Good worth judgements

Having announced its intentions to partner up with someone in the consumer sector as far back as February 2021, Sennheiser then announced in May that Swiss hearing solution provider, Sonova had bought the portfolio of headphones, earbuds and soundbars that had made Sennheiser a household name.

The nature of that consumer market has been changing rapidly, and it now emerges that this manoeuvre was part of a recalibration of Sennheiser’s core activities into three distinctly professional divisions: pro audio; business communications; and Neumann, as a standalone brand.

Part of this rationale, as revealed recently by brothers Daniel and Andreas Sennheiser who act as co-CEOs of the company, appears to be a reaction to the new conditions of consumer technology, in which huge corporations dominate a multimedia landscape less concerned with audio quality than brand loyalty.

The family nature of Sennheiser’s long-standing dedication to the pro audio global village does not seem to have suited the fast lanes of Google, Apple et al, and profits had declined. A return to core values was in order, raising further questions about the relationship between pro audio and business communications.

Company values
Firstly, though, Andreas Sennheiser sets out the new stall while revealing to what extent it represents some much older company values. “With these business units, we believe we can achieve above-average growth with our own resources – the resources of a family-owned company based in Germany,” he begins.

“We saw great potential in Consumer and Professional, but they are characterised by different customer groups, customer requirements, product life cycles and market dynamics. We decided to concentrate on the three Professional business areas and to look for a strong partner to invest in the Sennheiser Consumer business.

“The consumer industry has a few very large ecosystems, and basically you have to fit in, whereas ecosystems within pro audio and business communications are much more agnostic. The network and control systems are open players, working together – some of them large, but all interested in getting the best possible user experience. With our knowledge, and our people, we can really focus on making a difference.”

It’s now five years since Sennheiser began to diversify its high-end transducer expertise into what was already known as unified communications, a market that matches the consumer sector in the demands for simplification of complex things, and shares pro audio’s dependence on interoperability on a smaller scale. But does it care as much about sound quality?

“We believe everybody supports the idea of greater audio,” replies Daniel. “Whenever someone is exposed to it – and that’s why we put so many resources into demonstrating the products – it’s very convincing. When we do a direct shootout with our Team Connect Ceiling 2 microphone against competitors, there’s a high probability that our mic will be chosen because of the audio quality, the flexibility of the beamforming and the manufacturer-agnostic approach that we have. It’s what makes it a better solution for the job to be done.

“Furthermore, we’re seeing that more and more people appreciate the benefits of greater speech intelligibility in pure productivity terms, especially at hybrid meetings. Every person can be heard properly, the audio is consistent across all the rooms and the fatigue factor is lowered.

“A lot of research has been carried out by major universities that proves one of the main reasons for fatigue is poor speech intelligibility and a lot of unwanted echo, so that the brain needs to work harder to process it all. There is also a financial factor that’s beginning to be acknowledged. Great audio quality is not just a luxury you either can or can’t afford. It’s actually something that drives productivity among your remote workforce.”

Hands free
Perhaps it is naïve to expect the same enthusiasm for the granular niceties of audio across all of Sennheiser’s professional divisions, with Pro Audio and Neumann demanding the most attention to the fabric of sound, given their basic brief to deliver music reproduced to a level of excellence that will sell tickets and recordings.

“No, I don’t think you’ll find that kind of passion for perfect sound in the business communications markets,” admits Andreas. “But what you will find is some very smart integrators who are aware of what good audio can do for you.

“In the touchless audio environment, we have the very successful TeamConnect Ceiling 2 microphone that no longer resides on a desk but is installed on to the ceiling, using beamforming algorithms that identify speech around the room. It’s a system that makes it easier to create excellent audio. You don’t have to position the microphone correctly. You don’t have to think about where the person speaking will be sitting, standing or moving around.

“Once you understand how touchless audio works, you realise that it actually makes it easier for the integrator to set up the system and install it, because the system then configures itself according to the exact circumstances of the installation – even to the number of delegates present at any specific meeting. When you have these kinds of arguments at your disposal, you can convince an IT person within a large organisation that better audio is worth it for lots of reasons.

“That also applies to educational facilities, the largest of which have started to invest heavily into audio systems for learning. We see a very positive shift towards organisations of this kind employing the right kind of buyers, consultants and integrators who understand the symbiosis of touchless audio, easier installation and better results.”

Meanwhile, the pandemic has made its unique contribution to Sennheiser’s growth in the sector it calls Business Communications – or ‘BizComm’, as Daniel likes to say. Even though offices have been deserted or, at best, thinned out, the need for clear audio signals has never been more pressing. Just because classrooms and meeting rooms have lost footfall, the market still needs to talk and products, such as Sennheiser’s beamforming ceiling microphones, have been essential to the new links between people kept apart.

The products are also getting smarter and adding more and more software to help create and manage systems that draw in components from multiple brands, and it’s here that AV’s more advanced grasp of interoperability than, say, pro audio offers Sennheiser huge opportunities.

Consumer technology’s bullying ecosystems may be one thing, but Sennheiser has learned much from its formative experience in that field and is in a position to further the cause of smart interoperability in a world now dependent on Teams, Zoom and other remote solutions. While TeamConnect Ceiling 2 microphones can be adapted to individual environments via the software provided, all of Sennheiser’s electro-acoustic expertise can eventually slip into the hybrid applications now coming. In fact, ‘BizComm’ shares a profound similarity with pro audio after the virus: whatever’s happening in one space can include a whole lot more people who are somewhere else.

Ambient house
Whether it’s speech intelligibility, musical subtlety or the spine-tingling experience of an immersive AV installation, hybrid events are the platforms that will prove the necessity for great audio. As the infrastructure irons out its Quality of Service, and if network technology such as 5G makes good on its promises of low-latency, wide-bandwidth transmission, the stage is set for immersive audio to suspend a little bit more disbelief.

Immersive formats place the listener in the virtual space, a closer match than anything previously to the experience of those in the actual space. This is what breaches the gap between physical presence and online attendance and, of course, Sennheiser has been thinking about this for a long time.

“Sennheiser has been involved in immersive technology for more than 50 years,” says Daniel, “beginning with a dummy head design to promote open-back headphones and followed by other binaural systems, such as the Neumann KU 100 Binaural Head. We were pioneers in 3D audio with the AMBEO system, and we believe in it now more than ever, regarding it as absolutely the future because it’s a much more natural listening experience. It’s beginning to appear on the streaming platforms, from Netflix to Spotify and Apple Music, and it’s being pushed because it’s much more emotional.

“On the microphone side we have our AMBEO VR mic for spatial recording, with its classic microphone setup, and about three years ago we invested in immersive audio specialist, Dear Reality which creates an environment for 3D audio mixing, including for gaming and live sound, and we now have a 3D audio virtual monitoring system to mix spatial audio on headphones. It’s a really interesting development, and last but not least we’re bringing it to the automotive industry as well with AMBEO Mobility – for example, in a collaboration with Continental.”

A branded, digital version of the Ambisonics principle of full-sphere surround sound, AMBEO is described by Daniel as an “ingredient” brand. “It has several products,” he explains, “and is our way of saying ‘3D immersive audio’ – a very complicated phrase. We think AMBEO is much catchier – the succession from mono to stereo, and then from stereo to AMBEO – which is, basically, the future.”

The use of capital letters reveals AMBEO’s trademarked status, unlike the lower-case universality of the previous two audio concepts, which raises another frontier for interoperability: can immersive audio formats share the same ecosystem?

“The neat thing about AMBEO is that it’s not a proprietary technology,” says Daniel, “but it brings our knowledge of how to create the best immersive experience irrespective of the input format. For example, our AMBEO soundbar – now under the auspices of Sonova – takes DTS, Atmos and even generates an up-mix from plain stereo to 3D.

“Our ambition was to make our combination of hardware and software capable of generating the best possible experience from any input factor. It’s all about what the source is turned into and how perfectly it’s reproduced. With that attitude, we’re not in competition with any existing codec. We take what comes and project it into the room in the most natural way. The same is true of our binaural rendering – we want ours to be the best possible representation of the reality that goes into it, and we don’t want to focus on what input format is used to start with.”

Having ceded such items as soundbars to the consumer industry, the natural next step for this commitment to immersive experience in the pro audio field would be 3D in-ear monitoring on stage – as opposed to Dear Reality’s aforementioned mixing tool, which has found many AV applications in the design and execution of interactive experiences and attractions. But whatever is next, it will be as agnostic as possible.

“We don’t want to lock our customers in a box,” Daniel concludes. “We want them to be able to play with anybody – take anybody’s signal and be able to playback anybody’s signal. It’s the experience that counts.”