ASUS AI Noise Canceling Technology: An Audio Engineer’s Perspective

ASUS creates a wide variety of hardware and software products that are critical for people's digital lives, and the experts behind these products are just as diverse. ASUS team members are amazingly knowledgeable about their work and always enthusiastic to share their experience with others.

A lesser-known, but important team at ASUS is the Audio Engineering Lab. To learn more about their work, Jesse Chen, an acoustic engineer from the lab, was invited for an interview to tell us about the acoustic features and products at ASUS and how they were developed.

Hi Jesse! Could you please introduce yourself?

Hi! I am Jesse, an acoustic engineer at ASUS. I have been at ASUS for eight years and have worked on hundreds of products spanning from the affordable Ebook to the high-end GX800 water-cooled laptop. Due to my strong passion for music, and that I wrote my thesis on noise-canceling headphones back in graduate school, I decided to join the Audio Engineering Lab to build my professional experience in acoustics.

Can you introduce the Audio Engineering Lab?

The Audio Engineering Lab is a team that comprises deeply knowledgeable mechanical, electrical, and information engineers who tackle a wide range of acoustics-related projects. For example, the speaker is related to the mechanics; sound cards and amplifiers are electronics related; the noise-canceling algorithm used in microphones is related to programming and information engineering.

Recently the field of acoustics has become even more important due to the pandemic, which increased the number of people who were unable to go outside and/or had to work from home. These people had increased need of high quality audio equipment to complete their work and to better enjoy their music and videos.

How do you design a notebook's audio system?

Regardless of laptop type, the design of an audio system is largely dependent on the available space inside the laptop. The bigger the laptop’s interior, the more we can utilize the space to experiment with other types of speakers, such as full-range speakers and high-frequency speakers, to enhance the audio quality. Further, the exact location in which the speakers are placed affects audio quality and is a topic of extensive research.

Can you give us the behind-the-scenes of an ASUS acoustic engineer?

ASUS has a large number of professional acoustic engineers responsible for taking the lead in three core areas: microphones, speakers, and headphones. Most of them have a strong interest in music and each is responsible for a variety of projects. We frequently deal with speaker drivers (speaker boxes), microphone & hardware devices, audio equalizers and audio signal algorithms. These components, subtle and sometimes invisible to the naked eye, are fine-tuned for each laptop.

The Audio Engineering Lab also holds team events from time to time. These activities include visiting audio stores to assess the sound of different speakers. Through the visits the team members develop the ability to appreciate great audio systems and their performance in various frequencies, and learn to identify the authenticity of various sounds, such as different instruments. 

What's the most interesting or challenging part of acoustic design?

I personally feel that the most interesting and fulfilling part of acoustic design is tuning. Since there is only so much space for the speaker within a laptop, there are naturally more audio flaws and distortions than the average stereo. As such, it is our goal to come up with unique designs that mitigate these issues and present users with an audio system that is balanced, clean, and of low-frequency.

Usually, the easiest way to analyze and evaluate sound is to place a microphone next to a laptop while looking at the acoustic curve to see if it is indeed flat. That said, sound itself is quite subjective as people have different sensitivities to certain frequencies. For example, the sound of crying babies and scraping metal tableware have the highest frequency and never go unnoticed. Most of our engineers still rely on their own ears when evaluating sound. Our office is often packed with noise and various types of music as each engineer uses their own preferred sound to fine tune the audio.

Quality audio output has become highly-sought after by work from home students and working professionals. Can you tell us more about the AI noise-canceling technology that has become popular in recent years?

In 2019, ASUS ROG (Republic of Gamers) gaming came out with a headset with an AI noise-cancellation feature that magically filtered out all noise except for the human voice. At the time, AI was just beginning to gain traction and experts in the industry were figuring out ways to implement this technology. They discovered that there were about 10,000 different types of noises that occurred naturally in the environment. By training AI to identify those sounds, they could be effectively filtered out while leaving only the human voice intact. This new technology has proved to be incredibly helpful for microphone users who now no longer need to worry about distracting background noise interfering with their communication.

When the pandemic broke out, more people started to work from home and the demand for laptops and microphones became greater than ever. The new generation of ASUS laptops are now equipped with AI noise-canceling technology to ensure that people have better digital interactions no matter where they are working.