Hearing Aid Sound Quality Will be AMAZING! | xMEMS Silicon Speakers | Dr. Cliff Show

[Music] [Applause] there's birds there are birds hey guys welcome back to a bonus episode of the Dr Cliff show we have a special guest here today Mike householder from x-mems they create silicon speakers and silicon vents you do not want to miss this episode coming right up really conceptualization of the mem speaker because we're familiar with men's microphones from years ago and how those replace electric microphones inside a hearing aids so what's going on with the speaker side of things I mean starting from the fundamentals I mean mems technology microelectrical mechanical systems really hard to say it's a mouthful but you like the abbreviation better yeah yeah times is much easier but I mean essentially that you know the concept is they're just microscopic moving structures inside of a chip right and most mems Innovation over the past 20 30 years has been around sensing you know sensing pressure sensing sound for microphones sensing motion gyroscopes and accelerometers endless applications uh now we're kind of moving into a new generation of mems that is all about transduction and actuation so instead of waiting for a stimulus and sensing it we're actually now producing really what what this is and what we sought out to do was use this new generation of mems with Piezo materials to try to move these structures in a way where we could move air and generate really high quality sound and when you mean when you say Piezo what do you mean by that exactly yeah so these are these are uh Piezo materials that they have a property called the the piezoelectric effect you apply a voltage to them and the material property bends so that's our actuation we're a conventional speaker uses a coil and a magnet to move a diaphragm up and down we're using a thin film in the semiconductor sandwich to basically move these demand structures up and down so when we talk about solid state speakers uh that's what we're specifically talking about with a mem speaker right yeah and really the approach we took was was solid state there are some hybrid approaches out there where they've got a mems actuator attached to a traditional speaker we know that there's just a natural gravitational pull in electronics for solid state components so you might know that this is a first for me yeah so there's good examples the men's microphone I mean most people don't know that you know the electorate or ECM microphone was the microphone for for decades until a mems variant came along that was all silicon and now it dominates unit volumes uh if we look at data storage hard drives mechanical hard drives with spinning discs now we have solid state drops rights that don't move it's just solid state semiconductor Electronics and now that dominates market share so really the speaker is next it's the last mechanical component in consumer electronics devices that hasn't gone solid state and that's that's our journey to replace the the motor with Piezo actuation and then replace the diaphragm that is moving the air instead of that being paper or plastic now it's silica and so what are some of the other benefits of that so like just looking at the silicone properties of a men's speaker no warping right that was something that we were talking about with mems microphones is that you'd get something called microphone drift where the microphones would start warping over the course of time and then your directionality and all that was thrown off so I imagine that's one of the big benefits of doing that with a speaker as well yeah I mean there's the benefits are quite numerous uh if we categorize them into benefits to the manufacturer benefits to the consumer to the manufacturer a solid state component just as inherently more consistent into your form every speaker we produce is exactly the same you don't have any mechanical variants as these things are assembled they're just natively the same out of the the semiconductor fan reliability semi solid state components are more reliable so as you know through consumer wear and tear they're just going to be more robust over time and we've also removed the magnet so we've taken weight out and we've solved electromagnetic interference with Bluetooth radios those are benefits to the manufacturer yeah yeah now to the consumer okay doesn't sound better and the answer is yes right that's pretty much all they care about right it sounds good they'll put it in their ears so you said that the reliability and you know the longevity of the device uh is much better so what would the comparison be you know to something that we have more traditionally you know that lifespan versus the lifespan of The Madam speaker yeah good question so uh we can look at it in terms of robustness you know earbuds and hearing aids they get dropped we will have fumble fingers right so they're more robust to Mechanical stress and dropping so the less prone to breakage but also in terms of moisture and dust uh these are ip58 rated okay so moisture resistant particulate resistant and we even have some of our consumer electronics customers asking us to do washer dryer tests oh nice so leave your airpod in your pocket do some laundry can you survive a washer cycle and a high heat dry your cycle these components can yeah well you test it on yours first well and then two you know if we're looking at application you know down the road hearing aids I can't not tell you how many hearing aids in my career thus far I've seen go through the washer and the dryer as well so I mean if there's any hope of them withstanding something like that you know long term that would have a really awesome benefit you know for what we're doing as well so that's you know really on you know so it's mechanical stress it's it's water dust particulate you know that's the robustness that you're going to get um and then on the on the does it sound better side you know but the answer is yes but you know that's that's really comes back to the Solid State architecture which is you know the the mechanical response of these speakers is about 150 times faster than a traditional speaker so if you're really trying to produce detail and Achieve separation and hear every little note in a in a song or you know really get to really Crystal Clear wideband voice these speakers can render that very accurately so now for the audio files out there who might be thinking about for their headphones listening to me music right um we think about having a lot of different you know dynamic drivers inside of like inner monitors and things like that and the more drivers you have the better representation you can have but you're able to achieve arguably maybe not even arguably better audio quality with a single speaker yeah I mean there there's definitely you know some in the in the IEM space where you know one speaker has a weakness and a certain frequency range so they patch it with another driver that's strong in that range and you end up with a multi-driver earbud and sometimes that's necessary to really render the highest quality audio but that does create phased disturbances and you've got to manage those phase disturbances to not muddy the audio or alter the audio artificially it's always better to do with one speaker and what we've built with the the speed and the phase accuracy and the phase consistency of the speaker you can take a a 20 balanced armature I em and Shrink that down to a single mems tracker yeah so reduce the complexity reduce the cost and avoid any of those phase disturbances from these multi-speaker architectures and so we were obviously primarily more in the Hearing Care space um single drive so right right exactly um and so that's let's talk about that a little bit more and kind of the direction that you guys have taken with the approach to kind of launching this technology initially through the consumer market and now hopefully targeting more of the prescription hearing aid manufacturer market like talk us through that evolution of everything sure I mean I you know I think again we we think we built a fantastic speaker with a lot of great qualities now how does that how does that appeal to the hearing Health Community um you know what we hope the the manufacturers uh see in our product and and many of them are you know is uh you know again they're they're benefiting from the small size you know balanced armatures have dominated the space because of their their small size and yeah they can get deep in Canal well we've matched that size with these men speakers so we've we've been able to achieve that small size in terms of response we have a wider bandwidth speaker that isn't really tuned to to voice frequencies you know with hearing aids going Bluetooth it's not about just voice amplification it's immediate amplification you need a single driver wide bandwidth speaker that can produce all this Rich content and you want something that can do that you know very linearly smoothly very accurately without a lot of you know resonant Peaks and valleys that need to be managed acoustically or or electrically so we think we've built something more attuned to you know this new generation of Bluetooth connected if I remember looking at some of the slides and we had our first conversation it almost looked like your guy's stuff was half the size of the traditional Arbiters that are used inside of hearing aid receivers right now yeah I mean we've we've pretty much matched the the X and Y Dimension you know the length and the width of of a balanced armature but we're a fraction of the height yeah so we can definitely squeeze this into an even smaller our space if you wanted to entertain the possibility of doing a you know stacking these drivers to get additional loudness you could stack them and still fit on the same profile of a single balance yeah interesting um that that makes me think of you know when we have these hearing aids we have different power levels of the receiver so you know you go standard medium power super power you know ultra power right and everything in between um can you replicate the the output of all of those with a single one or were you talking like once you start getting into the superpower and ultra power you're starting to potentially stack them the only reason to stack them is if you need higher SPL that's all you're going to get so you wouldn't kind of woof or Tweeter it you wouldn't divide up the three ranges you would stack them to to get more overall allowance would be a compounding effect with it yeah um but again it really depends on what frequency rank frequency range you're trying to Target and again with with our with the Piezo speakers they have a unique property that above 800 Hertz they basically just have a linear gain out north of of uh 10 kilohertz so you've got that natural gain built in uh for those extended high frequencies that uh you know that you should benefit from without really having to you know to to deal with with resonances or or trying to you know uh Target a driver to a particular frequency range you've got enough SPL on those in those higher frequencies the thing that bothers me is that when you get someone who has more of a severe to profound level of hearing loss you think that you go bigger on the receiver size and you're going to get more gain out in the high frequencies and it's actually kind of the opposite right once you make that larger and larger you actually lose the ability to Target The High Frequency so how does that work with the solid state speaker yeah I mean with our with our linear gain you know again we'll we'll be you know typically north of 13140 DB uh out 10 out of 10 kilohertz and then we're pretty much flat out to 80 kilohertz again you don't really care about 80k yeah right I don't know my dog has hearing loss just just to show the capability of the speaker right once you hit about 10K you'll just be flat you know all the way out into into the Ultrasonics which again probably not a relevant application but but just gives you a sense for the technology yeah I think we've also been a little bit conditioned in that maybe it's not a relevant uh you know frequency range out Beyond 8 000 Hertz however one of the biggest complaints about hearing aids is that they don't have this great natural audio quality and part of that is because once you get out into those higher frequencies you don't have the amount of gain proportion to the hearing loss but also to just how the world in and of itself is sounding and you know human beings do have the capability of hearing out to 20 000 Hertz and so even though we haven't thought about it as necessary for hearing speech hearing and understanding speech it still has the application in that if we can make hearing aids sound even more natural because we can go into those higher frequencies as well does that also then increase things like hearing aid adoption right and those kinds of things because we're not having this you know more computerized speaker sounding effect yeah yeah and I I think it's a it's obviously a very individual problem and it's highly variable but I've read some studies that you know there are some harmonics in the extended high frequencies that can lend themselves to improve speech and noise yeah um and again that's going to vary person to person but but having that that Headroom in the extended high frequency should help you know a proportion of the of the audience well I can't reference the exact article but I know that there was a study done where they actually use filters to kind of filter out everything below I don't know 3000 Hertz or everything below 6 000 Hertz I don't remember what it was and only gave the high frequencies above that and and people speech intelligibility was still really good you know hitting these really high frequencies and so my goal uh as an audiologist is I'm always trying to hit the highest frequency that I possibly can when doing verification on patients with hearing aids and um the thing that goes against that is whether we're venting or not venting them right so like if you have no venting you can trap more sound pressure inside the ear canal hit out to a higher frequency prescriptive Target but the problem with that is is that if they have good low frequency hearing now you're creating you know different things like insertion loss and occlusion effect which are not a good thing there's a dynamic vent that you guys have as well that I do want to make sure that we talk about that could potentially solve that problem we introduced a product called Skyline that uses the same process and the same technology as our speakers but isn't trying to produce sound but it's basically effect to simplify it it's a barn door that can be dynamically opened or closed to mitigate occlusion effects or to improve passive noise isolation when the situation warrants it right and so right now there is a manufacturer that's out there that does an active vent type approach with it but you hear the clicking of the vents opening and shutting how does this Skyline vents function from that standpoint completely inaudible yeah so uh you know again the benefit of this Piezo mem Solid State Technology inaudible open and closed and then you've got all the robustness that we just talked about with speakers so highly robust to moisture to particulate so this thing will be robust over the life of the problem and what's the name of the Memphis is it Montana am I there's three of them right yeah so there's Montera Montana yeah that was our first product um the product that is getting the most attention the hearing aid space is a product we called cat would call cowl because that's our smallest speaker okay so for anything a receiver in Canal we can get you know very deep insertion uh with with the smallest size so Cal's probably the the optimal speaker for the hearing out space but then we've got our our largest output speaker right now which is Monterra plus um and that you know again that's that's the highest output that all the Hi-Fi guys are going after nice okay so the stuff that we were actually listening to a little earlier what were we listening to that was Montero plus okay okay so that's that's the that's the Hi-Fi speaker yeah so um you guys don't know but we were rocking out a little bit to music before we started hitting record uh and it's rather impressive so let's talk about that at here a little bit Dr Becky had brought your airpods Pro 2 which are also my uh uh that earbuds of choice when I'm listening to music or you know on calls and things like that um and so listening to those compared to listening to the Monterra plus um was rather dramatic um I felt like the separation of the music and the notes and the lyrics and all that was much better with the solid state than it was um with the Apple airpods Pro 2 and it's a little disheartening because now I have to go back and listen to my airpods Pro 2 consistently until I can get my hands on the devices that are using we'll give you a reason yeah exactly uh what was your perception of listening to that well and so for me I I sang for a very long time I'm very in the live music space and one of the things that I am very into is like did is are different harmonies that exist when you have a group of people who are singing together it is the thing that like I've been obsessed with since I was probably seven years old and I put one of my favorite bands on we were listening to it and you can hear each distinct voice from one another so harmonies are designed that you have not only the group that you can hear together as you're creating this you know one sound together but when you're at a live show for example you can hear that there are multiple people speaking and you can hear some of their different you know tones and things and to have that also in a set of headphones essentially that you can experience essentially a live concert really is what it sounded like at home from the comfort comfort of your couch was I mean you guys saw my reaction I like was just open now I mean it's incredible for hearing aid users it's not just about better speech intelligibility better separation of speech from background noise things like that but now that everybody has Bluetooth connectivity um you know Aura cast is on the way inside of prescription hearing aids too so having connectivity with listening to music and all that's important to them as well so um you know you're able to kind of satisfy both of those at the same time that's that's the goal and again it just you know coming back to the solid state characteristics the speed NO phase disturbance and then really for the first time we're using silicon as a speaker diaphragm so that diaphragm is staying linear and not muddying the sound at any frequency uh you know for for any type of music so you're really just getting the most honest sound you've ever heard theoretically could have a hearing aid manufacturer that chooses to use uh you know a solid-state silicone speaker like the mem speakers um and not use the venting side of things right absolutely uh yeah right yeah they're separate parts right and and so what happens to the frequency response with an open ear canal because I would say I don't know 90 of people being fit with hearing aids are just pulling that literally out of the air but 90 of people who are being fit or being fit with either uh completely open domes or vented to where there is a significant amount of leakage that's happening from their ear canal with sound so what happens with the solid state speaker frequency response when that happens yeah so you're you're with as with any speaker when you do have an open fit you're going to have a low frequency roll-off you're going to lose some of that low frequency energy and that's typically you know depends what that corner frequency is it could start at 100 Hertz or 200 Hertz you'll start to lose some of that deep bass but everything 100 to 200 Hertz and above is untouched nice even through the high frequencies correct nice that so anything above 100 200 completely unaffected yeah so that would be really nice and then there's a question who posted was it you who posed a question yesterday about feedback control it was me who posed the question so here's the thing is that even the hearing aid received they can get good high frequency responses the challenge then is the feedback manager that exists with inside the hearing aid and and their manufacturing because there are some you know even now where I would fit a hearing aid that for a particular manufacturer I know that I'm going to need a custom ear mold that's going to allow me to trap in some more of those high frequencies even again if we run into some of those other challenges like occlusion effect or whatnot um because there's just their feedback manager does not exist in a way that it's going to allow me to get all that good high frequency information because it's going to leak back out of the hearing aid and it's going to recycle through the microphones and then create feedback or squealing yeah yeah so that game before feedback is that's going to be a problem with with the you know every speaker is going to behave differently in that scenario so we haven't gone you know deep enough with with any of our we've got customers working on this right we haven't gone deep enough with them to to know if they are encountering similar problems with our speakers making this better in any way so that's not something I can I'm prepared to speak to yet but uh with in conjunction with the vent once you do have control over ambient and this is you know this is analog control so you can open it wide you can open it a little you can completely close it you know controlling that ambient may help that situation and so when you say controlling the ending you're talking about the then the venting side of it yeah perfect so it's kind of interesting because you've said analog a few times with this and you know audio files out there which say analog is better than digitally reproduced sound right are we talking about you know analog sound here technically speaking technically speaking I mean the the speaker itself is analog the circuitry's analog yeah we're doing no digitization so there's a lot of um I would say old school uh hearing aid users uh that you know either grew up on analog technology or whatnot and they hate digital sound reproduction um so theoretically we could be going back to now having more of an analog type amplification um yeah I don't I don't know if we're necessarily changing that because you know the the system processor in these hearing aids you know is is unaware What speaker is producing this somehow so you still whatever that processor is doing uh continue to do so yeah it just it would be interesting to to see or have people who are die-hard analog fans you know test it out and see if the that aspect of using a month speak or fixes whatever the issue is that they have with the sound um I do want to talk about power consumption too um talk to us through that if there's more power consumption less power consumption than what that would ultimately mean because a lot of hearing aids nowadays and the trend that you see is happening here everything's going rechargeable yeah the speaker itself is more efficient than a balanced armature it's extremely efficient but Piezo is a voltage-driven architecture so the amplification of this speaker is where we give back some of that efficiency we so this is really going to be kind of a multi-step approach where we're at today with our amplification we're probably on par with a traditional Dynamic speaker so you know is this going to hit a you know a medically critical 18-hour you know battery life hearing aid right out of the gate maybe not um but again is that 18 hour how you know how how much longer is that 18 hour of continuous fit required versus are there going to be interim recharge Cycles um so step one I think where we're at today is we're definitely right in the sweet spot for a more casual use OTC type hearing aid that's you know more tws like six hours eight hours you know maybe up to eight or ten hours no problem I wouldn't say today that we're ready for an all-day 18-hour product um but you know to show you where we're going again these these speakers are essentially a large capacitor a store of energy and right now the amplifier is leaking all of that excess energy away so now in the so the Next Generation amplifier architecture speakers unchanged the Next Generation amplifiers will be able to take that excess energy out of the speaker and recycle it back to the battery that's crazy so then you're really going to have an extremely efficient speaker that will continue to just give back to the battery then you know that you know that projection to that 18-hour all-day hearing aid is is absolutely feasible so we're kind of looking at the hearing aid Market in phases depending on how our our amplification technology comes along very cool obviously you've run demos with other people with this technology I don't have you guys worked with anyone with actual hearing loss yet at this point for for the shows that we go to and we're just getting random people from the public coming up and and hearing these things and they're disclosing to us that they're hearing aid users and they're they're definitely excited by what they hear nice you know we haven't gone to the step to quantify that right but at least subjectively we do have uh people with with the you know we do have hearing aid users listening to our technology they're liking what they hear what about the people who are not hearing aid users uh who may not have hearing loss or at least they don't know they have hearings there um who are just audio files like what's their response been in general uh I mean fantastic so we uh we uh in addition to you know the big consumer electronics guys we do spend a lot of time at these audiophile shows and we have people that'll walk up to our booth you know with a three thousand dollar headphone rig on and they'll say well you know I don't I don't like earbuds you know I'm more of a headphone yeah like just give these a try yeah let me change your mind well I guess what were the reason behind that be is it like the physical fit or is it they feel like they're better sound quality when they go it could be a combination of sound quality or just general Comfort some people don't like things in their ears um but your from the headphone Community the feedback we have is this is the first in-ear product that they felt had the space of a headphone yeah I can see that the music and the voice isn't in the head like in a typical uh any or earbud it's out in space so the spatial quality is much better with these speakers and then anyone who is you know an in-ear person again they're they're just a stun it takes them about three to five seconds to hear something that that surprises them just the detail the clarity or you know maybe uh you know a background instrument that they had never heard in their favorite track they're hearing that detail and that Clarity and you know unlike anything they've ever put in their ears there's birds in the back burgers for weeding in the background I'm sorry I've never heard that in that song Taylor Allison you're literally Gonna Hear tweet tweet tweet flying away well I'm actually looking forward to like when it starts coming out in uh actual hearing aids and and at some point my prediction is that this is going to completely take over the the prescription hearing aid World likely any uh device in the entire world is going to use a speaker is naturally going to progress uh to go this route I'm interested in seeing what the frequency response measured inside of someone's ear canal is and how I can fit them and how it's How much different it is than a traditional fitting with the receivers that we currently use today that'll be very interesting um but take us through um I guess company-wise like tell us about the actual company and like who founded it like where did it come from where was the idea of all this coming from yeah it's interesting so the uh the founding team uh it's kind of a an aggregation of mems Technology experts and audio experts uh our uh our CEO who I worked with at a prior men's company um you know after we left that old mems company you know he had started to dabble in audio a little bit and uh you know saw what had happened with mems microphones saw the evolution of these Piezo materials and said maybe we can build a speaker so the company was founded in 2018. um I came on at starter code in 2020 um when we were getting ready to actually launch a product into the market but uh you know about 40 percent of the company comes from an old men's company called called invent sense where we're doing mem sensors and now we're doing men's actuators what is the conversations then thus far if you can talk about it with some of the big five hearing aid manufacturers because a lot of the people who are watching this channel um they're interested in the hearing aid application side of it they're all we already have more jazzed up for Aura cast they're like cats coming it's like it's coming um but what did the conversations been like if you can talk about it sure I you know obviously respecting confidentiality yeah there isn't uh both on the consumer side and the the hearing aid side there there isn't a there isn't a world leading brand in the world who doesn't have access to our technology right now um you know but they're all bringing the technology to Market at different Paces so I can't uh I can't speak to when the big five might launch a product with a mem speaker I can say they they have our technology in hand uh they believe it's quite compelling it's quite interesting but to speak to their product plans right now I would imagine that it's a little bit more complex than just uh popping one of these inside one of the receivers plugging it into their hearing aid and having it work right yeah I I wish it was yeah yeah that would make my job a lot easier but uh no I mean you know the the product development process is a complex process they're trying to build a quality product this is a new type of speaker and you know they kind of have to take what you know what they know about balanced armatures you know for their entire careers and then not throw it all out because Acoustics are Acoustics but these speakers do behave a little bit differently they have different characteristics so there's kind of an adaption period to kind of figure out what they want to build and then how do they build it with this new speaker technology so you know that first product is always the hardest but then once they kind of dial it in then then everything kind of flows from there if viewers on the channel wanted to learn more about this technology what would the next best step for them be other than us creating more follow-up content I mean we're uh we're trying to generate more content on our own uh you know for for educational purposes and awareness purposes so we've we've got the start of some content out there that uh that you can find at xmims.com um and we've been working with uh with avenues like yourselves to to try to get more of this information out there um I get probably at least two emails a week from just a member of the public saying hey I'm reading about this I'm a 30 you know 30-year wear of hearing aids and this sounds really compelling and where do I get it right take my money yeah I wish I could say yeah call up Starkey college and ask for this part number we're getting there yeah we're getting there but we're not quite there yet if I'm integration of the speaker appropriately I well I actually I think I think in general it will be um I think you know a lot of the core Electronics in a hearing aid for the most part will be unchanged you know what happens in the the digital signal processor in terms of how they tweak and tune the frequency response that might change but the core electronics are going to be basically the same you know I think what will change a little bit is maybe a little bit of the Acoustics for how they integrate the speaker um you know into the ear canal but uh for the most part the electronics will be unchanged well I will say that there's a zero percent chance that these manufacturers come up and like hey we just created a new receiver using this technology um go ahead and pop it on your old hearing aid and get a firmware update like zero percent chance of that happening I mean at least not out of the game right like um it's going to be a lot of like hey here's a new amazing feature that we have with this new hearing aid that we're launching they want to sell a new hearing totally and I get that because there's going to be a lot of time and money in the research and development of how to include these in their technology so I do understand that concept that doesn't happen for free right so they have to be able to make it worth their time to invest in bringing on a new piece of tech like this and making it work with their hearing aids and then potentially completely changing how we well maybe not completely changing but changing to some degree how we approach a hearing aid fitting too so there's uh training and education that would go along with that too and a lot of training and education for new devices when they come out is from the manufacturer who knows how that product integrates and works with their Tech yeah and I'm not trying to interview you at all but I mean a question I've had is I guess you know as an audiologist how much rain and freedom are you given over altering the frequency response for your individual customers [Music] no matter what the hearing aid looks like you have top tier second tier third tier sometimes even fourth and fifth tier technology and within that that as you go down in tech level it takes features and customizations away from us when we are doing the fitting one of those things that it takes away is our control over the frequency response it gives us only a certain amount of handles to be able to program the hearing to a prescription and the further down in tech level you go the fewer handles you get so the the you know some of the of the manufacturers have you know 20 22 frequency handles that we can manipulate some have 10 even in their top tier technology they only have 10. so it really it's very variable and still that's not bad but I mean one thing that we've noticed you know playing with these speakers for three plus years is they they take they take uh Equalization extremely well okay they're nothing's infinitely tweakable these things respond to different eqs extremely well so I want to play with it so hopefully hopefully we can hopefully we give you all the knobs and dials you need to really kind of dial it in for for each customer now we'll get a little deeper into this right so um The Dirty Little Secret out there one of the dirty little secrets inside of the hearing aid industry is that like they'll say that you have a frequency response out to 9 000 Hertz with some of these premium level Technologies and you're not actually getting that inside the ear canal so they might be able to show in a lab that they're able to like look we got a decibel of gain at 9 Hertz which is going to do virtually nothing for you right um so that's kind of like what in terms of free reign I just gave a talk at a conference here recently and one of the audiologists in the audience was like oh well we can already get out to 9 000 Hertz and I'm like well like I see where you're coming from they give you an adjustment handle out to 9000 Hertz but you're not actually getting anything useful out there this potentially changes the game for that yeah I mean we'll you know if you know compared to a one kilohertz reference we'll give you upwards of 30 DB gain you know out out Beyond 10 kilohertz yeah so and that's a big deal that's not near infinite huge shaping and cutting absolutely absolutely that would absolutely be a game changer too for a lot of you know one of the things with hearing loss is that you know higher frequencies are often harder to adapt to and things like that but when you can follow right out to that level we can start to reach people's prescriptive targets that are you know having more severe and profound hearing losses into those high frequency ranges but if they're someone who can tolerate and gets benefit from it to be able to to be able to provide that I mean me as an audiologist who also happens to be a perfectionist when I am meeting people's prescriptions that their hearing aids that would just you know change the game for a lot of people as well especially in you know the natural sounding of being able to amplify out to a Hertz for example you know and having it and not needing it is one thing too um my goal always is when we're programming a hearing aid you head out to as high of a frequency response as you possibly can in relation to their prescription and if they can't tolerate it or if they don't tolerate it well then you can always remove right but you can't add if you don't have the ability to add yeah boosting never works right you want to be in a position to cut you know that's natural there's things artificial yeah absolutely the hearing aid manufacturers you're talking about our ability to manipulate like frequency response and things like that certain hearing aid manufacturers give a usually a three to five band equalizer inside of the apps that people have to use so there is some level of personalized customization with that it'd be interesting to know like for literally what we were just listening to I so Dr Beck you're talking about uh with your airpods Pro 2 that you have to trick the system with a hearing loss all right or you manipulate your audio Grant basically inside of your iPhone to get to make it get it less base right but you don't really get that good of an ability to manipulate in a consumer electronic my husband had the first generation in airpods I then had the first generation of Air Products Pro and then I recently upgraded to airpods Pro 2 because everybody said that you know the base the base the base got so much better and and it did I happen to be of the belief that they went maybe a little bit too far to where I actually find it muddies a lot of the sound um which you know if you are familiar with Acoustics you know too much bass actually drowns out um all of that good high frequencies that you would get from you know the rest of the song that you're listening to and so I found that if I and then if you don't know that this is an option inside your airpods pro go into your phone you can go and enter an audiogram which is a hearing test and you can actually tell the hearing test that you have better low frequency hearing than you might actually have and that actually dropped a lot of the bass off so that I could actually hear the rest of the song well but even still I find that you know it is Muddy when I'm listening to it yeah I mean it gets back to the old adage I mean if they're if they're trying to cater to the consumer average it's all about the base right yeah yeah but uh this is what's fun about that yeah you hit the nail on the head because uh you know certainly we our exposure to the Consumer Electronics side of the business just you know the first thing they're trying to focus on is the base but we're kind of we're kind of seeing a little bit of a correction now because you know for active noise cancellation in these earbuds a lot of that is low frequency energy so they've actually had to up tune the dynamic drivers in these in these ear buds to for noise cancellation so they actually the overhead and the Headroom in these speakers to produce space is quite enormous they can really pump base but what we found through like two or three generations now of ANC earbuds is that they've tuned those drivers so much for the low end for ANC that they've lost the mids and the treble so now we've seen a trend to now try to recapture that because I think consumers are now starting to realize that it isn't all about the bass you want that balanced sound profile I think it's one of those things where um you know you always want something that you don't have and so we didn't have you know maybe all of that bass that we were looking for now that we have it we realize that it comes with some unforeseen consequences as well and so you know trying to now you know tackle the new challenge that we all created yeah but to go under the hood a little bit you know back to your your earlier point with you know those three or five band equalizers you know today's uh hearing aids and uh consumer earbuds the the digital signal processor in these earbuds is enormously powerful they can have 30 band uh EQ in there they are they are very capable of 30 band EQ but the manufacturers Just choose to expose you know base mid-range treble to so the technology is capable the electronics are capable but I don't know if they're trying to dumb it down for the average consumer um I mean the capability is there well and what I've found too is that you know when people do try to go in to use the equalizer that is even in their hearing aids and they're playing around with it the knowledge required oftentimes to be able to know how to manipulate to achieve that you know your goal I mean there's a reason we went to school for as long as we did always just talking about sound and the physics of sound and how we perceive sound and what the brain does with it after that they're often like yeah no I couldn't make it any better and I tried but I don't know what I'm missing and then I'll make you know three tweaks because I know what their goal is and then how to accomplish that so you know the average consumer doesn't know what to do with it most of the time yeah and then I think there's probably a reason why the manufacturers have done what they've done because you do have to simplify because I've I've played with 30 band equalizer you know my team my team lives filters shelf filters you know things that I I can't really know how to manipulate that well so I I personally can be dangerous with a 30 band Evolution totally I'm more likely to mess something up so you know for me I you know I probably fit in that in that area just give me three and I'll figure it out but you you don't have full control and you'll never you'll never really get it dialed in the way you want to you really nailed it with that because hearing aid manufacturers not only will they limit it for the consumer so they're patients that are being fit with these hearing aids they'll actually limit stuff for providers because providers if you don't have a really refined understanding of what you're doing with those adjustments inside and I'm talking not just the equalizer that we're playing with I'm talking about the digital features and everything if you don't have the grasp of that you can actually make the experience for the hearing aid user worse and so what will typically happen is that when you go in and you you fit a pair of hearing aids and you're programming them having a lot of equalizer bands is great because then you can match their prescriptive targets very precisely which I'm a huge believer of but after that what happens is is that you end up chunking it down much further right and you almost like it's almost like you're adjusting three bands at that point right you take your your highs your mids and your lows and then you make bold adjustments to that to see what their perception is but you're never going to like you know what the things you're reporting sounds like 2 700 Hertz let me go and adjust that one oh yeah I should never say never right um and it's funny like that's a rare part right so Dr Cook and I we were working with a patient who actually goes and watches live performances all the time and was really struggling with the uh losing I don't know what were they losing like the trumpets and stuff like that so we literally go and we look up okay what's the Frequency response of a trumpet and then we go in and we're like okay how do we want to manipulate this and if you don't have the bands to be able to kind of uh separate it out enough to be able to manipulate that you can run into issues but that is like few and far between and would say that 99 of audiologists wouldn't go that far to manipulate that so I hate to say it but some of your Tech that you're working on will go underutilized yeah heavily but not under appreciated right yeah I'm sure I mean you you know as I'm sure as people's audiograms you know change over time it's not by Leaps and Bounds it's changing very minutely and you know having control over gain and cue and things like that allow you to make those intricate changes that keep it dialed in but uh yeah that's that's expert level stuff I always talk about like there is always stuff happening behind the scenes from technology development and stuff that we just don't see um and a lot of uh people who use either consumer electronics or hearing aids they probably when they're thinking about the creation of all this they're not thinking about all the time and effort you know I mean you're talking since 2018 the company was formed obviously the ideas of it you know were there before the company was formed and as of us recording this right now it's almost to the very end of 2023 um and so we're looking at five years or so of development and there's still no you know mainstream technology or correct me if I'm wrong there's no like massive adoption of this technology right now we're at the kind of the the beginning of that hockey stick yeah so uh you know we've had a a couple of Hi-Fi audio product releases uh over the past few months uh we do actually have a psap in Asia that that launched a few months ago so kind of this trickling into to the hearing assistance device uh space but uh two days ago we made a joint announcement with uh creative technology of Singapore so they've just announced their PWS earbud you know kind of like their their uh so not an OTC but an earbud yeah so that's that's launching later this year so we're kind of at that beginning of the hockey stick where you know again all the major manufacturers have our technology they're designing us designing it in and those products will start to trickle out over the coming quarters that's cool one so this is kind of an early look it's an early look but I think too you know there is you know product that's going to be launched in the near future and I think that if the response is anything like the response I had when listening to it I think that it's going to become very apparent to the larger companies that they need to get on this train and they need to get on it pretty quickly so that it's something that they beat everybody else to I mean it's all about the competition right yeah yeah I mean hearing is believing and uh you know as you know I've got I've got this product in my ears every day and you know I I do listen to uh Legacy products as well and and the difference is clear and I'll never go back yeah well you have the fortunate ability to not go back I'm biased but that's still I mean the difference is obvious and I think others will feel it too well that's cool well it's good to know that all the manufacturers so the ones that I care about and the major hearing aid space uh already have access to it and are obviously working on it behind the scenes as we speak they probably don't need any more encouragement from me uh it's more as always welcome right right but um uh you know I tend to focus on speaking to the users of hearing aids and um anytime that I identify something that I think is going to be big I tend to talk about it a lot and when new technologies come out inside the hearing aid space inside the prescription hearing aid space I'm usually telling people you know you're probably not going to notice massive differences from one generation to the next and back when Bluetooth came out like direct Bluetooth came out what 2013 or so um there there's very few things that come out that are like this is such a game changer that if you bought hearing aids six months ago you would want to consider upgrading literally right now right and I think that this has the potential to be one of those things um dramatic change right um and and frequency response and perception of quality of sound I think that that's going to be a huge driver for hearing aid adoption which you talked about you know we want those adoption rates to go up because people need to treat their hearing loss we just had research come out here recently uh mid-july 2023 from Johns Hopkins and Dr Franklin showing that individuals who are at risk for cognitive decline that a 48 reduction in the rate of that decline when they treat their hearing loss so you know having better technology for people to use inside of hearing aids is going to be critical for the long-term health of human beings absolutely as time goes on and so it's just really exciting to see that there are companies like this that you work with that are are creating Technologies to kind of Usher in this next you know game changing Tech um it'll just be interesting to see which one comes first is it going to be oracast that I've talked about a lot you know or is it going to be more of the Solid State men's speakers yeah it's it's it's interesting I mean the the speaker as we know it hasn't changed in 100 years yeah and you know you mentioned oracast and and you know there's a lot of effort around lossless Wireless lossless with Bluetooth and and high-res audio as the content gets higher resolution you know trying to get that content to resolve over the Legacy speaker Technologies you won't get the full effect and the full value out of the content you basically need the equivalent of an HD speaker that's that's what we think we've built yeah no I'm super jazzed about it is there anything else that you feel like you'd like to share with what you guys got going on well I think uh maybe a little bit more on Skyline yeah we'll talk about it so uh you know Skyline kind of came about uh you know getting back to our speaker really quick you know our speaker has another unique quality that we didn't touch on yet which is the diaphragm is actually vented so as the mems is is moving up and down the diaphragm is moving up and down there's basically Micron level etches or or slits in the diaphragm where from the from the you know from the front of the earbud to the back air can flow through the speaker and that's typically a No-No in most speakers you basically have a wall the diaphragm is a wall right um you know for the compliance of our membrane we actually put little microscopic etches in there and what we had noticed through our own listening experience with these products our Engineers are tuning with these speakers for hours a day they didn't notice that ear canal pressurization that they were accustomed to with other earbud technology so as we start to talk to customers about this vented diaphragm to improve long-term listening comfort we had our customers bring something else to us they said well could those slits uh help with occlusion effects and US kind of coming into this new we're like what's occlusion finish so we obviously educated ourselves pretty quickly and and quickly determined that those slits while they're really good for relieving uh buildup of pressure in the ear canal the opening wasn't significant enough to really address occlusion at first so that's how the idea of skyline our Dynamic vent technology came about saying oh well if we just make more vent um and kind of make that it's its own discrete component you know could that address occlusion effects so we we kind of took the concept to the twsc uh earbud space we took it to uh our leading uh hearing aid customers and said what's the spec what do you need and got some great guidance from them and and you know thus you know became skylines where did Skyline come in the development time frame in terms of like that versus the speakers of the speakers came first absolutely so uh that's how we had these conversations but uh yeah we were already out with our Montero device I think at the time we were getting ready to launch our CAL device when we started to have these discussions and explore the concept of event um and and that's that's where we're at today we we announced Skyline last year and uh now we've got that in the hands of of customers worldwide cool cool so uh what about four years after the the first Madam speaker um no I would say probably probably about two years two years after it okay okay originally we had the vent and the speaker on the same piece of silicon um and then customers said we want more vent and we want the vents separate from the speaker because where you place the vent is not always where you'd want to place the speaker right so that's why we created Skyline as its own component freedom of placement uh to maximize the performance let's talk about the occlusion effect a little bit more just in case anyone watching is not familiar with that um this concept where if you plug up your ears and you talk you end up getting your voice bone conducted through your jaw into your ear canals it literally cannot escape and it vibrates your eardrum and so and if you have good enough low frequency hearing you hear that right and obviously if you get into more of the severe to profound levels like you're not hearing the occlusion effect because it doesn't it's not loud enough for you to be able to hear um so the the technology that currently exists with with this inside of the hearing aid space we're familiar with the ACT events from one of the major hearing aid manufacturers opening and closing almost like a plunger effect and I think it plays around 80 DB or so um the sound of that which is rather jarring when you first hear it um I would say that that people end up getting used to it where if it's opening and closing enough their brain kind of tunes it out to some degree um but how is what you're talking about with the skyline different than that activate yeah so again this uses the same mems technology and Piezo technology as as our speakers so essentially I mean to simplify it it's it's actually just two flaps two silicon flaps that are it's a differential vent so one's going up one's going down when we fully open and then they they come back together to to close and fully seal so you've got this kind of barn door that that can swing dynamically and open and close based on the situation the user's in is it fast enough to do it like literally in between like I'm talking now I stop talking closes yeah it's it's milliseconds yeah it's very fast and and that speed is adaptable I mean we have we even have uh you know uh hunting and Public Safety people looking at this vent for gunshot protection that was my next question was I wonder if this would also be applicable for you know active noise you know canceling when you are talking about you know hunting shooting responses to gun noise yeah so we can close extremely fast for that use case uh or we can have uh you know for me personally you know as I experienced the event I kind of want to know it's there sometimes so I actually just it's personal preference I actually like kind of a slower close I can gradually hear the situation changing and that's my feedback it's not a jar and click it's just kind of a slow close of that vent and it gives you that that mental feedback to know that it's working and it's kind of reassuring but I think everyone will maybe want it a little bit differently with with everything especially if we're talking in the hearing aid space you know there are different you know people who like you know more fast acting things like compression or you know other things like that so I'm sure that there's going to be a range of what most people are going to like but again that goes back to our conversation about the product research and you know focus groups testing the product and to know what exactly that's going to be and then again how much control over it are they going to give to the provider

2023-09-17 22:50

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