The Future of Audio is Wide Open

In 1978, Dr. Amar Bose was on a flight from Zurich to Boston, struggling to hear the music coming through his airline-issued headphones. The founder of the legendary audio company that bears his name, Bose was frustrated that he could still hear the din coming from the airplane’s humming engines. So, when he landed, he asked his team to get to work creating a headphone that would shut out the background babble and “cancel” outside noise.

Bose’s active noise canceling (ANC) headphones revolutionized the way the world experiences sound and created sonic sanctuaries for millions of customers since their release in 1989. ANC headphones are still a vital part of a listener’s life but, as the world becomes more connected, people need a way to listen that integrates the outside world seamlessly— enter in the new age of audio.

Bose first saw the value of a more open listening experience when they developed the Soundwear Companion product in 2018, a headphone draped across the back of the listener’s neck like a collar said to create a halo of sound with minimal audio spillage. Bose’s engineers were exhilarated with Soundwear Companion’s potential, but wanted to create a headphone that packed their technology into something a bit more commonplace, practical. So what did they do? They bought a pair of cheap sunglasses.

“The team purchased a pair of plastic sunglasses for a couple bucks, glued the acoustic modules to the temples, and voila!” says Mehul Trivedi, Wearables Category Director at Bose. That innovation led to the creation of OpenAudio, a technology first available in the groundbreaking Bose Frames in 2018. The sunglasses were equipped with Bose’s signature drivers installed in the shade’s temples that directed sound around the listener’s ears and reduced audio spillage even further.

But creating an open, personalized audio experience wasn’t as simple as picking out a pair of shades — or pointing a tiny speaker towards a listener’s ears. Instead, Bose engineers looked at the company’s most famous innovation and turned it upside down.

According to Bose, its active noise canceling headphones use a driver to counteract sounds that are coming from the environment around you — a listening experience that puts you in your own world. OpenAudio, they say, does the exact opposite. Instead of canceling the sounds coming into your ear, it’s canceling the sounds coming out of your headphones. That’s because your headphones are creating an “anti-phase” soundwave that is the exact opposite of whatever it is you’re listening to. Those two soundwaves effectively cancel each other out, minimizing the audio leaking out to the world around you and creating a truly intimate listening experience.

“OpenAudio is like noise cancelation in reverse,” says Trivedi. “The driver is producing a sound that cancels itself at a far away distance in order to keep it from going out into the environment.”

Now, Bose has integrated that technology into an even more streamlined offering with the Bose Sport Open Earbuds, the first time that OpenAudio has been available in a wireless earbud — appealing to anyone from high-performance athletes working out and professionals on conference calls. But as the world becomes increasingly connected, the value of technology like the Sport Open Earbuds and OpenAudio is in its potential to “seamlessly blend the digital and physical worlds” as Trivedi puts it. Eliminating the tradeoff between listening to music and podcast or being on a call and staying aware of the environment could have a profound impact on how we hear the world, Trivedi says.

More than 40 years ago, Amar Bose saw how vital it was to find moments of peace in a noisy world. His team created a headphone that has been a standard bearer for decades — but innovation isn’t a straight line, and sometimes creating something groundbreaking means going back to your storied inventions and turning them inside out. That’s exactly what Bose did with OpenAudio and its newest iteration in the Bose Sport Open Earbuds. By inverting one of their most famous innovations, Bose engineers have crafted a technology that may spark the expansive future of audio.