Audio
In-depth integration, performance tuning, and testing across voice, wireless, and distributed audio, backed by world-class audio chambers, proprietary automation, and real-world test homes.
Request a QuoteWhat Does Audio Testing at Novus Labs Cover?
Novus Labs is an audio testing lab that measures how a device sounds and how well it hears, from smart speakers and headsets to whole-home distributed audio. Our engineers cover the many ways audio is implemented today, including voice-enabled devices, wireless audio, and embedded mixed-signal systems, and validate each against the experience a real user actually gets.
That work runs in dedicated audio chambers and low-noise test rooms that hold the environment constant, with the ability to introduce outside physical and RF variables on demand. Alongside industry-standard instrumentation, we have built proprietary software tools that capture KPIs, true user experience, and competitive analysis at a depth benchtop testing alone cannot reach. When a product needs to prove itself outside the lab, we extend testing into our residential test homes.
- Audio Precision AP 555 analyzer and Novus A/V Test Suite
- G.R.A.S. 45AG ear and cheek simulator (HATS)
- Proprietary glitch, dropout, and distributed-audio automation
- Audio chambers and low-noise test rooms
- Dedicated residential test homes for real-world validation
World-Class Infrastructure
Audio chambers, calibrated instrumentation, and a device library that together cover the full performance envelope of modern audio products.
- Isolation for performance & tuning
- Soundproof test rooms in parallel
- Localized & diffused noise sources
- Controlled reverberation
- Low noise floor: < 30 dB(A)
- Turn table for directional orientation
- Real-world environmental simulation
- Reconfigurable for each program
- Audio Precision AP 555 analyzer
- G.R.A.S. 45AG HATS (ear & cheek)
- Reference & SPL meters
- High-performance microphones
- Thousands of 3rd-party devices
- Phones, tablets, PCs, soundbars
- Speakers, AVRs, access points
- Real-world interop coverage
See How We Test
A look inside our audio chambers and audio validation workflow.
Proprietary Audio Automation
A set of robust, flexible, and precise tools for performance and functional end-to-end testing across a wide range of audio applications.
- Cloud computing service agnostic
- Use case specific test scenarios
- Adaptive learning algorithm
- Works with any digital assistant
- Scales to production-grade runs
- Any sine-wave frequency supported
- Runs on all flavors of Linux
- Hardware-agnostic deployment
- Integrates with Distributed Audio
- Headless or attended operation
- Multi-speaker sync & drift analysis
- Scales from a studio to a whole home
- Runs on all flavors of Linux
- Integrates with Glitch Analysis
- Automates verification across devices
Voice Validation Across Every Engine
The AVVF is a Novus Labs-developed test framework that measures the performance of voice-controlled devices regardless of which ASR engine, cloud service, or platform sits behind them. Whether your device runs Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri, or a proprietary engine, the AVVF measures what your end user actually experiences, with the same acoustic rigor as the rest of our audio program, focused on speech recognition accuracy, latency, and behavior under real environmental noise.
- Cloud-service agnostic: works with any ASR engine or backend
- Near-field and far-field test scenarios
- Adaptive learning algorithm for end-to-end tests
- Custom utterance generation via Speechify, Murf AI, and other TTS tools
- Multiple environmental noise conditions (silence, pink, party, music, crowd)
Beyond the Chamber
Controlled labs get you most of the way. Real-world environments close the gap.
Residential Test Homes
Our dedicated residential test homes provide authentic environments for validating audio products at scale: real walls, real Wi-Fi, real interference. Essential for distributed home audio and smart speaker programs.
Explore Test Homes
Case Study: Wireless Interference
A prominent headphone manufacturer couldn't figure out why audio cut out when the paired phone sat in a user's back pocket. Novus built a gel-body dummy and mapped the interference across real-world congestion scenarios.
Read the Case Study (PDF)Audio Testing Questions
What does audio testing involve?
Audio testing measures how a product sounds and how well it captures sound: frequency response, distortion, noise floor, glitches and dropouts, voice-assistant accuracy, and multi-speaker sync. At Novus Labs it runs in controlled audio chambers with calibrated instrumentation, so results are reproducible run to run.
Do you test smart speakers and voice assistants?
Yes. Our Automated Voice Validation Framework (AVVF) measures speech-recognition accuracy, latency, and wake-word behavior for any ASR engine (Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri, or a proprietary stack), under real environmental noise such as party, music, and crowd.
Why test audio in an audio chamber instead of on a bench?
A benchtop cannot hold the environment constant, and even small changes in ambient noise or HVAC can corrupt a measurement. Audio chambers remove the room as a variable, so what you measure is the device's true performance, and results stay comparable across runs and product cycles.
Can you test wireless audio products?
Yes. For Bluetooth and Wi-Fi audio we pair audio testing with wireless connectivity validation, including a hybrid audio-plus-RF chamber, and we can reproduce field issues in our residential test homes.
Ready to Tune Your Audio Product?
Talk to a Novus engineer about your audio validation, voice enablement, or distributed-audio program.