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Sennheiser and Samsung will bring Ambeo 3D audio tech to Android
Have you ever heard of binaural audio? Don’t feel bad if you haven’t, it’s not exactly a household name. But let’s get you filled in.
Binaural audio is three-dimensional audio. Imagine VR, but for audio. If you close your eyes right now and have a friend move around the room while talking to you, you can pretty well pinpoint where they are in that room even though your eyes are closed. That’s because our ears, along with the help of our brain, work in tandem with each other to detect three things: arrival time, loudness, and timbre.
If something happens to the right of you, your right ear will hear it first and then, a split second later, the left ear will hear it. Your brain can detect this, as well as how loud each ear perceived the noise was, and the tiny bits of distortion as the sounds bounces off the surrounding room. Once your brain puts all this information together, which happens almost instantly, we can detect where the sound is coming from.
So why am I telling you all this? Well because if I simply said that Sennheiser, a distinguished German audio company, is working with Samsung to bring its binaural earbuds to Android you wouldn’t know what that means. But now you do!
Let’s be clear here though: you don’t need special earbuds to listen to binaural audio. You can do that here with your own headphones.
The Ambeo earbuds Sennheiser is working to bring to Android are for recording audio. They work by having microphones in the metal mesh that you see in the picture above.
Sennheiser announced the Ambeo Smart Surround earbuds at CES at the beginning of this year, but for iPhone only. Now the company wants to share the love with Android users as well. Andreas Sennheiser, the CEO of Sennheiser, told The Korea Herald “We are working (with) Samsung because we need credibility and we are doing this technology collaboration for compatibility.”
Although it isn’t clear yet, these earbuds should work with all Android devices, not just Samsung phones. Are you excited for this type of thing to come to Android?