Manufacturers of electroacoustic equipment are under continuous pressure to deliver high‐quality acoustic performance by continuously innovating and optimizing their products and processes – from design, development, manufacture and beyond.
New electroacoustic devices such as mobile phones, tablets, and speakers keep pushing the boundaries of design, with manufacturers trying to squeeze in ever-more impressive capabilities while fulfilling international telephone standards for voice capture and reproduction. With HBK speech and hearing simulation solutions, manufacturers can accurately evaluate their products to provide advanced acoustic and electronic signal processing combined with superior design.
Protecting brand value increasingly requires living up to the quality expectations of customers, and manufacturers are constantly enhancing production tests to ensure and maintain the quality achieved in design and development. Applying HBK knowledge and systems to production testing gives a competitive advantage to products, ensuring products live up to consumer expectations and international regulations and standards.
With the products in the hands of consumers, now is the time for manufacturers to learn from the mistakes made in the introduction and growth stages. Data collected from products returned for service or repair can be gathered and used not only for immediate fixes but also for extended product life and future development. Using HBK's acoustic test products allows rapid evaluation of returned products, improving customers’ understanding of in-service issues.
Advances in high-speed technology has changed the way we communicate, with the mobile phone – with an estimated installed base of 6.3 billion – largely responsible for this evolution. Constant connectivity – often to several devices simultaneously – is affecting our daily lives and the way we socialize. We demand high-quality audio in every situation – from chatting on the phone on a busy street to taking business calls in a car. And to stay ahead of the game, manufacturers must deliver the quality of sound as promised by the brand.
An estimated 1.5 billion people suffering some form of hearing loss globally, an ageing population and a growing and substantial incidence of hearing loss among young people (most likely as a result of excessive noise exposure) are all fuelling the market for audiology devices. The challenges facing today’s manufacturers not only relate to sound quality and background noise rejection, but increasingly to personalisation and design for specific inner and outer ear conditions.
Audio performance has become increasingly important to our everyday lives, both in entertainment but also, crucially in communication, where real-time global meetings between multiple people are held in often challenging environments with high background noise levels. Addressing these issues requires complex designs and accurate measurements to ensure customer satisfaction with the audio quality.