With more than 1.6 billion mobile phones built annually, each with a microspeaker for the speakerphone and another for the receiver, this side of the speaker industry attracts the giants. Top players include AAC, Goertek, Gettop, ForGrand, Bujon, and Merry Electronics along with others that share the sizable market — which includes laptops and tablets. Fast ramp-up, intense pricing, and other tough challenges have driven the incumbent microspeaker market leader Knowles to offload its microspeaker business.
I wrote this article while attending Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Spain, which is the main global event for smartphones — from the brands and OEM/ODM factories to the parts vendors, signal processing specialists, and design houses. As with most events, the most interesting news is found in the back rooms, the prototypes kept under the table at some display, or just the industry gossip. However, I will stick to solid information!
The case can be made that we all spend too much screen time with our smartphones. The range and diversity of features and functions and apps are mind boggling. But please don’t forget that at least one of the core functions of the phone is to talk to each other — ideally with intelligible and aesthetically pleasing quality. Now with the leading phones priced at $1,000 and more, shouldn’t we expect our smartphones to deliver better sound? The speakerphone function on most smartphones goes south at around 750 to 800 Hz, not so impressive when 300 to 3,000 Hz has been considered a marginal standard for telephony speech for about 100 years. It appears that while we expect reasonable sound from our soundbars, auto-sound systems, and headphones, when we pick up our beloved smartphones, we leave our expectations behind.
