Sensaura

» see sensaura.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Sensaura's own corporate history starts in 1928, which is cheating slightly but not by much. The company grew out of Central Research Laboratories at Hayes in Middlesex, EMI's research arm, founded that year and the place where Alan Blumlein filed the first patents on stereophony in 1931. Management bought CRL out in 1996 to form Scipher plc, which took a London listing in February 2000 under the ticker SIP. Inside it sat a small team whose product was not a chip or a card but a set of algorithms for making two speakers sound like a room.

The work began in 1991, when Alastair Sibbald started the research that became Sensaura 3D Positional Audio. By 1997 Yamaha had become the first audio chip manufacturer to license it. By 2001 the company's own figures put its licensees at roughly 62 percent of the world audio chip market, a list that ran from Analog Devices down to Nvidia. In 2001 the Royal Academy of Engineering gave Sensaura the MacRobert Award, Britain's main engineering prize, and the Duke of Edinburgh handed it over at Buckingham Palace on 14 November. The citation mentions eleven years of research and recording sessions at Abbey Road.

Scipher sold the entire business and its patent portfolio to Creative Technology in December 2003 for $5.6 million in cash, a deal EE Times reported as valuing Sensaura at $6.4 million once $800,000 of retained debt was counted. Nine months later Scipher's bank appointed administrative receivers. Creative ran what it had bought as an internal research division from an office in Egham in Surrey. That lasted until the summer of 2007, when sensaura.com served its last working page on 11 July and was returning 404 by 8 August. There was no announcement, no farewell page, and no trade-press notice of any kind.

I would not have known the name at the time and nor would almost anyone who used it. On frmtr my signature was a spec list, the way everybody's was, and the audio line in it said whatever was printed on the chip or the motherboard. It never said Sensaura, because Sensaura was never printed on anything. That is what a licensing business is: the better it works, the more completely it disappears into other people's products.

~ the case file ~

~ the ear in software ~

The technical problem is a good one and Sensaura's answer to it was physical. Your brain locates a sound using the way your own head and the folds of your outer ears distort it before it reaches the eardrum, which is described mathematically as a head-related transfer function. To synthesize that effect you need a library of measured HRTFs, and measurements taken from volunteers or from off-the-shelf dummy heads were not accurate enough. So, as Sibbald's own paper puts it, CRL built a proprietary artificial head and used a digital cloning method to engineer almost perfectly matched pairs of ears, with the ear canals formed as part of the same piece. They called it the Digital Ear and the measurements from it went into the algorithms.

The product names were mostly FX. MacroFX handled sounds very close to the head, inside about a meter and a half, where the usual models break down, while ZoomFX scaled a source so that a large object sounded large rather than like a point. EnvironmentFX did the reverberation, and MultiDrive and Virtual Ear dealt with speakers and headphones. None of these were things you bought. They were things your driver did.

~ sold at the top ~

Creative had spent the preceding years at war over exactly this technology. It litigated against Aureal until the legal bills finished the company off, bought the remains in 2000, and pushed its own EAX as the standard for game audio. Buying Sensaura in 2003 took the last serious alternative off the table. The acquisition shows up most clearly in the small print of Sensaura's own developer FAQ from August 2004, which prices GameCODA, its cross-platform audio middleware, at $10,000 per title covering all four of the platforms it supported. The next sentence offers a 50 percent rebate to any developer who supports Creative's EAX ADVANCED HD features, which is to say the acquired competitor's price list now carried a discount for adopting the acquirer's format.

The last version of the homepage, frozen through the first half of 2007, claims shipments on more than 24 million game consoles and 150 million PCs, and describes Sensaura as an R&D division of Creative Technology. gamecoda.com went dark a few days before sensaura.com did, and by November both domains were redirecting to creative.com with the same server response. The company's final managing director, Douglas Balfour, was already sitting on a competitor's board by June 2007 and running an unrelated business by October. Six years later he registered a company called Sensaura Limited at an address in Henley-on-Thames, which never traded and was struck off in October 2014.

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