Audience today announced that it is now shipping the ClairAudient "The ONE" single-driver speaker set. The new model is the smallest in Audience's ClairAudient speaker lineup, at just seve inches high by 5.5 inches wide by seven inches deep. The ONE is tailored for desktop music listening, compact high-end stereo systems and surround-sound home theater.
Previous Apple supplier Audience has reported quarterly revenue well above Wall Street's estimates, after it diversified its suppliers beyond the Cupertino manufacturer. Shares climbed 24 percent in after-hours trading following the company reporting that it was expecting revenue between $43 and $46 million in the March quarter, trouncing analyst estimates of $31.8 million. Quarterly profit was $3.1 million, up more than $8 million from 2011's $5.6 million loss.
Audience Inc, a voice quality chip manufacturer for Apple's iPhone, has said that its technology is unlikely to be used in the newest model from Apple, triggering a stock slide. The chips, which filter out background noise, are supplied to Apple manufacturers including Foxconn and Protek. Audience has been supplying chips to Apple since 2008, and the sales have accounted for up to 37 percent of its total revenue.
Siri's exclusivity to the iPhone 4S may be connected to the use of Audience's EarSmart noise cancellation technology, suggests Linley Group analyst Linley Gwennap. While teardowns have shown the presence of a dedicated Audience chip in the iPhone 4, Gwennap points to a January S-1 filing, indicating that EarSmart is built directly into the 4S' A5 processor. "Even after accounting for the dual Cortex-A9 CPUs and the large GPU that provides the A5 with industry-leading 3D graphics performance, the remaining die area seems too large for the usual mundane housekeeping logic," the analyst explains. "To reduce system cost and eliminate the extra package required for the Audience chip, Apple cut a deal to integrate the noise-reduction technology directly into its A5 processor, which appears in the iPhone 4S."
A follow-up teardown at iFixit has revealed that the iPhone 4's noise cancellation is the same as in the Nexus One. Previously unidentifiable, a mystery chip on both has been given a close look in a ChipWorks scan and is now known to be an Audience A1026 audio signal processor. Both the Apple and Google phones are well-known for their near-ideal ability to filter out background noise and are now know to have accomplished that by using the same hardware.
