The airplane seat with headphones in the headrest

Hamburg, Germany (CNN) — As wireless headphones become ubiquitous, standard airline headphones with their tangled cables and multiple jacks seem increasingly obsolete.

Sure, you can now plug in personal headphones into some in-flight entertainment systems, but your batteries will last as long as a long flight, and you’re willing to risk losing your expensive earbuds in the seat mechanism, never to be seen again. to become ?

Enter Euphony, a new aircraft seat concept by French aircraft interior designer Safran Seats, produced in collaboration with audio technology company Devialet.

Euphony makes a personal headset superfluous. Instead, speakers have been installed in the headrests of each individual seat, with sound levels perfected to allow passengers to enjoy their choice of in-flight entertainment without being overheard or disturbed by their neighbour.

Comfortable installation

Euphony is designed for a corporate or premium cabin.

safra

At first glance, the AIX prototype resembles an ordinary business class airplane seat. Safran has made only minor aesthetic changes to the headrest design.

But the difference is apparent once the inflight entertainment is turned on. Sound starts shooting from the headrest, rumbling the pre-recorded airplane engine sounds already reverberating through the experience space.

The screen plays the smashing trailer for the recent Marvel movie “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness”. Atmospheric music blares through the headrest before the system switches to a number of different audio experiences, including a podcast, for comparison.

It takes me some time to get the headrest in the perfect position — for maximum sound quality, you want it as close to your ears as possible.

But once it’s in the right setting, the personal speakers seem to work fine. The hum of the simulated aircraft engine largely becomes background noise and my attention focuses on what I see and hear.

Euphony isn’t a substitute for the cocoon-like experience of noise-cancelling headphones, but it’s a comfortable setup and feels more akin to the experience of watching a movie on your couch. It would be perfect if you were flying with someone else and want to chat and communicate while watching a movie together.

In the AIX experience space, it’s hard to judge whether there really is no sound leakage – there is only one Euphony mock-up. But the fact that you can’t hear the sound very well unless you have the headrest next to your ear suggests that it should be relatively leak-proof, at least in business or first class, where passengers sit more apart.

Travelers looking for total noise cancellation or privacy may still want to use their personal headset, but Safran senior architect Paul Wills and his team say the idea behind Euphony is to give travelers more options. Travelers can also connect personal devices to the system via Bluetooth, and the speakers in the headrest work both when the seat is fully reclined or in an upright position.

In-flight announcements would not be broadcast through the headrest, as they would also be broadcast in the cabin in general, and Wills’ team wants to avoid a “funny mishmash of noises”.

Instead, announcements from the captain or cabin crew would just cut off on-board entertainment, as is already the norm on flights.

Complex design process

Safran worked with audio experts Devialet to perfect the sound design.

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Euphony has been in development for several years and Wills and his team say perfecting the concept was a matter of trial and error and teamwork.

When Safran first experimented with placing speakers in the headrest, before Devialet came on the scene, Wills said the sound quality was “terrible”.

“At that point it was clear that we are good chair designers, but we are not sound designers, so we had to find someone who was,” he says.

Franck Lebouchard, CEO of Devialet, says the project was an “exciting” challenge for his group of audio experts.

“An airplane is probably the most complex sound environment imaginable, both in terms of frequencies — low frequencies, high frequencies — and volume,” Lebouchard told CNN Travel.

The difficulty of simultaneously blocking the aircraft’s low- and high-frequency sounds was what led the team to develop Euphony without noise-canceling technology — the designers wanted to avoid blocking one frequency and inadvertently boosting the other.

But Safran and Devialet say the current iteration of Euphony will adjust in real-time to mask cabin noise, and future iterations of the concept will try to further improve the sound mix.

Another challenge was to provide the best possible sound quality at the lowest weight. Airlines always try to avoid unnecessary extra cargo, both to reduce their environmental footprint and to avoid extra costs.

The finished product still adds an extra kilo to an already existing chair, and it’s partly for this reason that Euphony is a business and premium offering, at least for now.

“Maybe it just doesn’t fit the economy right now, purely because it weighs too much,” Wills explains.

But in the future, the team thinks they can refine the concept for cheaper cabs.

“There’s a definite demand for it,” Wills says.

Safran already has a yet-to-be-disclosed partner launch airline, which will premiere the product in their first-class and business-class cabins in early 2023. Euphony test flights will take place at the end of this year.

The ultimate goal, Wills says, is to make flying as “normal” as possible, mimicking the experience of relaxing in your own home.

“When you go home at night don’t put on your headphones and watch a movie – it just doesn’t work, does it? You can’t chat with your partner or your friends or yell at the dog or whatever you have to “You have to be free to move. And that was the idea with this. You sit down, turn on the TV, play a movie — it’s just like home.”

Great photo thanks to Safran