play can double as a speaker and haptic input device. 12 So much for audio outputs, how about audio inputs in particular the microphone. Emile Berliner is credited with having developed the first microphone in 1876 but micro- phone technology moved forwards in leaps and bounds with the growth of broadcasting in the 1920s. George V talked to the Empire on medium wave-radio in 1924 from the Empire Exhibition at Wembley using a Round-Sykes Microphone developed by two employees of the BBC, Captain Round and AJ Sykes. Over time microphones came to be optimised for studio or outdoor use, the most significant innovations being the ribbon microphone and lip microphone. Marconi-Reisz carbon microphones were a BBC standard from the late 1920s to the late 1930s and were then gradually supplanted by the ribbon microphone. Over the following decades an eclectic mix of microphone technologies evolved including condenser micro- phones, electromagnetic induction microphones and piezoelectric microphones. Over the past ten years the condenser microphone has started to be replaced by MEMS- based devices sometimes described as solid-state or silicon microphones. The devices are usually integrated onto a CMOS chip with an A to D converter. 11 CUPERTINO, California-February 25, 2010-Apple today announced that music fans have purchased and downloaded over 10 billion songs from the iTunesR Store (www.itunes.com). 12 http://www.hi-wave.com/. Making Telecoms Work The space saved allows multiple microphones to be used in consumer devices and supports new functions such as speech recognition. These functions have existed for years but never previously worked very well. This new generation of microphones also enable directional sensitivity, noise cancellation and high-quality audio recording. Companies such as Wolfson Microelectronics, Analogue Devices, Akustica, Infineon, NXP and Omron are active in this sector. Audio value is probably more important than we realise. It has powerful emotional value. Audio is the last sense we lose before w