noise-canceling

They often say that Apple never really invents anything. It only does things better than anyone else.

They also often say that making a call on an iPhone is as reliable as putting a bet on a sheep in a horse race.

So here's a new iPhone 5 ad that may confirm one of these alleged truisms, while defeating the other. For it features a revolutionary new noise canceling microphone on the iPhone 5.

Well, when I say "revolutionary," I might be prematurely full of Thanksgiving spirit.

I remember my fine engineer friend George offering that noise … Read more

Audience, a company that has delivered noise-canceling technology to Apple's iPhones since 2008, thinks it might be left out of the fun in the iPhone 5.

Speaking to Reuters in an interview published last night, the company's CEO Peter Santos said that "the normal course of business led us to believe that our technology is not likely to be enabled in Apple's next-generation mobile phone." Santos didn't say what the "course of business" was. He also broke the news to the company's shareholders.

Apple and Audience's partnership was revealed earlier … Read more

Apple has been slapped with yet another patent-infringement lawsuit.

A California-based company, Noise Free Wireless, last week filed a complaint against Apple in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging that Apple violated its noise-canceling technology patents. In addition, the company charged Apple with breach of contract and trade secret theft.

GigaOm, which was first to report on the lawsuit, also pointed out that a third-party, Audience, was included in the lawsuit.

According to Noise Free, it met with Apple in 2007 to discuss the potential of the Cupertino, Calif.-based company using its technology … Read more

Most phones sold these days have a speakerphone mode. This setting is usually good enough for an impromptu hands-free call in a quiet office. However, when you get on the road in a noisy car, the phone's flaws are made apparent. For example, the built-in microphone can be less than ideal for canceling the levels of road and wind noise present in a car at highway speed, which leads to poor quality on the receiving end of your calls. I'm sure that you dislike repeating yourself to callers as much as I do, so let's look at how to improve call quality.

Visor-mounted Bluetooth speakerphones feature more sophisticated microphones with noise and echo-cancellation technology located closer to your head, which can dramatically improve sound quality. How much of an improvement should you expect? I've recorded outbound calls from five speakerphones (and my test phone's internal microphone) to demonstrate. … Read more

Today's show title is the design credo of Milton Glaser, the celebrated designer responsible for turning the "I <3 New York" graphic into a world-recognized symbol.

That ethos is also the inspiration for today's discussion topic about Apple's "faux-real" user interfaces that Tom Hobbs at Fast Company believes is stunted by skeuomorphs, or elements of design that retain parts of its inspiration.

We'll look at how Apple's desire to show off the look of its products may be hindering its principal innovations, why the Amazon Kindle uses its own basic layout to create a more immersive environment for its readers, and how apps harnessing nostalgia like Instagram and Hipstamatic are holding back the next evolution of technology.… Read more

Remember when expensive headphones, let's say anything over $100, were never big sellers, and only audiophiles bought them?

That's no longer true--judging by the number of Beats by Dr. Dre headphones I see on the streets and subways in New York--pricey headphones have reached the mainstream. That's radical. Bose did pretty well with its QuietComfort noise-canceling headphones long before Dre jumped into the headphone business, but the Beats stand out in a crowd.

The reasons for Dre's success aren't purely based on sound quality, it's more that the other manufacturers' headphones sorely lacked any sense of street style. … Read more

I have to admit I never really bought into noise-canceling headphones.

The name was a turnoff, they don't really cancel or eliminate noise, they reduce noise--and that's great--but so do most in-ear headphones. Better yet, those headphones don't need batteries and don't run the music signals through the noise-canceling electronics. My favorite isolating headphones sound better than noise-canceling headphones, but I haven't tested a noise-canceling headphone for a long time.

So I borrowed a pair of Bose QuietComfort 15 Acoustic Noise Cancelling headphones ($299) from CNET editor David Carnoy. I headed down into the New … Read more

Apple's A5 processor includes noise-reduction circuitry licensed from a start-up called Audience, and a chip analyst believes that fact resolves an iPhone 4S mystery and explains why the iPhone 4 lacks the Siri voice-control system.

Audience revealed details of its Apple partnership in January, when it filed paperwork for an initial public offering (IPO) of stock. Teardown work from iFixit and Chipworks revealed a dedicated Audience chip in the iPhone 4, but the iPhone 4S integrates Audience's "EarSmart" technology directly into the A5 processor, the company's S-1 filing said.

The details answered a question that … Read more

I'm always looking for cheaper alternatives to Bose's highly regarded but expensive Quiet Comfort noise-canceling headphones, which is why Creative's new HN-900 headphones caught my eye.

In the past, Creative's noise-canceling headphones have been pretty decent, and the nice thing about this one is that unlike the Bose and many other noise-canceling models, the HN-900 has an integrated microphone for making cell phone calls. One AAA battery gives you about 40 hours of active noise-cancellation.

At the same time Creative released the HN-900s, it also announced the impending arrival of a higher-end model noise-canceling model, the $… Read more