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LAS VEGAS — As usual, CES 2022 brings together a panoply of technologies under many vast roofs. Audio gear has e'er been a huge part of the show, now celebrating its 50th year. While "traditional" sound of the high-end variety – that of separate source components, turntables, receivers, amplifiers, and speakers — are still well-represented at CES, at the lower end of the market there's been a transition to more integrated systems oriented effectually sourcing content from smartphones, tablets, and computers.

Consumers are increasingly moving to simpler, wireless devices that tin be controlled by their smartphones, may be portable to take outdoors or elsewhere, and generally are simpler to command and live with. Look effectually CES, and you see a vast array of headphones to accept your music with y'all, multiple styles of wireless speakers, soundbars to make simpler home theater setups, and innovative use of digital sound processing to make big audio out of lighter, smaller devices. Hither's a few of the interesting things I found this twelvemonth.

Aivia

Aivia showed a portable Bluetooth speaker with some new wrinkles. It can charge your telephone wirelessly, sports a 7-inch colour touchscreen, and runs Android. Using Google Assistant, you tin can tell it to play music, do smart dwelling house control functions, and other things a la Amazon's Repeat. Sound is delivered by dual side drivers and a built-in 15-watt subwoofer. With the screen and Android, effectively information technology could also be a mini Goggle box streaming annihilation you lot can do with Android apps. The product is a prototype, and will launch on Indiegogo in the second quarter of 2022.

Aifi is another portable Bluetooth speaker with some cool tricks. It is portable and rechargeable similar many others, merely also built to high-quality standards with an aluminum housing and long-throw aluminum speaker cones. The trick comes in the way these speakers tin can be combined to evangelize big sound. They tin exist stacked and continued side to side to create a bigger soundfield. The speakers accept proprietary "WaveDot" affect connectors on the tops and bottoms. When the speakers sense that they are stacked on each other, some algorithms and clever DSP processing piece of work to synchronize and multiply the sound. The idea is that y'all tin can employ several to get better sound from TV and movies in your living room, but skin off speakers to take with you to an outing outdoors.

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The Swedish company showed a 66-speaker stacked array for event (above), with impressive sound. While it made an interesting demo, nobody would really stack anywhere close to that many. But the speaker's flexibility and overall audio quality was notable.

Audezeplanar

Moving on to headphones, Audeze showed off what it calls the kickoff in-ear planar magnetic headphones. Planars are often favored by audiophile headphone aficionados for their excellent frequency response and sound quality, but are usually fairly big and beefy over-the-ear models and may require separate headphone amps to drive properly.

Audeze'due south ISINE20 (correct) includes a DAC and headphone amp built inline with the cable, which is Lightning compatible and takes a digital signal out of the iPhone and processes it with the custom DAC. The result is a very rich-sounding headphone likewise capable of decoding high-resolution sound. The $599 headphones besides include an iOS app to customize the audio to your preferences.

Also in the headphone realm, Ossic showed off the new Ossic X (beneath), which claims to be the world'southward get-go 3D headphones. The premise is that the headphone calibrates the sound to the listener's caput and ear size automatically, and delivers a more immersive environs blazon sound experience from regular stereo or environment sources. In add-on, the headphones track head and trunk motility and suit the sound and so that yous continue to hear the 3D consequence.

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At that place have been many headphones in the past that have provided a faux environs or 3D blazon of upshot. But DSP processing has improved exponentially over the years to the extent that information technology is now far more than realistic and natural sounding and yields an actual improvement in audio, from instrument separation in music to audio effects in movies. Ossic raised $2.7 million on Kickstarter and is planning to ship the X by this summer.

In home components, one example represents a significant upgrade to an established category. SVS is an established speaker company founded on the principle of delivering Hi-Fi audio at prices mere humans can afford. Originally employing an internet direct model, but at present carried by some brick and mortar retailers, it take developed a line of (relatively) affordable speakers that deliver high quality sound. Information technology started out with subwoofers, which take been highly rated by audio reviewers and especially praised for delivering high value for the price. At CES it introduced a massive 16 inch model, the PB-sixteen Ultra.

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This 175 pound beast of a sub packs an 8-inch voice ringlet, a sixteen-inch long excursion commuter, and 1,500 watts of amplification (with peak power of 5,000 watts). It as well comes with an iOS and Android app with blaster tweaking for music, movies, and more. At $2,500 it'south not inexpensive, but it volition provide all the satisfying deep bass you could need in almost any home theater or stereo setup. While this production may non break new ground in terms of "new" digital audio tech, it is an impressive feat of audio engineering and packaging.

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Finally, a completely different type of speaker applied science from Waveion aims to revolutionize speaker blueprint. Well, maybe not all of it, as the bass portion of the speaker is a conventional woofer. Waveion designed a "membrane-less" speaker, eliminating the inherent distortions in speaker materials and their physical boundaries (like say aluminum, Kevlar, or silk). The speaker, in their words, "generates sound directly from the air, whereby a pulsating air shaft generates a 360-degree sound field," and the process "converts molecules in the air to ions and back into molecules, invisible to the eye." I don't understand the scientific discipline, but it did sound and look impressive. The ion function of the speaker handles the 300-20kHz range, while the conventional bass driver handles the 30-330Hz notes. Waveion is has completed the Model One prototype as a proof of concept, and is seeking partners and additional funding to get information technology into product.