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The Fox Report Barry Fox’s technology column Hi-Fi making a comeback & new EU digital tagging law S ince COVID-19 and the maturing of Zoom, companies have taken the cheap and easy way out of staging industry conferences. Instead of hiring a hall, providing refreshments and booking speakers with something worth hearing to say, they have often let self-promoting managers pre-record a speech someone else has written and duck questions. So, hats off to the bodies like electronics industry market analysts Futuresource (www.futuresource-consulting.com) that still put on real live being-there conferences, with meaty content and time for Q&A and old-fashioned personal networking. The DTG, the UK’s Digital Technology Group (https://dtg.org.uk/), is another body that still does real conferencing. At the recent Futuresource Audio Collaborative annual event at London’s Soho Hotel, a string of speakers applauded Apple’s recent commitment to combine headphone and earbud music listening with hearing aid technology. It’s a logical step that will remove the stigma of wearing ugly hearing aids by replacing them with stylish overthe-ear headphones or in-ear buds. A smartphone or tablet will measure the owner’s hearing and use AI to tweak the audio output to compensate for the 24 deficiencies detected. AI will also handle the tricky task of separating live conversation from background noise and music. The ongoing development of low power-drain chips for the new Bluetooth Low Energy standard and the coming of higher capacity batteries will make running times between charging more realistic. This gels with the audio trade statistics distilled by Futuresource research analyst Kavish Patel. Headphone listening remains one of the few consistent areas of growth, with ‘old-fashioned’ over-the-ear headphones making a comeback. That includes True Wireless Stereo (which needs no wire between left and right earpieces) and UWB Ultra-Wideband wireless links, which use pulse coding at higher frequencies than Bluetooth or Wi-Fi for precise location tracking. “When people try listening to better quality sound, they then know they want it”, said Kavish Patel. Several speakers then warned that the industry’s big challenge now is to show consumers why it is worth spending $400 on a pair of buds or cans, when what looks like the same thing can be bought for $15. “How do you tell your story in three seconds and a listing on Amazon? Education for consumers needs to be better”, became a familiar cry throughout the event. No-one could say how the education should be done. Magazines like this are read by tech enthusiasts, not mass-market customers interested in trendy gadgetry. Trendies get their technical advice from online ‘influencers’, who have no clue how anything works, or from shop-floor staff who are often just as badly informed. Industry trade body RETRA (the Radio, Electrical and Television Retailers Association) has now been absorbed by BIRA (the British Independent Retailers Association). BIRA has just now killed off the magazine called Alert, which kept dealers informed and better able to explain the difference between $15 and $400 earbuds. A new immersive sound system called Amphi Multichannel Hi-D from a company called Audioscenic was promoted but not demonstrated. Amphi builds on previous attempts at getting a binaural headphone surround sound image from loudspeakers. The basic technique (as used decades ago by JVC for a long-forgotten system called Bi-Phonics) remains the same: they doctor the phase and level of different frequency bands from the left and right speakers so that the listener’s right ear does not hear the left sound and vice versa. Now, as then, the system needs to know the listener’s position. This is relatively easy if the listener is sitting at a PC, at a conference table, in a fixed car seat, or even a dentist’s chair. AI will help, but even the cleverest system will not have much success at location tailoring if several people are lolling on a living room sofa or in different chairs and not sitting still. Past systems have failed commercially because most people find it easier and more relaxing just to continue listening to old-fashioned stereo from a pair of speakers working on the principles laid down in the 1930s by British electronics pioneer Alan Blumlein. Lisa Stafford, from a company called TAZAAR, was billed to speak about ‘sustainability’, which is usually a sure-fire yawn-maker. But she jolted the audience into interest when describing the new “Digital Product Passport”. It emerged that in 2024 the EU passed laws which, from 2026, will require all Practical Electronics | February | 2025 The Fox Report Barry Fox’s technology column electronics (along with textiles and booze) to be digitally tagged – eg, with a QR code – which holds product information and a log of the product’s history. Once Ms Stafford had moved on from somewhat vague talk about using the new passport to “set up meetings, influence positive actions, create communities of owners, build customer loyalties, foster a cheaper way to spread word of mouth and reduce landfill”, some hard facts started to emerge. So far, digital device passports have been used only for luxury goods, like top-end cars and watches, and in the automotive and aerospace industries, as an alternative to paper records for countering the sale of counterfeit spares. But, in theory at least, the time is coming when shirts, hats and socks will be coded. Ms Stafford predicts that within the next five years, the effect will be huge. Batches of just about anything will be traceable. Owners will be alerted to problems. How? Mobile apps will be involved. Even wine bottles will be tagged. This raises all manner of knock-on issues. Will alerts end up in spam traps? How will people who do not have a smartphone be warned about a problem with their socks? Will garments buzz or beep? Badly handled, Digital Product Passporting could end up another well-intentioned but inadequately-thought-through ‘official’ idea that will create yet more red tape and paperwork for already struggling businesses – not just inside the EU, but anywhere in the world that is trading with the EU. During the conference networking coffee break, an awful lot of people were saying the same thing: “It’s completely new to me”. One of the last sessions of the day was for me the most provocative. The topic was connectivity, and a panel of experts debated in detail the pros and cons of all the new and coming wireless link technologies, including Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and UWB. “Bluetooth is cheap and all devices are compatible”, argued Maurice Moroney of Qualcomm. “Bluetooth does a bit of everything and is the de facto standard. The consumer wants not to care; not to care about how it works, just know that it works”. Alexander Tschekalinskij of the Fraunhofer research institute in Germany (creators of the MP3 standard) revealed the welcome news that “Fraunhofer is looking for one codec that does everything”. Jez Stark of UK research company Cambridge Consultants said, “Wire sets the benchmark. It’s the lowest common denominator”. Maurice Moroney put it another way: “Wireless is the invisible wire that the consumer can’t see”. So I put a question to the panel: Why not use wire instead of wireless? With wire – or optic fibre – you get instant connection, with no need for pairing, no gobbledegook passwords, no struggling to set up Wi-Fi Mesh Extenders, no latency, no quality loss, no need for compression codecs, no inexplicable dropouts and disconnections, and no need to re-charge batteries for wire-free speakers or headsets? With wire or fibre, there are virtually no security risks. Just plug in and switch on. Why is it so desirable to stop providing headphone jacks? Why create the situation where wirelessly connecting to one device can stop another device working, with reboots then needed to reconnect? In short, what has the industry got against wires? Maurice Moroney of Qualcomm defended the quest for wire-free connection with curious logic: “With so many ‘sinks and sources’ (input, output, source, play and display devices) from so many different manufacturers, Bluetooth will never be completely right. But I was on the committee that designed the HDMI standards. That was wire, and it was a real nightmare.” Indeed, HDMI was and remains a pain in the neck. Connections often don’t work or stop working until devices have been unplugged, re-plugged or re-booted. Ask any conference speaker who has tried to connect their laptop PowerPoint to a big screen or projector. But that is not because HDMI uses a hard copper wire connection; it’s because of all the complexity that is built into the HDMI standard, to make the copper connection rely on handshakes that are intended to block unauthorised copying and all too often also block legitimate connections. “The driver of change is shareholder interest”, reminded Moroney. I was so gobsmacked by such an honest appraisal of why so much of the technology we now rely on behaves all year round like a dysfunctional family at Christmas that I asked Mr. Moroney to confirm what he had said as I wrote it down. Put another way, “the driver of change is shareholder interest” means that manufacturers’ drive for profit brings PE consumers misery. 1551W IP68 miniature enclosures Learn more: hammondmfg.com/1551w uksales<at>hammondmfg.com 01256 812812 Practical Electronics | February | 2025 25