If you’re an Apple user, you might be in luck. The company has just filed a patent that allows earphones to adapt to one or more users, meaning that sharing earphones may no longer the phase-induced mess that it currently is.
The stereo field is a large virtual soundscape that puts instruments in various positions around your head for that ‘larger than life’ feel. While it sounds great when you’re alone, there’s nothing more annoying than sharing your favourite song with a friend only to find that the other person can’t hear anything properly.
The problem is called phase and it happens because of the way our ears perceive direction. Music uses a delay system to make us believe that we can hear things around us. When you get the full stereo experience it sounds amazing, but when you only hear one channel¦ Things go a little quiet and weird.
Well fear no more because Apple has just acquired another ingenious patent for their ever-expanding legal department. The new document details a system whereby the earphones can detect if they have multiple users and adjust the song to two mono streams. The earphones make use of multiple sensors to figure out whether they need to operate in single or multi-user mode.
Perhaps even cooler, the patent has the potential to allow multi-source listening from a single pair of headphones. As a stereo source is essentially two mono sources, you could simply split the signal into two separate channels and allow each listener to enjoy their own music in private.
So in future when your friend steals your phone because he ‘forgot’ his own, you no longer need to listen to all the garbage that he enjoys on a daily basis.
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