Apple today unveiled powerful new features for AirPods Pro 2 as part of iOS 18.1. To coincide with the launch, the company offered a rare glimpse into the Audio Lab, where the new AirPods features are developed.
Hearing Health Features Tested in Audio Lab
It's not often that Apple gives us a rare peek into the inner workings of its development labs. One notable exception came in early 2018, when the first HomePod was released and Apple gave a special look at the audio lab where it was designed.
Today, the Cupertino audio lab is back in the spotlight as the place where the new hearing health features of the AirPods Pro 2 were developed.
About the process and tools used to create new hearing aid features and test hearing:
To fine-tune and test the hearing aid's performance, a broad demographic of study participants with a wide range of hearing levels were placed in this controlled environment to complete a speech-in-noise test. The test consisted of the participant sitting in a chair in the center of the room while a complex sound scene, such as a noisy restaurant, was played. The participant was then required to repeat the words of a single speaker, distinguishing them from background conversations.
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In addition, the audio lab is permanently equipped with three clinical audiometry booths—the type that patients would typically encounter during a hearing test in a doctor's office. For internal testing, the engineering team worked with audiologists in booths to conduct thousands of clinical audiometric tests and software hearing tests before moving the new hearing testing feature into clinical validation studies.
Different lab spaces provide ideal environments for unique tasks
Apple also describes several key spaces in the Audio Lab that are used in the development process:
The Longwave anechoic chamber was built on a separate foundation that uses springs to isolate it from the rest of the lab, allowing for precise sound measurements without any noise or vibration interference. The chamber includes a custom-made speaker and microphone array that can measure head-related transfer functions, or in other words, how sound interacts with the human body. The presence of both speakers and microphone arrays in this chamber makes it a unique space with a variety of applications, including the development of AirPods, iPhone, and HomePod.
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On the other hand, the Audio Lab, to ensure the highest quality sound in every audio product Apple makes, Fantasia Lab uses a spherical array of 50 speakers to simulate hundreds of real-world soundscapes — like a shopping mall, a busy street, or an airplane ride — in a tightly controlled, evenly distributed sound field.
Overall, the full Apple Newsroom article is worth a read. It provides fascinating insight into the tools and processes the Apple team uses to develop not only new AirPods features, but also improvements to the speaker and microphone technology in iPhone, HomePod, Mac, and other devices.
What’s your biggest takeaway from Apple’s Audio Lab? Let us know in the comments.
