JBL: The future of sound and the 'modulated' use of AI in noise cancellation

What Harman has been building for years in terms of user-oriented product quality in sound with JBL is surely not lost on anyone. We at Gamereactor have been reviewing their releases across the full range of systems, from headphones to speakers, for many years and have almost always been more than satisfied.

But in an environment as hotly contested as that of headphones, to stay on top you have to keep up a constant pace of innovations that allow you to always be at the forefront, and with this aim the company invited Gamereactor and other media to an event to present its new line of devices for 2025 in London, where we were also able to talk to the director of product marketing for EMEA at Harman Lifestyle Audio, Jurjen Amsterdam, in the interview that you can see below with integrated subtitles.

While the talk touched on topics such as new iterations of its best-remembered hardware, Amsterdam left us with some interesting notes regarding the implementation of its artificial intelligence solution to measure and modulate both sound and power and deliver the optimal output for both.

"We're using more and more AI, simply because in previous generations of a Charge or a Flip, like the Flip 6 and all the ones before that, there was always a limiter inside, and that limiter made sure that when you played too loud, it said 'hey, I can't play that loud. I don't want to distort,'" Amsterdam explained. "So what we've now implemented in both the Flip [7] and the Charge [6] is AI Sound Boost, which is literally something similar to what we do in headphones, continuously measure."

"Any incoming signal, we continuously measure it. The AI knows what's coming next, what signal is next. So when it knows for a certain amount of time, it can release a lot more energy because you know if there's going to be a very loud percussion. (...) AI Sound Boost helps us get the most out of the speaker without needing a limiter. Because we know the incoming signal. We know what the signals are coming in next."

Their AI effort is just a portion of what JBL has planned for future product innovation, ranging from developing in-vehicle systems to exploring "gaps" in the market to address, keeping both price and user saturation for new products stable.

"We want to keep improving audio performance. We also want to always make sure we keep the retail price stable," Amsterdam maintained. "So we always, for the same retail price, try to offer more features, more power (...) We see Wi-Fi, we see Bluetooth, we see it converging more and more to do a lot of things. The new immersive audio format.... We'll see a lot of things."

Finally, Jurjen Amsterdam let us glimpse a horizon where entertainment companies, such as streaming services, make the leap to offering better sound quality, and that JBL wants to be there when the time comes.

"It also depends on the streaming services. We are waiting for some of the streaming services to move to high definition. "What does that mean for us in terms of product development?"