On December 13 (local time), JAL and Airbus unveiled the actual A350-1000, JAL’s new international aircraft, in Toulouse, France. The aircraft will enter service on January 24, 2024, on routes from Haneda to New York (JL006/JL005).
As we have already reported, all seats have been redesigned, with 6 seats in First Class, 54 seats in Business Class, 24 seats in Premium Economy, and 155 seats in Economy, for a total of 239 seats, among which the headrests in First Class and Business Class seats will be equipped with built-in speakers for the The world’s first to be equipped with built-in speakers in the headrests of First Class and Business Class seats.
We spoke with Junta Nishigaki, Project Manager of the Product and Service Planning Group, Product and Service Development Department, about the details of this project.
As a prerequisite, all seats in this year’s class will feature 4K-resolution personal monitors and support Bluetooth connectivity for use with your own headphones/earbuds. For example, if you own noise-canceling headphones, you can bring the ones you are used to and watch movies with them.
However, if you leave your headphones/earbuds on when you get sleepy, they may interfere with the headrest when you turn your face sideways and cause pain, or if they are earbuds, they may come out of your ears. This is especially true in first/business class seats that can be fully flattened.
It is in these situations that headrest-integrated speakers demonstrate their true value. Since they do not need to be worn on the head/ear, sound is localized around the head without interference or dropout, no matter how much the user turns over in bed. Surprisingly, it does not have a noise canceling function, but rather detects in-flight noise and dynamically changes the volume to make it easier to hear.
Although JAL’s A350 is quieter, due in part to the performance of the Rolls Royce engines, there is no escaping the “gurgling” noise that is the mechanism of the airplane. Conversely, we knew that because of this noise, even if the sound was made directly into a particular space, it would not echo to the seats around it.
The project team, with the cooperation of Safran, the company that actually produced the seat, placed the seat in a mock-up that reproduced the interior shape of an A350 and played recorded noise from the cabin of an A350-900, and they were able to verify that there was indeed no sound leakage to the surrounding seats. In movies, it is often the case that dialogue is played at a low volume and accompaniment and sound effects are played at a high volume (with a wide dynamic range), but the speakers are built into the headrests and the dynamic volume control allows this problem to be solved.
Incidentally, the built-in speakers are from Devialet, a French high-end speaker manufacturer that has opened a flagship store in GINZA SIX.
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