Original subtitles

[narrator] On Tomorrow's World Today

we explore the cutting-edge advances

that are shaping four different worlds.

The world of inspiration

where the wonders of the natural world amaze and inspire us,

the world of creation where ideas come to life from traditional arts,

the world of innovation where ideas and inventions move us all forward,

the world of production

where innovations are mass-produced

to improve our lives.

From Inventionland world headquarters,

here's your host George Davison.

When I created Inventionland back in 2008

I had one goal in mind.

Design an immersive work environment

that would inspire creativity.

And, visually, we did just that.

But one thing I didn't consider when I was designing it

was how immersive sound can be.

What if people could hear the crash of ocean waves beneath them

when they were on our pirate ship?

Or the sounds of the jungle animals in the distance

when they were in our cave?

The invention of spatial audio, it's changed everything.

One limitation with sound is that, for the most part,

when we hear music it's in stereo.

And nowadays, we want to immerse ourselves in experiences.

Spatial audio technology, it uses hardware and software

to simulate a three-dimensional sound field

to simulate sound from various directions and distances.

Today, everyone can benefit from spatial audio,

from watching movies and playing video games to producing music.

So I'm sending Tamara to the world of innovation,

where she's gonna explore how spatial audio

will help listeners in any environment

not only feel the depth of sound

but also make listening a truly immersive experience.

[Tamara] Spatial audio has changed the way we experience sound.

Imagine music taking you on a three-dimensional experience

with every sound, every note, every whisper

surrounding you, immersing you, and taking you on a journey.

I'm here at Sonos headquarters in Santa Barbara, California

to explore how they are bringing

a powerful new home spatial audio experience to listeners

with easy-to-use hardware.

-Hi. Patrick, it's great to meet you. -Hi.

-Welcome to Sonos. -Thank you.

I am so excited to be here

and learn more about the origin of this company.

[Patrick] Sonos was created to fill every home with music

and do it in a really easy way.

20 years ago, audio was really trapped in one room of the home.

There were these complicated wires

and physical media,

and, really, one person

had to be the technical expert.

Yes, in my house that would have been my dad.

Yeah, and so what we wanted to do

was really make it easy for people to be able to play any music they wanted

in one room of their house or their entire house.

We saw, really, this opportunity

to take some emerging technologies,

Wi-Fi in the home, micro-electronics becoming a lot smaller,

so computing, and phones, and all those things,

and then the move to digital music.

-And so all of those things -[Tamara] Mmm.

we felt we could bring together into a new product

-that we introduced here... -Oh.

...which is really combining a computer and audio together

and giving you access to any song

in any room of their home or every room of their home.

So you really had a vision of something that didn't exist yet.

It was something that was mind-blowing then

and you've seen widely adopted since.

Well, I love seeing the innovation in progress,

and I look forward to seeing what's next.

And we've got something very exciting.

We believe the future of audio is spatial audio,

so I want to show you what we've got.

I cannot wait to take a look inside.

-Let's go see it. -Okay.

-Hi, Victoria. -Hi, Patrick.

-This is Tamara. -Hi. So nice to meet you.

-Nice to meet you. -Thank you so much.

-You're welcome. Enjoy the demo. -Oh, I will.

All right. Welcome to our listening room.

We're going to be listening to our new product,

-so make yourself comfortable in the middle spot. -Okay.

So, this may be a silly question,

but what exactly is spatial [chuckling] audio?

Spatial audio is an emerging audio technology

which delivers three-dimensional sound.

So now creators can view their work

as a sound canvas or a sound bubble,

and they can place objects of their mixes anywhere in the room.

So that's not only in front of you

but above you and all around you.

The best way to understand is to listen.

-Let's do it. -Yes.

[dramatic music playing]

[gasps] Um, that was amazing.

-This is your job? -Yes.

I love seeing people's reactions.

This is the best part of my job.

-Well, I need to see what's inside these things. -Sounds good.

[Tamara] I'm at the Sonos testing building in Santa Barbara, California

to explore how speakers can give us a fully immersive listening experience.

-Hey, Ryan. -Hey, Tamara.

We've got some great stuff to show ya.

-Follow me. -All right.

So, just how do you make a brand-spanking-new speaker?

That's a great question.

First thing, uh,

it really starts with a sound experience brief.

-Mmm-hmm. -So we write down

the capabilities that we want out of the speaker.

How do we want people to experience it in their homes?

And then we build acoustic models.

So the brief is where you kind of dream it up

-and then this is where you start to realize it. -Absolutely.

What you see here are a couple of different versions

that we would call a sounds-like prototype,

where the acoustic team has essentially duct-taped

-and glued a 3D-printed model together -[chuckles]

and placed drivers around in different spots for us to listen to

and hear if that delivers on the sound experience that we want.

Okay, so I really want to break this down to basics.

When you say "drivers",

tell me a little bit about what a driver does

and kind of where it fits in here.

Yeah, so drivers is what people might think of as a speaker.

-Mmm-hmm. -We think of this whole product

-as a speaker. -[chuckles]

But this is made with six different drivers in it.

So there's woofers for low-end,

mid-range drivers, and tweeters that deliver high-end.

[Tamara] Okay. Gotcha.

So you're kind of experimenting in this phase

with what you want it to sound like

and what it might look like.

-But this is really all about the sound. -Absolutely.

So what you see here really is the convergence

of the acoustic design and acoustic architecture with industrial design.

You can see the shapes and sizes that we explored

as we were in the development process.

And I'm noticing that. What do you call this indent?

We call that a cinched hourglass shape.

Okay, well, I'm noticing that the cinch occurs

in different places on different models.

-Does that make a difference? -It absolutely does.

You can see in a clear model of the final product here

-we've got six drivers. -Mmm-hmm.

-So there's one on the kind of bottom and shoulder... -Mmm-hmm.

...one facing up and one facing out.

And those all strategically placed

to deliver the best, most immersive sound experience.

All right. So we've talked about how it sounds.

We've talked about how it looks.

What else goes into putting this together?

So in addition to building the world's most immersive smart speaker,

the Era 300 is also the most sustainably-produced product that Sonos has ever made.

Okay, so how is it different than what's come before?

So the Era 300 uses about 40% recycled plastic.

-[Tamara] Mmm-hmm. -It uses under two watts of energy in standby mode,

and also uses less power when it's actually on.

-And what am I looking at right here? -This is an example

of our plastic recycled source material.

So we take this, and it gets melted into these beads

and then used to make the various plastic pieces of the speaker.

Got it. So this is an example of the materials that help with sustainability.

What about how it's actually put together?

What you see here is a speaker that's been completely disassembled.

-And what you notice is there's a lot of screws. -[Tamara] Yeah.

[Ryan] We would normally use glues and adhesives

to get the product to not rattle, and not make any noise,

and come together.

But with the Era family we use screws instead

to ensure that it is repairable and more sustainable.

Sustainability was also a very important part of our package design.

The box is made from recycled materials.

As you look inside...

...you see the speaker comes in a nice bag

-and even has a paper handle on top. -Okay, hold on a second.

How does a paper handle support something like this?

Our package engineers did an incredible job and a lot of testing

to make sure that you can safely get from the store to your house

without dropping your speaker.

Well, kudos to your project engineers.

Now let's go take a look

-at our antenna testing chamber. -Oh.

So this is one of my favorite rooms in the building.

This is where we do the testing for the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth antennas.

So this is really the heart of what powers that experience

so that you don't have to have your music tethered

into just one room with cables and stuck in a cabinet.

[Ryan] Absolutely.

I'm gonna introduce you to Sohini,

who's our antenna engineer,

and she'll walk you through a couple of demos.

Fantastic. Thank you.

-Hey there. -Hey, Tamara.

-How are you doing? -I'm great.

So, tell me a little bit about

-what's going on in here. -Okay.

So I just finished setting up

a measurement for this antenna that we have here.

And I'm going to measure the signal that is coming out of the antenna

in all directions.

Let me show you one of the other setups

that I have done in one of our other chambers.

So I have this Era 300 speaker set up inside this antenna test chamber.

And I'm going to measure the Wi-Fi connectivity for the antennas.

How many antennas are in there?

There are four Wi-Fi antennas in this speaker,

-and I'm all set to start measuring them. -All right.

[machine whirrs]

[Sohini] While the test is running, let me tell you a little bit

about the location of the antennas inside the speaker.

So you can already see one of the antennas in the front.

-Mmm-hmm. -There's one more antenna in the front.

So two antennas in the front, two in the back.

And that provides a whole 360 degree of Wi-Fi coverage.

I can see why they all need to work properly.

Speaking of, how's our test subject doing?

It should be already done. Let's take a look.

[Tamara] What are we looking at here?

[Sohini] This is the 3D pattern

of the Wi-Fi signal strength.

And what do the different colors mean?

The darkest red means that the signal is the strongest,

and the blue means that the signal is weak at that spot.

All right, well, we've got a lot of red in this one,

so it looks like we're doing pretty okay.

[Sohini] That's right.

All right, Tamara.

Ready to go check out the reliability lab?

All right. Time for my next test.

-Thanks so much. -Buh-bye.

[Ryan] Welcome to the reliability lab.

All right. So we were just testing Wi-Fi. What are we testing in here?

So this is where we do all of our environmental testing.

We've got a suite of tests that we run each speaker through.

You can see the Era 300.

-Mmm-hmm. -That gets a heat and humidity test.

The Move is one of our portable speakers, so it's much more durable.

We do drop testing.

We do water testing, so it gets put in a sprayer.

The Roams are also portable.

They get dropped from really high.

-[Tamara laughs] -[Ryan] They also get water tested.

They get tumble tested in, like, a big dryer-like machine.

Making sure that whatever speaker people have bought,

it's gonna live up to the promises that we've made about it.

What do you think is the most surprising test that you do?

[Ryan] We've got sunscreen, vinegar, sweat, olive oil.

We really want to make sure that if someone's got one of these speakers

and they're using it in their kitchen or using it at that the beach

that if you have sunscreen on your hand

that it's not gonna degrade the finish,

doesn't change the color, or wipe off the controls,

or anything like that.

And at what stage of product development

are these tests actually happening?

Throughout the development process.

-Mmm-hmm. -Every time we make a change...

...we re-test to make sure that,

if there was a small change to the plastic

or some kind of a coating,

that it's still robust.

Now we're gonna go to my favorite spot

-where we do all the audio testing. -[Tamara] Ohh.

-I can't wait to see it. -Yeah.

-Welcome to the acoustics lab. -Very cool.

I'm gonna introduce you to Doug

who's our distinguished audio systems engineer,

and he's gonna walk you through a few tests.

Hey there. It's great to meet you.

Nice to meet you too, Tamara.

So, tell me about what's going on here.

Well, what we're gonna do today

is we're gonna take a look

at some testing of the drivers.

-[Tamara] Mmm-hmm. -The drivers are the elements

that are nested inside the loud speaker that actually make the sound.

And today we're gonna be taking a look at testing the low frequency driver,

the woofer, that's in the Era 300.

Fantastic. I can't wait to see it.

-It's already started. -Oh, let me take a look.

[machine hums and beeps]

[Tamara] All right, so what's happening over here?

[Doug] Well, this is the woofer,

and what we've got trained on it is a laser.

And what we're measuring as we put these tones into it

is the displacement.

And we're also measuring the temperature

of the voice coil in the unit.

-Why do you use a laser? -Non-contact.

We don't want anything touching the driver

-while it's being tested. -Got it.

-And so how's our testing going? -It's going very good.

What we're doing is we're stepping up in level and also in frequency.

As we put higher and higher frequencies in,

we're getting more and more rise in the temperature.

This is the voice coil temperature.

We also see that as we put more power into it

it's also getting hotter.

In the total harmonic distortion

we're seeing that the distortion is also going up

as we put more power into it.

Now, distortion's something I'm familiar with.

Why does the temperature matter?

Well, it's all about reliability and durability.

We want these loudspeakers to last for a very long time in the home.

Makes sense. All right, what's next?

We're gonna introduce you to Kylie

who's gonna show you through a couple more measurements

-that we make in the lab. -Fantastic.

-Hey, Kylie. -Hey.

Doug told me to come check out what you're doing.

Yeah, so right now I'm getting ready to test

-our mid-ranger driver of the Era 300. -[Tamara] Mmm-hmm.

So this plays back the mid to high frequencies.

Ohh. What's in there?

This is our two-part anechoic chamber.

It allows us to measure the transducers

without any other reflections.

Would you like to take a look inside?

-Yes, I would. -All right.

-Okay. You can follow me. -Cool.

-Oh, wow. What is this? -Welcome.

This is our anechoic chamber.

So anechoic meaning, like, anti-echo.

-Mmm-hmm. -So there's no reflections

off the walls.

So if I clap my hands it sounds really dry

because there's no reverb.

-Oh, yeah. There's, like, nothing. -Yeah. Exactly.

And what about all the different shapes and sizes of foam

-I'm seeing on the wall? -[Kylie] These are really large pieces of foam

because we're dealing with really big soundwaves.

-And so they need to be bigger -[Tamara] Mmm-hmm.

so they absorb the lower frequencies.

Oh, and, wait, that's the other side of the driver

that we were looking at before, right?

[Kylie] Yeah, so this driver is radiating out

into these 19 different microphones.

-So that way we're able to measure the sound -[Tamara] Mmm-hmm.

at every angle that it comes out.

Ah, right, and that makes sense with spatial audio

because you're around, and above, and behind.

Absolutely, and we actually have an even big chamber

where we can measure all of that at the same time.

Whoa!

What is going on with this floor here?

So, we're in the bigger anechoic chamber now.

This is so big that we're actually only seeing half of the chamber.

-So up and down. I'm in the middle right now. -Yeah. Exactly.

And what can you test for differently in here?

Yeah, so since it's such a large space,

we're able to put 25 microphones up

-at a further distance away. -[Tamara] Mmm-hmm.

[Kylie] And that allows us to measure sound

as the speaker rotates

to measure how the sound is radiating

across a whole balloon of data.

Can we actually run a test so I can see it in action?

Yeah. We're gonna play a frequency sweep.

-It's gonna play low and then go high. -Mmm-hmm.

[tone rising]

-Okay. -Let's go see what that looks like

-outside the chamber. -Cool.

[Kylie] So, what you're looking at is we have 25 measurements,

one for each microphone,

and we have a very smooth frequency response.

What does it mean for me as a listener

-when you have a smooth frequency response? -Yeah.

It means you're gonna have a very natural listening experience

-Mmm-hmm. -that's gonna be true to the artist's intent.

-Oh, cool. -In fact, we have you set up

to go talk with Chris Davies after this.

He's gonna talk to you about how we collaborate

-with music producers. -Awesome.

-Thank you so much. -You're welcome.

[Tamara] So, as head of audio here at Sonos,

tell me a little bit about what you and your team do.

My team is responsible for everything

from the architecture of our products

-to make sure that all the parts -[Tamara] Mmm-hmm.

are coming together the way that they need to,

all the way through to the final sound tuning

to make sure that the sound that we're delivering to our customers

is something that we can be really excited about.

See, that's what I actually wanted to ask you about,

that customer experience, the music we get to enjoy.

What's it like working with the artists?

We have a team that works with us

that we refer to as our soundboard.

It's made up of mixers, producers,

people throughout the audio industry,

and we work with them extensively to get feedback

on not only what we're doing well with our products but also what's not working.

What's an example that a consumer might be able to sort of understand

the complexities of that?

Yeah, one of the tracks that we've worked with a lot

is a track called Deep, Deep Feeling by Paul McCartney,

which was mixed by Giles Martin

-who is part of our team here. -Mmm-hmm.

And that track has a lot of different spatial elements in it,

and various things that are in specific locations but also moving around.

And we can listen to that out of our product,

but also be able to walk into his studio and listen to it in the studio

to be able to hear specifically how it sounds

and what he was intending to create with the mix.

It's just an amazing experience to be able to connect between

what's happening in the studio and what we're able to bring into people's living rooms.

You have a very cool job. It really is a true marriage of art and technology.

Thank you very much.

-Hey, Jeff. Welcome to Inventionland. -Hey, George.

Thanks for having me.

Well, hey, your team was here,

and they put all this equipment in,

and I'm hoping you can tell me what's going on.

That's why I'm here.

Sonos has been a pioneer in audio

for over 20 years.

-Mmm-hmm. -And just like the transition

from mono to stereo,

we're really excited about a new transition

that's happening in the music industry.

And this is spatial audio.

And this has got creators really excited about

really showing their content, their art in a new way.

And with Sonos, we now have the way

-to actually show that to people in their homes. -Mmm.

So what we've setup for you is the ultimate home theater listening experience.

-We got a Sonos Arc in the front... -Okay.

...a pair of subs to each side,

and a pair of Era 300s in the back.

So this is gonna give you immersive sound

all around you, above you,

-and you're gonna feel it in your core. -Oh, my gosh.

Immersive sound.

My sound engineers in Inventionland are gonna love this.

[chuckles softly] I'm gonna leave you to it.

[whispering] Okay.

[woman talking indistinctly]

-[man] Come on, you guys. Let's go. -[dramatic music playing]

[thunder rumbling]