CES Las Vegas 2024: xMEMS Labs taking on Apple’s AirPods

Making speakers has remained largely unchanged for the past 100 years, using a magnet and coil to produce sound – until now.

xMEMS Labs director of marketing Zachi Friedman with a set of the company's ultrasonic earbuds.

A Californian start-up is looking to shake up the earpods market – dominated by Apple, Bose, Samsung and others – building speakers with microchips to produce ultrasonic sound.

Based in Santa Clara, xMEMS Labs, says it has created earbuds that provide listeners with a higher resolution of sound – and which are cheaper to manufacture.

The company was one of 4000 exhibitors at the CES – the world’s biggest consumer electronics trade show – in Las Vegas this week, spruiking its wares.

While many exhibitors are enhancing existing technologies or releasing powerful AI updates, xMEMS stood out because it created a new way to listen to your favourite records.

xMEMS director of marketing Zachi Friedman said for the last century there had only been minor improvements in speaker technology, which involves a magnet and a coil pushing air against a membrane – usually made from paper or plastic – to replicate sound.

But the xMEMS Cypress speaker uses small flaps on silicon chips instead of magnets and coils, which can produce smaller movements against a membrane and a higher quality of sound.

The company says this will change the way mass-market, true wireless stereo (TWS) earbuds “create ultra high-quality, high-resolution sound experiences across all audio frequencies”.

It’s a big claim but how does it work?

“Since the motion is much smaller in scale, it’s literally microscopic, it cannot compete today, with the current technology, with a speaker that you have in your TV … if you’re three metres away, you won’t hear it,” Mr Friedman said.

“But for specific applications, like earbuds that are literally stuck inside your ear canals. For those, it definitely gets loud enough. And by loud enough, I mean, it gets to the order of 120 dB (decibel).”

Creative Aurvana Ace series earbuds that use xMEMS technology.

Ultrasonic sound is not entirely new – it has been researched since the 1960s.

xMEMs says previous tests of the technology failed to produce the acoustic performance required for broad commercial appeal – until it put it into earbuds.

Mr Friedman said the sound envelope of ultrasonic pulses in the earbuds was an exact acoustic copy of the source signal, meaning across all frequencies, Cypress is more faithful to the original recording than current speaker technologies and can produce sound levels as low as 20Hz and, with its new model to be produced later this year, as high as 140dB.

“As an air pulse generator, Cypress comprises: a modulator to generate an amplitude-modulated ultrasonic wave that faithfully follows the amplitude of the intended audio signal; and a demodulator to synchronously demodulate the ultrasonic wave, transferring the acoustic energy down to the baseband, producing the intended audible sound as a result.

“Now initially it might sound to you almost slightly artificial in your ears because it doesn’t sound like you would expect this is how it would actually sound. But this is actually what’s the recording contents.

“As a result of its superior resolution in the time domain, Cypress can more accurately reproduce today’s advanced sound formats, including high-resolution and spatial audio.”

Mr Friedman said ultrasonic earbuds are also cheaper to produce, with more reliability, given the use of microchips rather than mechanical components.

The company’s technology was in the Creative Aurvana Ace series earbuds launched late last year, with two models priced from $US130 ($194) and $US150. This is slightly cheaper than Apple’s AirPods, which are priced from $US169.

“I spoke to at least five different people that compared it to their own AirPods, and only one said the AirPod sound to his ears was a little better. But the other four said it sounds way better than AirPods,” Mr Friedman said.

“But keep in mind that if you install the app, you can actually change the EQ. So we can actually change it because the one person that liked the AirPods better claimed that these have too much bass. But if you install the app on your phone, and you play with it, you can actually lower the bass or add more bass. So you can actually control all of that with the creative app.”

Originally published as CES Las Vegas 2024: xMEMS Labs taking on Apple’s AirPods