Unveiled: Audience powers iPhone 4′s impressive noise cancellation
When we analyzed the Nexus One last January, the big news was its Audience voice processor. The Audience chip takes advantage of two microphones (if you're counting, that's one more than most cell phones) to cancel out ambient noise.
Context & Ripple Effects
When the Google's Nexus One debuted its noise-muzzling voice processor in January 2010, Audience's two-microphone ambient-noise cancellation was pitched as a differentiator for Google's first self-branded phone — a feature reviewers noted the iPhone 3GS lacked in head-to-head comparisons like the Nexus One vs. iPhone 3GS matchup.
iFixit's teardown now shows Apple adopted the very same Audience voice processor inside the iPhone 4. What began as an Android talking point has quietly become shared infrastructure: both flagship platforms now run on the same audio silicon.
First-order effects
- Apple is now a customer of Audience, the same chip vendor powering its chief rival's flagship — putting Audience on both sides of the Android-iOS divide overnight.
- iPhone 4 callers get the dual-mic noise cancellation that was previously the Nexus One's signature feature, erasing one of the 3GS's audible shortcomings.
Second-order effects
- Rival handset makers now face a baseline where two microphones plus a dedicated voice processor are expected, not optional — pushing second mic BOM cost into every premium phone spec sheet.
- Audience gains pricing leverage as effectively the proven merchant supplier for smartphone noise cancellation, with both ecosystems' flagships validating its design.
Third-order effects
- If both leading platforms standardize on dedicated audio DSPs fed by multiple microphones, voice processing splits off from the baseband/application processor as its own component category in smartphones.
- Hardware-grade noise cancellation becomes table stakes, shifting differentiation toward who tunes it best rather than who has it at all.
The trend: Smartphone audio is moving from single-mic afterthought to multi-microphone designs built on dedicated voice-processing silicon, with one merchant vendor supplying both rival platforms.