Optimizing earbud microphone performance through the use of digital filter

Abstract

Within the past 10 years, specifically from 2013-2020, global headphone unit shipments have grown considerably. Just recently in 2019, 445 million headphones were sold worldwide. (Vallshery, 2021) These consumer headphones come in a variety of different forms, many of which come with a built-in microphone.

These built-in microphones are widely used for phone calls, online meetings, and even in some cases home music recordings, but their performance is far from perfect. Just to name a few, there are no gain adjustments, no frequency adjustments and sound quality is largely mediocre at best. With the heavy use and demand of these built-in microphones, it stands to reason that improving their quality is necessary.

There exists a technique often used in live acoustic tuning of spaces like rooms and halls: To play Pink Noise, which is noise that has equal energy in every octave, and flatten frequency response. How can this help the aforementioned situation? My research focuses on investigating how implementation of this technique on these small built-in consumer microphones can improve their audio performance.

I will delve into my journey now.