Amazon’s Director of Audio at Lab126 explains the interesting design decisions behind the company’s affordable Apple AirPods rivals.
Despite being seen as a somewhat controversial – and slightly tacky – move, Amazon had a good reason to add a smile logo to the outside of its Amazon Echo Buds (2nd Gen) true wireless earbuds. According to the company’s Head of Audio, people kept putting them in wrong. “We found that with our first-generation, people were actually putting them in upside down or backwards,” said Phil Hilmes, Director of Audio at Amazon’s Devices & Services Team. “It’s understandable if you haven’t worn a pair before, and some people have really big ears so they actually fit in there upside down.” You read that right, Amazon had to put the smile logo on there to prevent people from putting in the earbuds upside down. “Having that smile logo actually helps them say, ‘OK, this is the right way this goes in there’ and it helps orient the microphone towards your mouth while still being subtle.” There’s an old adage in computer engineering that products can’t be fast, good and cheap, but only two out of the three. The way that Hilmes talks about audio design – and specifically the tradeoffs that have to be made when designing a pair of earbuds like the Echo Buds – you can tell he’s heard it before. In a discussion with TechRadar, Hilmes talked about the decisions that went into making the 2nd Generation Buds – choosing to include a larger full-range driver instead of a dual driver design and building an efficient noise-cancelling algorithm that saves on battery life.
