Earbuds Consumer Survey Identifies Key Takeaways for Manufacturers

Austrian company ams, a leading worldwide supplier of high-performance sensor solutions, shared the results of its ‘Comfortable, Smart, High-performing Earbuds Survey’ conducted in Spring 2020 with 2000-plus consumers around the world on their audio earbud uses, habits and preferences. Earbud comfort seems to be a key focus for existing users, with the survey identifying the benefits of active noise cancellation and volume-limiting technology as top earbud innovations. Preference between loose fit and tight-fitting, in-ear earbuds, depends upon type of activity.

Renesas Electronics announced sample shipment availability of the new RYZ012 Bluetooth module targeting ultra-low power applications in connected devices. The RYZ012 is Renesas' first Bluetooth Low Energy 5 module. It integrates a 2.4 GHz RF transceiver supporting the IEEE802.15.4 multi-standard wireless protocol, Bluetooth Low Energy (LE), Bluetooth LE Mesh, and ZigBee. The RYZ012 features a power draw of only 0.4µA during deep sleep (without SRAM retention) allowing developers to extend battery life.

Designers of compact consumer devices like hearables can now slash solution size by half and extend battery life by 20 percent with the MAX77654 single inductor, multiple output (SIMO) power management IC (PMIC) from Maxim Integrated Products. The breakthrough new SIMO technology replaces traditional power management architectures for the most demanding designs in wearables and personal audio devices, reducing BOM count by up to 40 percent, with 23 percent lower BOM cost compared to discrete solutions.

Showing its importance to the CE industry as one of the world's largest advanced semiconductor manufacturers, Samsung Electronics announced the first all-in-one power management integrated circuits (PMIC), MUA01 and MUB01, optimized for True Wireless Stereo (TWS) devices. The new Samsung PMICs integrate multiple discrete components in one chip to make room for longer battery life and more efficient designs in today’s true wireless earbuds and other very low power designs.

Wireless stereo earbuds are super-convenient but are locked into proprietary solutions. Consumer-friendly solutions need to be interoperable. In the world of wireless earbuds we fairly quickly recognized, after Apple introduced AirPods, that earbuds connected by a strap were truly unconvincing in their claim to be truly wireless. Why did those other products even start with a strap? Mostly to keep power consumption down and to synchronize between left and right speakers, both of which become trickier if the speakers are really unconnected.