Audioscenic: From Vision to Product

Audioscenic is an innovative 3D audio beamforming technology company spun off from the University of Southampton. It is a remarkable example of perseverance, from early development to the first commercial implementation, which audioXpress considered Best of Show at CES 2023. This article shares the story so far, as Audioscenic continues its groundbreaking journey exploring consumer applications for its forward-thinking approach to spatial audio.

- Marcos Simón

The S3A Project

Audioscenic started in 2015, when I met Professor Filippo Fazi, working together on the S3A audio project. The S3A program was a 5-year UK research project that aimed to bring spatial audio into people's living rooms and develop innovations that would increase the in-house adoption of spatial audio consumption, which at that time was stagnant due to the slow sales of home cinema systems, mainly caused by surround home systems being complex and bulky and hard to set up. This was in 2015, so ambisonics for headphones and virtual reality (VR) had not yet arrived on the market.

At that time, I had just graduated with a PhD in personal audio, specifically experimenting with using loudspeaker arrays to create boosted audio zones to increase speech intelligibility for hard of hearing TV viewers. Filippo Fazi was the principal investigator of the S3A project at the Institute of Sound and Vibration Research (ISVR) at the University of Southampton.

The ISVR had a long tradition with the development of crosstalk cancellation systems, dating back to the early 1990s. Filippo and I were both fascinated by the breathtaking spatial audio performance that a good crosstalk cancellation system could provide. We were driven by the idea of a soundbar that could provide full 3D audio as a method of bringing spatial audio to the people. A soundbar was something more appealing to put in the living room than a full surround setup, and this idea had been tried previously commercially by companies such as Opsodis and Comhear.

Until then, crosstalk cancellation systems were designed to work with a single, fixed, sweet spot. This was a real problem as they were only working effectively if a user was placed exactly in front of them. This was not ideal, as consumers would not widely accept such a system and therefore crosstalk cancellation systems were only used in academic and niche, enthusiast applications.