The Future of Home Audio

Here is what I see as the future of Home Audio:

Imagine if you never had to worry about speaker placement when setting up a home theater, or making sure that you had a room where you could have symmetrical placement of speakers.

They way I see the future is that of post-installation customization. You buy a receiver that includes a given number of outputs. There is no 5.1 or 7.1. Instead you get a receiver that might have, for example, 10 speaker outputs. You just plug in whatever speakers you want to into the receiver. After placing them where you want them, you turn on the calibration. Most receivers come with a simple microphone that you put in the listening position that will balance out levels. In the future, there will be a more advanced microphone that is multi-directional. You would set it up to be head-level in your seated position, pointed directly at the display and horizontally level. The next step of the EQ would be that the receiver would play a tone, say 5khz, out of each speaker. The microphone would detect exactly where the sound is coming from in 3 dimension. For example, speaker 1 could be at 15 degrees on the horizontal plane, and 5 degrees up on the vertical. Speaker 2 could be at 100 degrees on the horizontal and 15 degrees vertical. The receiver would get all of the values of the various speakers and construct a 3d representation of the speaker positioning.

Here is why my idea branches off into the short-term and the long-term. In the short-term, the source audio will still be a specific 5.1 or 7.1 audio stream. During the EQ, the receiver would take your specific speaker configuration and determine how much of each channel to put out of each speaker to give you the equivalent perspective. For instance, if you have 4 speakers in your configuration, the right “channel” of the 5.1 would just be the front-right speaker, the left “channel”, the front-left. The center channel would then be 50% right and 50% left. (Well, not actually 50% due to having to balance the levels between channels, but it would be at least equal between right and left). The EQ would then save this configuration into memory, so that every time it received 5.1 source audio, it would know exactly how to output that information. It would save the specific mappings for stereo, 5.1 and 7.1.

Now the long-term solution would be that instead of the source audio having a specific number of channels, it would instead follow the philosophy of “voices” that computer game technologies such as EAX use. The source audio would have, say, 128 voices in a given track. Each of these voices effectively a non-fixed audio channel is coordinated to specific location in the audio field at any given point in time. For example, one “voice” could be a helicopter. This sound could move around the sound stage to come from different locations at different times. Where the smarts of the EQ comes in, is that each of these voices will be processed in the receiver and will be outputted to the specific speakers that your system defined would be represent that specific location. If the audio was supposed to come from 90 degrees horizontally, in your 4 speaker configuration, it would be 50% front right and 50% rear right. This would be the equivalent setting. The receiver would process all 128 of these discreet sounds and position them exactly where they are supposed to be, tuned to your specific speaker placement.

Now the other aspect of the EQ would be calibrating for different speakers. You might have more space to put bigger speakers in the corners of the room, but you still want to have the benefit of having smaller speakers on the side to improve the positional audio. Well, the receiver would be able to have a sound profile for each speaker that would help to balance that out across the entire frequency range. Lower frequencies generally are less directional, so the receiver could do have the front speakers boost the lower-end while the small speakers in various positions would provide the directional information. Obviously in such a configuration, subwoofers would be assigned a role as pure back-up since 10-90hz range very non-directional.

The optimal way to accomplish this would be to have wireless speakers, so you don’t have to do any actual wiring. You could just run an auto-detect that would have the receiver detect all wireless speakers and give each the proper information. Once wireless power technology is available, you could then mount speakers all over the place without having to run any cables at all. It would be simple to have 20 small 6” cube speakers that you could place fairly-randomly around the room, and the receiver would do all of the processing to determine the optimal sound sound placement.

One of the main benefits of this vision is that people won’t have to sacrifice a living space to have a good movie watching experience, but could instead take any living space and turn it into a home theater without having to think about furniture arrangement. Or when you do move furniture and speakers around, all it would take is a simple calibration and things would return to optimal sound performance.

Also, in this scenario, the way to get higher-quality surround sound is to merely get more speakers. In theory, each speaker you add would improve accuracy of the positional audio. You could start off with a simple 2-speaker system and add in-ceiling speakers or bookshelf speakers or wall-mounted speakers down the road and each would improvement your home theater.

So I issue a challenge to the world of consumer electronics: Let’s make this happen.