When i look at the bose QuietComfort earphones - earphones that are supposed to have(according to reviews) the unique ability to greatly block non-constant noise(for example talking) - and ability that to my knowledge nobody else has, and on the other hand are really expensive($270) and beyond the reach of many, i wonder:
Would some sort a programmable(app based) headphones enable an affordable noise reduction earphones that do a great job ?
Because all in all , noise is huge problem and a huge potential market.
Latency is a real problem, so I don't think doing the noise cancellation in software would ever work particularly well. You almost certainly need dedicated hardware, or at least a programmable chip with a low latency connection to the headphones and all the other necessary components connected at low latency as well (some microphone(s) picking up the ambient noise, for example.)
You're certainly not ever going to do noise cancellation over bluetooth.
I bet the headphones could be much cheaper, though. Bose almost certainly wants to monetize their R&D investment and take advantage of their significant marketshare. (There are non-Bose noise cancelling headphones, but I don't see them around often.)
Sure, you'll probably need dedicated low latency hardware. But that's probably relatively cheap, and shouldn't prevent apple ,or even a smaller company doing something in that area.
Cost isn't what's preventing Apple or anyone else from doing this. The patents are. They have titles like "Method and Apparatus for Minimizing Latency in Digital Signal Processing Systems".
the Bose noise cancelling in ear plugs already do the processing in a "dongle" which is at the end of the plug that goes into the phone. nothing is stopping Apple/Samsung/whatever to put this piece of hardware into the phone.
and remember the new Beats headphones that are supposed to hook into the Lightning port instead of the audio jack? THIS is the use case right there.
Bluetooth audio introduces obscene amounts of latency. Whatever that dongle's doing, it's not broadcasting noise-cancelled audio over bluetooth. It's probably something low-latency like RF.
The wireless speakers/headphones and mics supported by typical mobile phones are all bluetooth. As a result, you wouldn't be able to easily (if at all) do noise cancellation for those devices via software.
You could totally do it for wired headphones, though, if you sorted out the mic positioning problem and the processing latency problem! The processing latency issue is the big one, in my opinion. Doing it without dedicated circuitry on your iPhone without the interference of other (system or user-mode) software is gonna be tricky. A pause on the order of 3ms could be big enough to cause audible glitches in the noise cancellation or give you a headache.
No. The time to do D/A/D conversion and signal processing would just leave you with noise above the wavelength equivalent o the time loss, plus a whole bunch of spurious transients. It would sound quieter on a first impression, but probably prove more fatiguing over time due to the departure from natural noise spectra (which our brains are better at filtering)...which is exactly why I find Bose's headphones impossible to tolerate for more than a minute or two.
If you want quiet, get a pair of large close-backed headphones with good insulation, such as Sony MDR-7506. OK, so they weigh a bit more. OTOH they cost less and sound better, which is why they're a fixture in the gear boxes of location recordists.
Maybe it's your personal taaste(or that you haven't tried the right earphones) , but at least according to reviews, many are quiet pleased with a good noise cancelling tech when it's working well.
Well, you can find an audience for anything. I'm a sound engineer (mainly for film) by profession, so although I'm pretty opinionated about this my comments are based on nearly 20 years years of field recording experience.
Keyword here is definitely "sound better." Bose's headphones do not sound very good at all, though I'm not sure if it's due to the quality of the headphone driver, side effects of the active noise cancellation, or a combination of the two.
We used the laptop's mic as the source of environmental sound and just flipped the signals and play them back on a headphone. Because of the distance between the laptop and our ears, the signals can't really be cancelled that trivially.
The app ended up amplifying non-noises (we had some filtering) and we could hear other people talking quietly even across a room. So we jokingly said we built a spying tool on demo.
So how do patents "encourage innovation" again? It sounds more like patent attorney & bureaucratic speak meaning lots of money flowing toward them at the expense of everybody else.
Here's yet another example of patents hindering innovation and reducing novelty within the market. Why can't we just focus on real innovation & novelty instead of this legal drama?
I'm not the person you responded to, but I did read the article. The article kind of highlights the OP's point IMO. eg. (from the article):
"Bose alleges that Beats has infringed on 50 years’ worth of research, development and engineering of noise cancelling tech"
Well, the whole point of patents is supposed to be to publish the implementation details of inventions so that technology is available for all (the public commons) to use freely after the initial (14/17/20 year -- depending upon what year the patent was issued) patent period is up.
This whole concept of incrementally improving a technology with amendment patents to keep the protection going virtually indefinitely is a very modern concept, and one that the "forefathers" who wrote patents into the Constitution would have been dead set against.
Far be it from me to defend Beats or Apple since they are both IP-abusive companies themselves, but I'm not going to defend Bose either; the patent system and the lawsuit industry that has exploded around it in the past decade is completely out of control.
If the technology is covered solely by expired patents, I doubt any judge would call that infringement. Is there even a concept of amending a patent and getting it extended as a result without filing for a new patent?
Yes, but it's not so bad as to get you 50 years of protection. It sounds to me like they're accused of infringing on specific fairly recent patents relating to enhancements to noise-reduction techniques.
Bose has certainly been doing a lot of R&D for 50 years, I think the point of that statement is to make clear that they are not a patent troll, not to suggest that they're trying to hold Beats liable for 50 year old inventions. In fact, if Bose had come up with the ideas 50 years ago being claimed in recent patents, their own earlier patent would be prior art against filing a recent patent.
The whole purpose is to spur innovation, not allow for blatant copying.
The point in contention is whether or not Beats innovated, or just copied.
And please, for the sake of intelligent discourse, don't say "the forefathers would have". It's so alarmingly meaningless and just strikes the conversation with a weird cultish vibe.
The "forefathers" in the US weren't mystical, but real people (like Thomas Jefferson) who wrote real documents describing their concern with the potential negative impact of patent law abuse due to the harm monopolies cause.
People who, while they eventually accepted the idea of patents as being positive if highly restrained, were vocally outspoken against many of the ways patent law could potentially be twisted (as it now has become at the hands of the modern corporation and IP law firms).
> What innovation's being hindered here? Beats didn't do anything new.
Novelty is being removed from the marketplace.
Beats products look good and many people prefer them to Bose. The technology itself has been independently developed by Beats.
The funny thing is Chinese manufacturer & tech firms don't strictly adhere to patent laws and are making progress by leaps & bounds. It's a matter of evolution. Patent law "chivalry" is dead. It's a quaint game from a time long gone.
On one hand we have Bose, who "for almost 50 years...has made significant investment in the research, development, engineering, and design of proprietary technologies now implemented in its products, such as noise canceling headphones" [1]. On the other hand we have Beats, which dressed up commodity tech in a nice design and well-executed marketing campaign. Not sure if this is the best case to torpedo patent law with.
Every audio enthusiast I know would scoff at that assessment of Bose. They have a reputation for commanding a premium for cheaply made, mediocre products using fancy marketing and gimmickry. They're no different from Beats in that regard.
Do any of the audiophiles on HN know if it's just fashionable to hate Bose or are there actually double-blind studies done in which music listeners consistently rate Bose as worse than price-comparable alternatives?
I'm not an audiophile by any means, but I also get the sense that many around me seem to have disdain for Bose. I also stumbled into possession of QC headphones and some Bose speakers for my house and think they're great. So I've always wondered at what the precisely stated and justified beef is.
There's certainly a lot of hate that only makes sense with audiophile logic, and a lot that stems from Bose not playing the same marketing game that everyone else does. Amar Bose wasn't a charlatan. But like any premium brand that's marketed by marketers rather than engineers, sometimes things end up overpriced and benefits get overstated.
I don't call myself an audiophile but I have owned a lot of different headphones up to the $1500 mark.
There's no need (and no way) for double-blind studies here. We're not talking magic cables. Objectively you can plot frequency results with actual science and measure a difference. Subjectively you can experience it, and of course there is the look, smell, weight, clamping pressure, earpiece comfort and texture of the things as they sit on your head (hence no blind testing possible).
I have disdain for Bose because of their breathless hype, misleading sales practises, high cost and (subjectively speaking) mediocre performance. Lots of people disagree with me and like Bose a lot. And that's just fine.
Well if you selected people that weren't overly familiar with the headphones and blindfolded them, they probably wouldn't know the difference offhand. And the testers would not need to see the people listening.
Bose has consistently made the world's best-performing active noise cancellation headsets.
In home theater, they've targeted the best performance per unit of "unsightliness", so people who are willing to have 10 cubic foot floorstanding speakers scoff at their performance. But nobody can really touch them in price per unit of speaker volume, which is an important aesthetic parameter for Bose's customer base.
This comes out in every possible review, subjective ones [0]
where Bose headphones are best at noise cancelling and bad at sound quality; or you can try to compare for yourself the frequency response or distortion [1] against a Sony MDR v6 for instance, which retails at 100$ and represent pretty well average quality headphones I think.
The lifetime of patents in the US is only 20 years (roughly). Most of those 50 years of innovation are no longer eligible for patent protection, including their original noise cancelling technology. Unfortunately companies seem to be very good at finding ways around this limit.
You only need to look at companies like Dyson who was just one guy in a garage coming up with crazy new approaches to an existing problem. Someone like that deserves some protection from bigger companies who could simply steal his idea and put him out of business.
> Patents are really designed for the "little guy".
That's the marketing by the pro-patent camp. However, it's the big guys that benefit, at the expense of the little guys. The big guys can afford the lawyers, the filing fees, and the patent war chests.
How often do we hear about the little guy receiving a patent infringement cease & desist letter by a patent troll or large company?
Patents add another layer of complexity to the market resulting unnecessary expense & process for everyone. We focus on hiring lawyers for protection & litigation instead of innovation. Derivative works result in innovation. In the end, the ultimate beneficiaries of patents are the patent attorneys & bureaucracy. Hardly a recipe for innovation.
The little guys are at an advantage over the big guys because they are more nimble & can explore markets that are "too small" for the big guys.
And then, why are we choosing to favor anybody at all? Why not let the free market determine the winner? Manufacturing, development, & marketing are becoming more decentralized as time moves on. Why have a centralized legal roadblock to new product development?
Some markets require large research investment up front (like pharmaceuticals) and they won't bother if others can immediately sell the same finished product without doing the research.
Without patents you also get trade secrets which can leave the public without ever knowing how something works.
Patents are an attempt to exchange a limited time monopoly for a complete disclosure of how the invention works so that the public can benefit. There might be an argument for that time being too long (and I think it's completely broken when it comes to software), but I can see why they're useful as incentives.
I wound up nearly writing a book in response to this so I'll try to sum it up.
I agree with most of what you've said in this thread, but...
> Why have a centralized legal roadblock to new product development?
Rephrased: Why have a centralized catalog of discoveries and inventions available to the public that afford the contributors temporary exclusive license?
The idea behind patents was to counter very real problems created by the failure of markets to balance out the incentive to invent and innovate with the incentive to make those discoveries publicly available so they can inspire or cornerstone further discoveries. If they weren't published they were hoarded as trade secrets and were at risk of being lost forever over time.
Did the inception of patents account for or even acknowledge the kind of market control they're being used and traded for today? The lauded free market has turned patents into a commodity, possibly by expectation, but it's clear that this activity is relatively recent and seems to me due to changes in how the scope of their exclusive license grants is being interpreted/abused. Would we be better off assuming that the publication of discoveries would lead to closely aligned derivative products that would create a competitive environment or should we be generous with the licenses granted "inventors" so there's greater incentive to share those inventions?
Personally I think we're just seeing the beginning of what effects doing the later can have.
Generally I'm against patent battles, but not in this case.
Noise and echo cancellation are very research-demanding areas, with pretty smart algorithms and hardware to be developed. Those are certainly patentable, unlike "round edges".
I returned a pair of QueitComforts and purchased a pair of Beats Bluetooth for airline travel because the Beats had better audio response for the music I like and they were wireless. The QuietComforts had the superior noise cancelling.
It almost seems like patent law needs to apply proportionally to the crossover in market share between two products. Bose and Beats operate within the same industry but I wouldn't consider their product offerings to completely overlap.
The outliers offer the consumer more choice and if the patent holder is not in that space, are they being damaged?
My low tech solution works for me. I wear an inexpensive set of musician's earplugs, then turn up the volume on the headset. Works great in the car, too.
Ambient noise doesn't bother me unless it exceeds a certain volume. Musician's earplugs take care of that nicely, they're nearly invisible, fit in my pocket, the nonexistent batteries never go dead, they're cheap, no worries about breaking them, there's no weight on my head, I keep several sets handy, etc.
47 comments
[ 0.26 ms ] story [ 84.8 ms ] threadWould some sort a programmable(app based) headphones enable an affordable noise reduction earphones that do a great job ?
Because all in all , noise is huge problem and a huge potential market.
You're certainly not ever going to do noise cancellation over bluetooth.
I bet the headphones could be much cheaper, though. Bose almost certainly wants to monetize their R&D investment and take advantage of their significant marketshare. (There are non-Bose noise cancelling headphones, but I don't see them around often.)
IJS...
And the other stuff is software, which in general is very hard to enforce patents on with torrents etc.
the Bose noise cancelling in ear plugs already do the processing in a "dongle" which is at the end of the plug that goes into the phone. nothing is stopping Apple/Samsung/whatever to put this piece of hardware into the phone.
and remember the new Beats headphones that are supposed to hook into the Lightning port instead of the audio jack? THIS is the use case right there.
The wireless speakers/headphones and mics supported by typical mobile phones are all bluetooth. As a result, you wouldn't be able to easily (if at all) do noise cancellation for those devices via software.
You could totally do it for wired headphones, though, if you sorted out the mic positioning problem and the processing latency problem! The processing latency issue is the big one, in my opinion. Doing it without dedicated circuitry on your iPhone without the interference of other (system or user-mode) software is gonna be tricky. A pause on the order of 3ms could be big enough to cause audible glitches in the noise cancellation or give you a headache.
If you want quiet, get a pair of large close-backed headphones with good insulation, such as Sony MDR-7506. OK, so they weigh a bit more. OTOH they cost less and sound better, which is why they're a fixture in the gear boxes of location recordists.
The much cheaper cost certainly helps too.
We used the laptop's mic as the source of environmental sound and just flipped the signals and play them back on a headphone. Because of the distance between the laptop and our ears, the signals can't really be cancelled that trivially.
The app ended up amplifying non-noises (we had some filtering) and we could hear other people talking quietly even across a room. So we jokingly said we built a spying tool on demo.
Here's yet another example of patents hindering innovation and reducing novelty within the market. Why can't we just focus on real innovation & novelty instead of this legal drama?
What innovation's being hindered here? Beats didn't do anything new.
"Bose alleges that Beats has infringed on 50 years’ worth of research, development and engineering of noise cancelling tech"
Well, the whole point of patents is supposed to be to publish the implementation details of inventions so that technology is available for all (the public commons) to use freely after the initial (14/17/20 year -- depending upon what year the patent was issued) patent period is up.
This whole concept of incrementally improving a technology with amendment patents to keep the protection going virtually indefinitely is a very modern concept, and one that the "forefathers" who wrote patents into the Constitution would have been dead set against.
Far be it from me to defend Beats or Apple since they are both IP-abusive companies themselves, but I'm not going to defend Bose either; the patent system and the lawsuit industry that has exploded around it in the past decade is completely out of control.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuing_patent_application
Bose has certainly been doing a lot of R&D for 50 years, I think the point of that statement is to make clear that they are not a patent troll, not to suggest that they're trying to hold Beats liable for 50 year old inventions. In fact, if Bose had come up with the ideas 50 years ago being claimed in recent patents, their own earlier patent would be prior art against filing a recent patent.
The point in contention is whether or not Beats innovated, or just copied.
And please, for the sake of intelligent discourse, don't say "the forefathers would have". It's so alarmingly meaningless and just strikes the conversation with a weird cultish vibe.
Have you heard of derivative works? Are you aware of how derivative works have contributed to innovation throughout the course of human civilization?
People who, while they eventually accepted the idea of patents as being positive if highly restrained, were vocally outspoken against many of the ways patent law could potentially be twisted (as it now has become at the hands of the modern corporation and IP law firms).
See, for example: http://www.temple.edu/lawschool/dpost/mcphersonletter.html
Novelty is being removed from the marketplace.
Beats products look good and many people prefer them to Bose. The technology itself has been independently developed by Beats.
The funny thing is Chinese manufacturer & tech firms don't strictly adhere to patent laws and are making progress by leaps & bounds. It's a matter of evolution. Patent law "chivalry" is dead. It's a quaint game from a time long gone.
On one hand we have Bose, who "for almost 50 years...has made significant investment in the research, development, engineering, and design of proprietary technologies now implemented in its products, such as noise canceling headphones" [1]. On the other hand we have Beats, which dressed up commodity tech in a nice design and well-executed marketing campaign. Not sure if this is the best case to torpedo patent law with.
[1] http://www.scribd.com/doc/235098824/Bose-v-Beats-Civil-Compl... §5
I'm not an audiophile by any means, but I also get the sense that many around me seem to have disdain for Bose. I also stumbled into possession of QC headphones and some Bose speakers for my house and think they're great. So I've always wondered at what the precisely stated and justified beef is.
There's no need (and no way) for double-blind studies here. We're not talking magic cables. Objectively you can plot frequency results with actual science and measure a difference. Subjectively you can experience it, and of course there is the look, smell, weight, clamping pressure, earpiece comfort and texture of the things as they sit on your head (hence no blind testing possible).
I have disdain for Bose because of their breathless hype, misleading sales practises, high cost and (subjectively speaking) mediocre performance. Lots of people disagree with me and like Bose a lot. And that's just fine.
In home theater, they've targeted the best performance per unit of "unsightliness", so people who are willing to have 10 cubic foot floorstanding speakers scoff at their performance. But nobody can really touch them in price per unit of speaker volume, which is an important aesthetic parameter for Bose's customer base.
This comes out in every possible review, subjective ones [0] where Bose headphones are best at noise cancelling and bad at sound quality; or you can try to compare for yourself the frequency response or distortion [1] against a Sony MDR v6 for instance, which retails at 100$ and represent pretty well average quality headphones I think.
[0] http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-noise-canceling-headph... [1] http://www.headphone.com/pages/build-a-graph
You only need to look at companies like Dyson who was just one guy in a garage coming up with crazy new approaches to an existing problem. Someone like that deserves some protection from bigger companies who could simply steal his idea and put him out of business.
That's the marketing by the pro-patent camp. However, it's the big guys that benefit, at the expense of the little guys. The big guys can afford the lawyers, the filing fees, and the patent war chests.
How often do we hear about the little guy receiving a patent infringement cease & desist letter by a patent troll or large company?
Patents add another layer of complexity to the market resulting unnecessary expense & process for everyone. We focus on hiring lawyers for protection & litigation instead of innovation. Derivative works result in innovation. In the end, the ultimate beneficiaries of patents are the patent attorneys & bureaucracy. Hardly a recipe for innovation.
The little guys are at an advantage over the big guys because they are more nimble & can explore markets that are "too small" for the big guys.
And then, why are we choosing to favor anybody at all? Why not let the free market determine the winner? Manufacturing, development, & marketing are becoming more decentralized as time moves on. Why have a centralized legal roadblock to new product development?
Some markets require large research investment up front (like pharmaceuticals) and they won't bother if others can immediately sell the same finished product without doing the research.
Without patents you also get trade secrets which can leave the public without ever knowing how something works.
Patents are an attempt to exchange a limited time monopoly for a complete disclosure of how the invention works so that the public can benefit. There might be an argument for that time being too long (and I think it's completely broken when it comes to software), but I can see why they're useful as incentives.
I agree with most of what you've said in this thread, but...
> Why have a centralized legal roadblock to new product development?
Rephrased: Why have a centralized catalog of discoveries and inventions available to the public that afford the contributors temporary exclusive license?
The idea behind patents was to counter very real problems created by the failure of markets to balance out the incentive to invent and innovate with the incentive to make those discoveries publicly available so they can inspire or cornerstone further discoveries. If they weren't published they were hoarded as trade secrets and were at risk of being lost forever over time.
Did the inception of patents account for or even acknowledge the kind of market control they're being used and traded for today? The lauded free market has turned patents into a commodity, possibly by expectation, but it's clear that this activity is relatively recent and seems to me due to changes in how the scope of their exclusive license grants is being interpreted/abused. Would we be better off assuming that the publication of discoveries would lead to closely aligned derivative products that would create a competitive environment or should we be generous with the licenses granted "inventors" so there's greater incentive to share those inventions?
Personally I think we're just seeing the beginning of what effects doing the later can have.
Which is strange, because patents last only 20 years.
It could also be referencing other research upon which the patents in question are based...
It almost seems like patent law needs to apply proportionally to the crossover in market share between two products. Bose and Beats operate within the same industry but I wouldn't consider their product offerings to completely overlap.
The outliers offer the consumer more choice and if the patent holder is not in that space, are they being damaged?
Graph is of attenuation in dB: lower values are better, and positive values are worse than no blocking at all.