headphones, queue up a custom radio station algorithmically modeled on our previous listening habits, or bliss out to a playlist we discovered in our social feeds. No longer are we limited by music-encoded objects like cassettes or compact discs — we now have access to an infinite library of audio at our fingertips.
Today we have more choice, control and convenience than any other time in history.
It makes sense when you think about it. “Entire industries are built on the sheer concept of convenience alone,” says Ken Jacob — a 33-year veteran of Bose Corporation. “This is what happened with the streaming music revolution. People no longer have to have a wall full of CDs, I can just ask for it from my phone and there it is. And people obviously respond to that new convenience and buy into it.”
The ease with which we can throw on a pair of wireless headphones and tune into our favorite music streaming service truly is convenient. But what’s more, the growing preference of smartphone users to rely exclusively on voice-enabled headsets to interact with their devices is a testament to the lasting power of headphone innovations.
But how has the consumer experience around personalized audio changed over the past few decades? How did we get to where we are today? And where can we expect to go in the next five years?
Analog to Digital
Although we like to think of digital audio as synonymous with the rise of MP3 players in the late 90s, its history extends all the way back to the 1980s when the first compact discs (CDs) hit store shelves. Originally intended to replace vinyl records, CDs were smaller, stored more music and weren’t prone to warping, making them highly practical. But the real innovation behind CDs was how they stored music.
By using millions of tiny bumps to represent ones and zeroes, CDs were able to encode music digitally, making them a perfect match for the information revolution that was to come. While this format provided a vastly superior audio experience to tape cassettes, encoding music into a physical object still imposed constraints on a consumer’s ability to take their music with them wherever they are.
As CDs were making the music-listening experience more efficient, headphone hardware also began catering to consumers on the go. In-ear headsets like Bose’s IE model were adopted by users who favored compact and easily transportable design. By 2013 noise cancellation had been added as a feature to the IE model, bringing the twin benefits of transportability and noise cancellation into one model. These innovations only served to increase the ease of movement and fluidity of consumer listening experiences.
Cutting the Cord
Although wireless headphones may seem like fairly modern invention, they’ve been around for far longer than digital audio. However, since these early models used FM transistors to receive audio, they had a limited range and a shoddy sound quality, making them a short-lived fad in the public’s imagination.
It wasn’t until Bluetooth came appeared in the late 1990s that truly wireless headsets became feasible. By integrating a low-power antenna that communicated via short-wavelength UHF radio waves, it was now possible for phone users to ditch the cumbersome cables of their accessories. While the first devices to take advantage of this technology were earpiece headsets designed for making hands-free phone calls, wireless headphones centered around music weren’t far behind.
Of course, today’s wireless headsets do more than just stream music. They often serve as a primary interface for interacting with smartphones, whether it’s answering an incoming phone call or checking the weather. Our ears are intimately connected to the information streams that come from our cloud-connected devices.
Bose’s Ken Jacob notes:
“For the first 50 years the value of a product was pretty self contained: it was what was in the box. But this is radically changing. Now “what’s in the box” is only a fraction of how the experience unfolds or takes place. These days value is created not in, but rather around the product itself, in the circuit that goes from ‘what’s in the box’ — speaker, headphone or whatever — through the cloud and back to the device.”
MP3s and The Advent of ‘Music Discovery’
The adoption of digital encoding standards helped popularize the now ubiquitous MP3 format, and portable digital media players soon followed. In keeping with Moore’s Law, the price of memory quickly shrank to make MP3 players attractive for the masses. Since they could store thousands of songs, didn’t need additional batteries and didn’t suffer from analog woes like disc skipping, it didn’t take long for MP3 players to leave CD and cassette players in the dust.
With the gradual rise of internet file sharing services like Napster, LimeWire and Kazaa in the early oughts, digital audio began to realize its full potential. Now, instead of being bound by the physical limitations of the CD, audio could be transmitted across telephone wires and played back on home computers, changing the paradigm of how music was stored and disseminated. Music became something that could be fluidly shared, and infinitely stored across our devices. An entire culture of social sharing was born before Myspace had even made its first appearance.
No longer tied to full-length albums, custom playlists and mix tapes became the norm rather than a practice relegated to die hard music fans. In this way, the era of music discovery also became the era of personalization.
The Birth of the Smartphone
The next great leap forward in 2007 with the birth of the smartphone. For the first time, consumers found a means to be permanently connected to the internet, wherever they were. The smartphone became an ideal tool for streaming, downloading and storing audio, which helped free up valuable internal storage for other media like photos and games.
In less than a decade since smartphones hit the market, streaming music services have become so integral to the consumption of audio content that the habits of listeners have also changed. These streaming platforms have enabled an entirely new experience for listeners that giving users the ability to “discover’ music outside of their immediate physical environment, allowing music to transcend beyond the confines of its stored medium.
What’s more, because they can analyze the listening habits of their users, music streaming services are able to curate customized listening experiences that go beyond genre and artist. Tapping into the power of AI, they’re able to pin down hard-to-define categories like “mood” and “atmosphere” to put together the ideal collection of mellow songs for that slow Tuesday morning or a jovial collection of music for poker night.
The convergence of smartphone and music streaming technology fundamentally changed not only how we listen to music, but also how we experience it. “Whether it’s developing an earphone setting that allows you to go beyond the natural capabilities of your hearing in a crowded environment, or simply perfecting the private experience of hearing music in your bedroom, technology changes our capacity to feel and experience life,” says Jacob. “This principle will only become more pronounced as connected technologies suffuse more and more of our everyday life.”
The Birth of the Smart Home
The utility of having always-on internet connectivity wasn’t lost on the tech industry, and following the successes of smartphones and the proliferation of residential internet, a big push toward smart homes ensued. Under the burgeoning umbrella of Internet of Things or IoT, previously offline devices like televisions, speakers and even vacuum cleaners could now stream content, receive automatic updates and be managed from the convenience of the homeowner’s fingertips.
While many of these new IoT devices, like smart televisions, redefined their respective product categories, the smart speaker was by and large the most impactful. Speakers like Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Home did more than improve the listening experience — they essentially transformed the living room and bedroom into the bridge of The Starship Enterprise where an invisible, nigh-omniscient computer stood at the user’s beck and call, ready to set an alarm, call a cab or even order a pizza.
In essence, smart speakers elevated smart homes from a collection of discrete Internet-connected devices to a unified platform, one that supports a growing number of consumer products, including, you guessed it, headphones. For users, this means having more freedom to interact with their devices without worrying about compatibility, while software developers and hardware manufacturers can rest assured that the smart home is more than a passing trend — it’s here to stay.
The Future: Cloud Connection and Wearables
While advances in software seem to have played the biggest role in the changing ways in which we interact with our devices, one notable hardware innovation is right around the corner: wearable technology.
What consumers saw with the initial run of Google Glass in 2013 — while perhaps somewhat premature — was an indication of things to come. The future of consumer technology will be gear that seamlessly fits our bodies, while providing connection to the cloud, or smart hubs and other wireless devices.
This kind of cloud-enabled, wearable technology aims to make good on the promise of increasingly invisible, always-on devices. Just last month Bose released their SoundWear device —a product that wraps around the user’s neck and pushes high quality audio through a series of two 11-inch waveguide speakers on the device. The SoundWear maximizes sound for the wearer, while minimizing it for others, all while keeping the wearer connected via bluetooth.
So what does this mean for you? In a couple of years, instead of pulling out your cellphone to make a call, you might get a buzz notification from your wearable device. You might ask Google Home, or Samsung SmartThings or Amazon Alexa to pause your music and take the call. Then, once you’re done, you might resume listening to your friend’s latest Spotify playlist.
The expectation is more connectedness at higher quality with more choice than ever before. And it’s right around the corner.
Sponsored by Bose, The Sound of Innovation explores the ways in which technology, culture and sound intersect.
