AV Technology's content director, Cindy Davis, had a candid conversation with Daniel Sennheiser and Dr. Andreas Sennheiser, Co-CEOs of the Sennheiser Group. They discuss the stories that shaped the company's 80 years, new milestone technologies such as Spectera, its latest wireless broadband ecosystem, what to expect in the near future, and thoughts on artificial intelligence.
Cindy Davis: Let's start with your perspective on Sennheiser's 80th anniversary.
Andreas Sennheiser: It's more about the stories over the past 80 years that really shaped who we are and the impact that Sennheiser made in the market. At the very beginning in 1945, an engineering-minded group of people were obsessed with bringing good and better audio to the world. That group of people injected the spirit of creative dissatisfaction with everything that existed in that field, which then inevitably led to a lot of innovations over the decades. In 1957, the first wireless microphone—the first of its kind globally—was a revelation for everybody who was attached to a cord on stage until then. Another example from the 60s and 70s was the shotgun microphone, which brought creative freedom to the film world because it allowed for recording from a distance without the need for close micing. Every decade has its own special footprint that we have left. And the most recent, I would say, is Spectera, our newest digital ecosystem, bi-directional wireless system, which is really the first of its kind. It's like the move from a push-button phone to a smartphone, which becomes anything you want it to be depending on software-defined features. And this, I think, from the very beginning of a microphone to Spectera, really, what's alive is the innovation spirit, the reliability of a product, and everything just to create remarkable audio experiences.
Cindy: How do the newer technologies, such as TeamConnect and Spectera, impact corporate and higher ed end-users and integrators?
Daniel Sennheiser: Everything starts and ends with a customer request or with a customer user experience, and that's what we are very much focused on. We have our TeamConnect family, microphone, and beamforming technology. We offer the most feature-rich collaboration bars on the market, but we also provide wireless platforms like SpeechLine Digital. Eventually, Spectera will also allow, especially higher education, but also corporations, to embrace the freedom and the new opportunities of that new platform. So, in the end, what Spectera offers us is a platform. Whether it's used for a conferencing system for a large corporate venue or for any monitoring system on a live concert, it doesn't really matter. It's about what the user does with the platform that we're offering. Therefore, we really believe in creating unique applications, unique experiences for the customers with the customers. That has been a stronghold of Sennheiser: co-creation with customers, whether it was with television in the 1950s or with universities today to create hybrid learning experiences, making collaboration and learning easier. It's always about understanding what the application is and how technology can help bring that promise to the customer.
Cindy: It seems like software has been driving innovation in our industry. How is this playing out at Sennheiser?
Andreas: I think you absolutely spot on with that and that's why that to Daniel's example, focusing on the user experience, which is an evolving request, that is very, very important that we really master this on the software side because a generic platform like Spectera will allow different applications, different user experiences, and the software enablement will also make sure that our products are future-proof because you can iterate much faster. We can bring in a lot more requests from customers when we can iterate on the software side than if we had to do a hardware spin. Everything that we're really doing going forward is thinking ecosystem, thinking in ever-growing and enlarging platform solutions, which then can be targeted for this application or for another application, really, depending on the front-end the customer wants to use.
Cindy: A lot of companies are talking about ecosystems, platforms, and iterations of products versus new hardware products. The iterative process can catapult an existing product into a new category, but on the surface, it might not look all that special. During our industry tradeshows, attendees are often looking for the shiny new object.
Andreas: A perfect example is our TeamConnect Ceiling solution. The ceiling microphone in its first iteration was just a very smart dynamic beamforming microphone. In its next firmware iteration, it had new features included, like camera steering, and used the positional information gathered from the speaker to give it to the camera so it could be steered. In the third iteration, we had voice lift integrated, so it became almost like a PA system in the room. In the newest iteration of the firmware, it now behaves like native devices that can be integrated into Q-SYS, Crestron, and Extron control systems completely natively. And it still looks the same from the outside, but in terms of functionality, it has developed fourfold since its inception.
Daniel: At the same time, the complexity is even harder because we as humans are still inherently analog. So, we cannot, at least for the foreseeable future, directly connect to our brains. So we need an analog microphone, we need an analog speaker, and at one point, that needs to be translated. And for that, we need very good hardware. And this is where Sennheiser has historically been strong: at the intersection of the best hardware and the best software. Hardware is something that a lot of companies, especially new software companies, take for granted, and that's where they fail, because if you have stable hardware and the software has to run on that hardware, we need to foresee all the iterations that are coming in the next two to four years and build that into the hardware. And this is where the magic of a long-term thinking company like Sennheiser, still privately owned, still a family company, we can build all that knowledge into the hardware to then enable the next iterations on the software side. It's this combination that makes us so reliable. So, if somebody is in front of 80,000 people or in front of 600 students, feeling completely confident that the system is running remotely, maintained, and being checked just before they go on stage, and talk to their audience.
Our relationship with the customers is also a commitment to try out things with them that may or may not work—to be in an exploration phase with them.
-- Andreas Sennheiser
Cindy: We're posting news about acquisitions just about every day. What keeps Sennheiser a family-run, independent company?
Andreas: It gives us the freedom to really focus on what matters for our customers. This is the be-all and end-all to staying independent. We have a lot of topics that we have followed up on for decades that sounded very promising, and in the far future. Immersive audio is a good example. We've been researching 3D audio algorithms for decades, but there was really no application until AR and VR started to take off, and suddenly, we could bring a lot of our ideas there. Then we brought it to the automotive space for three audio experiences in the cars or doing software plugins like the RIME [Reference Immersive Monitoring Environment] plugin from Neumann that allows you immersive mixing on the go. A lot of these forward-looking things that probably stock-listed companies or companies that are funded externally would not necessarily do to this extent.
Our relationship with the customers is also a commitment to try out things with them that may or may not work—to be in an exploration phase with them. That has proven to be very strong, particularly in times where others have failed. A perfect example is COVID, because we invest so much in our own supply chain, and we have very strong relationships with the major chip manufacturers. We hardly had any product that was not available during the whole COVID period, where most of the others have just said, "You know what? Come back 18 months from now." And I think in such times, it's not just about being a good friend who has coffee with a customer, but also being a partner, offering products and support. I think these are all ultimately a testament to the actions and the thinking that only independent family-run companies would probably do.
Cindy: What’s on Sennheiser’s roadmap?
Daniel: We believe that there are still a lot of great things that we can do, especially in the collaboration and higher education market. We are a company that is agnostic. Ecosystems are really important, but we don't want the customer to be locked into an ecosystem. We play natively with all the big ecosystems because we want the customer to be able to make their own choice. We want the integrator to play their important part, and ultimately, the end user, whether it's a university, a corporate hospital, or whatever, to have the best experience. And for that, we now also bring our Control Cockpit to the cloud, which is basically the control software that is able to monitor all your endpoints. Suppose you have multiple campuses or multiple buildings across the campus. In that case, being in the cloud is actually very helpful because you can manage all those things at the same time from your home office or from your office without having to walk around and check that every professor put the handheld back into the charging cradle or every microphone is working correctly. Looking out a little further, we believe that, especially in the field of 3D audio, there are a lot of things still to explore, and that promotes inclusion for people who are on the far end.
Imagine a large corporate meeting or a university lecture today. You often have people calling in from the far end, and they are very frequently second-level participants. With 3D audio, you're able to have less fatigue, you have better inclusion, and at the same time, you also include people on the ground. For example, our Sennheiser MobileConnect is the system for the hard of hearing. People can bring their own devices; they don't have to sit in a certain area. They can use just their smartphone and the already installed university network to feel included and participate in the lecture from anywhere, including advanced features such as voting. Understanding those verticals and especially those high-impact verticals, which we call education spaces, hospitals, large corporate boardrooms, or large training facilities, is where we understand the user really well. Our technology, whether it's our TeamConnect Ceiling, Spectera, SpeechLine, or Sennheiser MobileConnect, all play together because every solution is unique, and every solution needs to be tailored to the customer.
We want to elevate the discussion in our 80th anniversary with maybe also a little twinkle in the eye and show that we're different.
Daniel Sennheiser
Cindy: The buzz has been about artificial intelligence. How is Sennheiser using AI now, and what is the plan for the future?
Andreas: AI is really cool. For us, AI has mainly two vectors. One, it's an enabler for speed and efficiency because it allows us to develop fast prototypes much quicker, validating assumptions and conducting research. The right use of AI can really propel everybody forward in acquiring knowledge and getting solutions ready. What we believe is even more important is how AI can make our solutions better, our product smarter, and more context sensitive, like a TeamConnect Ceiling sensing, whether it's a person speaking, a coffee machine grinding, or the ventilation sound. So, I think AI has the potential to make the products smart, which allows them, without human interaction, to react as if they're almost intelligent devices that preempts what needs to be done before a user may even have identified the need for a change. So, it's both enabling our products to be almost like smart agents that support whatever the customer wants to do, and at the same time, allowing us to be much more efficient and fast-forward in bringing a solution to the market.
Cindy: Final thoughts?
Daniel: Maybe just one point, which I find interesting, especially now, for our 80th anniversary, because we've decided that we want to talk about innovation and the iterative aspect of it. That's why we also decided not only to share the success stories, but also to share things where we successfully identified a path that does not work. And I think that's really interesting to understand as well. We tend to have a culture where you always talk about what's working, and you most often learn more from the things that are not working or not working yet, because the idea was great, but the execution wasn't. Look forward to some stories, such as the Surrounder, which was an idea out of the late 90s, where we created a thing around the neck where you could listen to surround sound. It sounded great, it looked really stupid, so it wasn't a commercial success.
But today, if we think about 3D audio, that's exactly the kind of frontrunner to that. Or we brought out the first true wireless headphones in 2008 when smartphones didn't have Bluetooth on board. The experience was bad because you had to plug in a transmitting device to then connect to your earphones. However, a couple of years later, when Apple introduced Bluetooth on its iPhone, it suddenly created the market. So we'll talk about these things where we can anticipate a future, and maybe it's the same a little bit with AI right now, where a lot of people think AI is the solution to everything, and it's probably not. AI is a solution to a lot of very smart problems, but sometimes a simple algorithm is much better because it gives you a much more predictable result. We want to elevate the discussion in our 80th anniversary with maybe also a little twinkle in the eye and show that we're different.
