Your guide to the 5 latest audio tech features to look out for

Spatial audio

Many speakers, headphones, and earbuds feature some form of spatial audio nowadays. The idea is to surround the listener in a 3D sound field for a more immersive experience when watching movies, playing games, or enjoying music. There are a few different ways that can be done.

Home entertainment systems can use physical speakers placed around your living room, so the sound seems to be coming from the front, sides and behind you. For a simpler setup, soundbars often simulate that experience by featuring multiple speakers inside the one unit, which can bounce sound waves off the walls or ceiling to make it seem like it’s coming from everywhere.

Occasionally, headphones use the same technique, with multiple speakers inside each ear cup. Now you’ll frequently find a virtual spatial audio system at work in headphones and earbuds, which use powerful signal processing to convert the audio into virtual surround sound.

One nifty trick that many headphones and earbuds use is called head tracking. Basically, the gear can sense when you turn your head and will adjust the audio processing accordingly, so it seems like you’re moving inside the sound field, rather than it moving with you.

In other words, if you hear a sound to your left and turn your head, that sound will now come from in front of you, instead of always staying to your left. It really adds to the immersion of games and movies, and helps you feel like you’re at a gig if you’re jamming out in your lounge room.

To enjoy music with spatial audio generally requires accessing tracks that have been mixed and remastered to support the format, however Bose Immersive Audio works with all streaming sources.

TV Audio Swap

Say you’re watching an action movie but someone else in the house is trying to sleep. Rather than turn it down and soften the audio experience, you can switch the output from your home theatre soundbar straight to your headphones, so you can still immerse yourself in a movie or game without keeping the whole house awake.

Sonos has a feature called TV Audio Swap, and it works if you have the Sonos Ace headphones and a compatible Sonos soundbar, while other manufacturers have their own versions of the tech too.

Noise cancellation

There’s nothing worse than having your tunes drowned out by the neighbour’s mowing, or a podcast on the train interrupted by the boring chatter of people beside you. Luckily, noise cancellation tech can be found in plenty of headphones and earbuds, and there are a few different types.

The most basic is passive noise cancellation. This usually means just physically muffling the sound with thicker ear cups, which is affordable and reasonably effective.

A more high tech version is active noise cancellation. This works by capturing outside noise using tiny microphones on the headphones or earbuds, then generating the exact opposite wavelengths of sound in your ears, which cancels it out. It’s great for things like removing the low hum of the engines while you’re trying to nap on a plane.

The next step up is adaptive noise cancellation, which, as the name suggests, will react to a wider variety of sound frequencies – so it’s better at removing both the engine sound and the crying babies at the same time. The most accurate results though come from hybrid noise cancellation, which places microphones both inside and outside the ear cups.

There are still some sounds that you need to be able to hear though, like alarms or approaching vehicles, so many headphones and earbuds include a ‘transparency’ mode that can pick out and admit certain sounds, keeping you aware of the outside world.

Multipoint pairing

Back when we used physical cables, it was easy to quickly plug into other devices when you needed to switch, but Bluetooth can be a bit fiddly to connect and reconnect all the time. Multipoint pairing is the solution if you’re regularly switching between two or more devices.

This feature lets you connect headphones or earbuds to two devices at once, and automatically switches audio from one device to another. For example, if you’re listening to music on a laptop and get a call on your phone, multipoint will prioritise the call, pause the music, and send it straight to your ear gear.

Bluetooth connection

Chances are high there are plenty of Bluetooth signals whizzing around your home right now. But while we take Bluetooth for granted nowadays, there’s more to it than you might realise.

There are a few different versions of Bluetooth, usually based on the device’s age and class. Devices released in the last eight years or so will be version 5-point-something – the latest is v5.4, released in 2023, but that’s still finding its way into consumer devices for now.

The Bluetooth in most consumer grade devices has a range of about ten metres, which hasn’t changed much in a long time. But besides that, each new version usually strengthens the signals, increases the amount of data that can be sent, and speeds up that connection. In terms of audio gear, that means you’ll get higher quality sound and lower lag out of devices with more recent versions.

It’s also important to note that every Bluetooth version is backwards compatible, so you don’t need to match up versions between different devices – any Bluetooth device will work with any other, you just might miss out on some specific features.

If you want to really dig into getting the best sound from your Bluetooth headphones or earbuds, pay attention to the codecs that your device uses. These are how the data is packaged, so it affects the sound quality, speed, and how many channels of audio are sent. Some are company-specific – iOS uses AAC, for instance, and aptX is mostly on Android devices. Higher-end headphones can use Sony’s LDAC, which offers some of the highest-quality audio currently possible over Bluetooth.

There is also Bluetooth LE (Low Energy), which allows devices to connect for longer periods without significantly decreasing battery life, and Bluetooth LE Audio that transmits high quality sound at low data rates. LE Audio isn’t backwards compatible with the original Bluetooth Audio, however most new devices should support it.

To get the most out of a specific codec, both the audio source and the headphones will need to be compatible with it. But again, they’ll still all work with each other, so they’ll default to the best codec that’s common to both devices.