About Acoustic Magic
Acoustic Magic is a privately held company, founded in 2000, located near Boston, with the objective of creating a family of array microphones with pickup range superior to conventional microphone technology.
Brown University spent many years working on array microphone technology, creating not only some intellectual property but a pool of array microphone PhD’s. Acoustic Magic licensed the technology, hired a few of the PhD’s, and launched the Voice Tracker™ I array microphone in 2002.
In 2002 all the commercially available array microphones used fixed field of view technology. By definition, their field of view was quite small. The differentiating factor for our microphones was that its listening beam would scan automatically and electronically through a 360° field of view.
The original target market was automatic speech recognition. The idea was to achieve good recognition accuracy without the constraint of having to wear a headset microphone. The Voice Tracker™ I is probably the first non-headset microphone certified by Dragon NaturallySpeaking.
But it quickly became apparent that the wide field of view created by a scanning listening beam made the Voice Tracker™ I useful for meeting recording, lecture recording, and conferencing. The ability to capture all talkers in a 30+ foot room through a single, relatively inexpensive microphone is unique.
Since 2002, we have sold well in excess of 10,000 Voice Tracker™ I. Our microphone, in spite of its technological sophistication, is incredibly reliable. We have had less than one half of 1% returned.
In 2010 we created the Voice Tracker™ II, a smaller, sleeker version of the Voice Tracker™ I which was more easily portable. Additionally, the Voice Tracker™ II has a built-in high-performance acoustic echo canceler to enable conferencing with VoIP products that do not have robust acoustic echo canceler’s.
