Sennheiser, the widely known audio technology behemoth has today announced its collaboration with Samsung as it finally looks to bring its immersive, three-dimensional audio experience to Android smartphones. Through its Ambeo Smart Surround earbuds, the German company is aiming to provide a majority of the populace with a near-perfect sound experience — the closest to how our ears actually hear something.
The company first showed off its smart earbuds at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year. These earbuds were designed to work only with an iPhone at the time, providing the Apple device owners the opportunity to capture binaural audio recordings (also known as 3D audio) using the microphones embedded on the outside of each of the in-ear headphones. They capture the sound from the surroundings to provide a surreal and unique listening experience. Their working has been described as under:
The two microphones capture the subtle differences in timing, volume and timbre that occur as sounds from different directions reach each ear. When played back on headphones, the result is a truly stunning lifelike audio experience in picture-perfect fidelity.
The partnership was announced at the IFA Global Press Conference in Lisbon, Portugal over the weekend. Talking about the same with The Korea Herald, the company’s CEO Andreas Sennheiser said,
We are working with Samsung on the Ambeo smart headset to make it available for Android devices. Because a dominant layer of the smartphone market is Android-based phones.
But, due to the apparent dominance of Android devices, which account for over 80 percent of the market, Sennheiser has decided to port their technology and earbuds to Google’s operating system. The German company has decided to go ahead with the development of its audio experience with Samsung, as the CEO believes, ensures their technology receives more credibility and is compatible with a huge number of Android devices.
A partnership with Samsung for extending a pair of earbuds to the Android platform? It does sound quite surprising but Sennheiser’s Ambeo 3D surround sound technology is currently limited to its one product — the earbuds. It has partnered with Samsung, who now owns one of the largest audio giants Harman, to further bake their technology into more products. It is being believed that a binaural audio experience will come in handy for enhancing VR and AR experiences in the coming years. This means Samsung will soon help out Sennheiser step foot into these segments.
This partnership will also enable Samsung to include yet another significant audio partner to its arsenal, thus, building on its existing feature set with Harman and Sennheiser. And this new bond also suggests that Samsung may soon upgrade your listening experience by providing Sennheiser’s Ambeo earbuds free with its latest flagship devices — Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 Plus. It is currently providing buyers with Harman’s AKG earbuds.
