The technology of mobile phones never ceases to amaze us with great advances that sometimes through hardware and sometimes through software, manage to improve results and increase possibilities. One of the newest technologies that we have been able to know is the audio zoom or audio zoom with which we will be able to listen to what happens at a great distance without sound problems.
We will have to put ourselves in a position to understand this technology, for example imagining ourselves in a park where a guitarist is playing a song and around us everyone is talking. In this situation, if we record with our mobile phone, we will listen more to the people who are close to us than to the guitarist himself, but using the audio zoom technology , we will check the result if it is the one desired in our recording.
Microphone sensitivity is key
To make this technology possible, a greater number of microphones have been added to compatible mobiles, which have been strategically placed to obtain the best result. When we use the camera of our mobile phone to record, the microphones focus on the element that we record. These microphones are also aware of the position with the help of the gyroscope of our mobile and detects where other sounds come from to eliminate or reduce them.
This series of microphones are omnidirectional, which means that they are capable of capturing sound from all around the phone. When we use the zoom on the mobile, the audio zoom itself is activated together to increase the sensitivity of the microphones in that direction and limit the capacity of the sounds that are further from the point to which we are aiming with the camera.
With this method it is possible to eliminate what is known as ambient noise and focus the attention of the microphones on a specific point. The farther the object is and the more zoom we make, the more the microphones will limit the sound of our environment.
Equalizers and artificial intelligence
We can not forget that mobiles are a small device that has very difficult to achieve quality levels such as those of a studio or professional microphones, but to compensate for this, it relies on artificial intelligence. Audio zoom also takes advantage of this technology and modifying the sound equalizers according to the circumstances, it is possible to pick up the point at which we are recording in the best possible way.
In turn, the sound of the elements that are close to us is limited. Not all brands use the same method or mechanism, but in a similar way. Some smartphones have a larger number of microphones to more easily eliminate ambient noise , while others use artificial intelligence to leave the decision to the software.
Phones that have audio zoom
This technology is not as novel as we can imagine, since one of the first mobiles to include it was the LG G2, a smartphone that was launched in 2013 and which gave way to others such as the HTC U11. These models did not manage to make this resource so popular, something that has happened with more recent models such as the Samsung Galaxy Note 10 and the Galaxy S20 Ultra . Samsung takes advantage of all the possibilities and in its compatible models adds a practically invisible microphone in the camera module.
Apple has also included this technology in the iPhone 11 Pro and the same has happened with the high-end OPPO that has integrated it into its OPPO Find X2 and X2 Pro models. The last to make it possible has been the OnePlus 8 Pro and we will surely continue to know more and more devices that use audio zoom technology little by little.
