Invalidity dossier
US 9871496
Personalized adjustment of an audio device
Current assignee: Faunus IP Holdings LLC
Added 10/30/2026, 12:01:14 AM
Active provider: DeepSeek · deepseek-flash
Patent summary
Title, assignee, inventors, filing/issue dates, abstract, and a plain-language overview of the claims.
Patent Overview — US 9,871,496 B2
Title: Personalized adjustment of an audio device (as listed on the supplied page)
Patent number / application: US 9,871,496 B2; Application US 14/867,107; earlier publication US 2016/0020744 A1.
Inventors: Hui Siew Kok; Tan Eng Sui.
Assignee: The supplied page lists the original assignee as Bitwave Pte Ltd and the current assignee (as of the page's display) as Faunus IP Holdings LLC. (Note: the supplied excerpt reports these labels but does not establish any chain of title; per instructions, ownership transfers are not analyzed here.)
Key dates (from the supplied page): Priority date 2010-07-27; filing date 2015-09-28; publication of US 9,871,496 B2 and grant 2018-01-16. The page shows a status of "Active" and an "anticipated expiration" of 2031-07-26; these are stated as page labels, not legal conclusions.
Purpose: The disclosure addresses the limits of conventional narrow-band audio, equalization, and volume control — which cannot account for each user's individual hearing sensitivity and can cause distortion or clipping when volume is raised. The stated aim is to adjust audio effects to personalize an audio device for an individual based on that person's ear sensitivity. [source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US9871496/en]
Plain-language scope described: A user tunes the device by raising the volume of a tone in each available frequency band (using a man-machine interface/control panel, wired or wirelessly connected) until the tone is clearly perceived; the level at which this occurs is stored as a minimum perceived level. From these levels, per-band gain settings are computed and applied to multi-band filters to offset or equalize the user's hearing sensitivity. During normal use, the device can monitor environmental noise and automatically adjust signal levels in each band to match the user's hearing level. The described audio device may be a headset and may use a microphone array (two or three sensors) with a signal-processing algorithm emphasizing voice quality while minimizing noise.
What the excerpt does not establish: It gives no claim language, so the actual scope of protection cannot be determined from it; it omits FIG. 10 and the remainder of the description; and it does not provide details of the gain computation or filter implementation. The excerpt also does not address validity, prior art, or litigation; per instructions, none of these are researched or opined on here.
Generated 10/30/2026, 12:01:35 AM
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Litigation summary
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PTAB challenges
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Assignment history
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Prior art
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Obviousness
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Extensions
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Derivative works
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