From the horse’s desk: Sennheiser’s sound-blok prototype update (v1.0)

By Lance Reichert, Sennheiser

Its been a busy two weeks here in San Francisco. We’re attacking the development of our audio blok from all angles - from design aspects and feature sets to mechanical and electrical concerns.

There have been a couple of your features that we’ve really kept going back to as we refine our design, getting more and more excited about them each time. We’re beginning to hone in on what we feel is the best way to combine them into an audio module or a group of audio modules that we could offer the public.

Example suite of sound-bloks.

The first is probably the obvious one: high quality audio. Sometimes its hard to drive certain headphones to sufficient volumes with today’s cell phone headphone amps. But one of the beautiful things about being able to make an audio module for your phone is that we can now fix that (or if physics and current battery technology wants to be annoying about it, we can at least make it better)!

The second is physical buttons to control volume. Here we’re thinking keep it simple: maximum three. Their functions could vary with the context, but imagine a volume up, volume down, and mode switch. In fact, ideal use of the three buttons is somewhere you can help us! Have an idea to use these buttons, post it to the forum topic here.

Example of trying to see if two jacks would fit in an ARA 1x2 module. It does, an *just* barely (remember, the connectors have solder pads and there are tolerances - AND we had to use 2.5mm TRRS jacks in this rapid sketch. Not ideal, but we’ll keep working on it.

The third is LEDs. Everyone loves shiny things that blink. But more than that, seeing your input actually change something gives you that warm gooshy feeling inside, like a good cup of hot cocoa. We want you to feel that (and now I want cocoa). Plus, we also liked one users idea of making them blink along with the music (thanks OLLEY102, see here).

Example uses of having two jacks.

The fourth is having two jacks for sharing music effortless with friends (from ukjet and ravmahov, see here). Once we started expanding on the idea, we realized it was our dream. With more jacks, we have the potential for more analog audio ins and audio outs, meaning we can do way more with cell phone audio. Want to share your music with your friend on the bus without have to deal with wireless connections? You got it. Want to have world class noise cancellation, a noise dosimeter and binaural recording capabilities all at once? No problem. Want to have a speaker array for louder and better music? Yup, it does that too. How about a higher directivity microphone array to really get good audio from afar? Gotcha covered. The only problem is getting two jacks physically in the module. Turns out these things need to be tiny! But we’ll work on it and let you know.

Example Sennheiser headphones specifically designed to make use of an audio module that would have two jacks.

The next step is to get physical! At the same time we’ll further develop the electronic evaluation platform we showed on the previous blog post (see here), we’ll start making mock-ups that we can walk around with and interact with.