aHEAD in all aspects
At HEAD acoustics, we have been devoting our attentions to all aspects of voice communication even long before manufacturers and network operators began to focus on it. We have explored emerging technologies and conducted research into the effects of signal processing on human perception.
What nobody could have foreseen at the time
It was my interest in music, audio and recording studio technology that led me to acoustics. Spending my time grappling with topics such as "speech intelligibility" and "hands-free systems" as part of my PhD – areas still heavily regulated by Deutsche Post back then and limited to a bandwidth of 3.4 kHz, a long way from hi-fi – seemed like breaking with this interest. Looking back, I realize that this in‑depth study laid the foundation for my enthusiasm with these topics that remains with me to this day. Still today, I am fascinated in how cooperation can provide a way to create a network that functions worldwide, regardless of borders and ideologies.
Nobody could have foreseen at the time how fast analog narrowband telephony would be followed by the introduction of new technologies; that latency would become an issue in communications; that the quality of signal processing in end devices would suddenly become of vital importance; and more.
Ahead of time
With the introduction of digital cellular networks and the move to VoIP, the subjects of our research and development work and the measurement and analysis technology that it has produced have suddenly become literally “standard”. Many of our ideas and the resulting methods got public and have become standardized. In a similar way, we are now focusing on the concept of smart homes.
We have remained true to our aim of being "aHEAD" at every step of the way. We are still focused on offering innovative means of optimizing communications equipment of all types. With our technology, we aim at reproducing communication between people as accurately as possible. Even more, we also want to help raising the quality of human–machine communication to a completely new level.
Authentic communication is the goal
Personally, I think we have gotten a lot closer to my vision of what is ideal: with good conditions in place, we can now actually conduct telephone calls with hi-fi quality. The specialist expertise of our highly skilled team is going to put us in a position to broaden our product range to such an extent that it will be used for all conceivable use cases for devices and configurations, however complex the challenges may be. Our objective is nothing less than making communication of all types into an acoustically authentic experience and supporting new voice technologies in a way like how we have supported telephony since our inception.
