Soundskrit Turns Wind Challenge into Product Advantage

Success Story.

Soundskrit

Soundskrit Turns Wind Challenge into Product Advantage

When Soundskrit co-founder Stephane Leahy realized his directional MEMS microphones performed poorly in windy conditions, it looked like a show-stopping flaw. Instead, it became the foundation for the company’s new audio product, the Butterfly Demo Kit.

The ability to maintain clarity at range is exactly what emerging audio applications such as speech-to-text, live translation, and intelligent conferencing need, but the physics of wind threatens to undermine the entire value proposition.

Montreal-based Soundskrit was founded in 2019 at TandemLaunch startup incubator with the goal of helping customers to “hear the impossible.” It was recognized as one of the top silicon startups to watch in 2023 and 2024 by the EE Times’ Silicon 100.

Soundskrit’s core technology is a directional microelectromechanical system (MEMS) microphone that uses two ports to pick up sound from a preferred direction and reject background noise. “There’s a nice relationship where a directional microphone will have the same level of quality as an omni-mic at twice the distance,” Leahy said. “You’re always fighting distance.”

Microphone performance changes with distance and device format. The quality of sound scales with distance between the microphone and the source. That’s why a phone call can sound better than a far-field video call where participants could be several feet or even metres from the device, and why earbuds outperform devices that sit farther away from the mouth.

From Lab Problem to Deployable Solution

Instead of trying to build another MEMS-based microphone from scratch, Soundskrit opted to attack the wind problem experimentally and develop, build, and commercialize a product that incorporated its directional microphone.

The Soundskrit team built a wind testing facility instrumented with anemometers to measure wind speed and tested the company’s own devices and off-the-shelf products such as doorbells and earbuds. That let them characterize the microphone under conditions where wind speed was controlled.

By reverse-engineering how leading consumer devices handled wind, Soundskrit came up with a pragmatic architecture that didn’t reinvent the wheel. “The better path was to combine our mic with an omni-mic and do switching,” Leahy said.

Because wind is often low frequency, you can switch to the omni signal but keep the directionality to high frequencies if there’s a gust of wind. When it’s gone, you switch back to the directional signal.

Sounds simple on paper, but in practice, it demands tight optimization for embedded compute and careful tuning of latency and switching behavior. It needs to be smooth and can’t require too much compute due to the limitations of embedded chips.

Soundskrit’s Butterfly Demo Kit combines hardware, packaging, and software. On the hardware front, the team explored how microphone placement and shielding could reduce turbulence. For packaging, it tested the effect of larger air gaps and meshes. Leahy said in one prototype, a one-centimetre gap reduced wind by a factor of 10, but that configuration would be too large for many consumer devices.

On the software side, Soundskrit developed switching logic that could move between directional and omnidirectional signals depending on conditions. Leahy described that work as cleverly toggling between both, emphasizing that the real challenge was doing it smoothly and with limited compute on embedded systems.

This means the Butterfly Demo Kit preserves the superior signal quality of the directional MEMS mic most of the time, while falling back gracefully to proven wind-resilient strategies when conditions demand. Soundskrit is already filling orders, including 260,000 mics for China’s Alibaba, one of the world’s largest online retailers.

De‑Risking Adoption of New Audio Hardware

Leahy said the goal isn’t to own “wind-resilient microphones” as a niche, but to clear the main barrier to adopting a fundamentally better audio sensor. “Our technology is not improving the performance in wind; it’s improving the performance when there’s no wind and then leveraging existing solutions.”

FABrIC, managed by CMC Microsystems, was a catalyst for helping Soundskrit turn a technical challenge into a product advantage. It helped the company de-risk a product category that depends on balancing performance, manufacturability, and real-world usability.

Leahy said that without FABrIC, the company might have deprioritized wind mitigation in favour of other markets. “I don’t know if we would have spent as many resources solving this problem. We might have just said, “Okay, well, let’s just try to address other markets and put that aside for now.” And we would be in a worse spot now.” Funding support not only paid for experiments but encouraged the Soundskrit team to define a concrete development plan and test multiple approaches in a structured way.

The outcome was both technical and commercial. Soundskrit gained a better understanding of what worked, what didn’t, and how to position the product for customers who need a minimum level of performance and reliability in difficult environments.

When customers from around the world ask about wind, Leahy said, the company has more than an answer — it has a world-class Canadian-made technology broadly relevant for mobile phones, wearables, and field devices where wind and environmental noise degrade speech quality. “We have a solution and it helps us get that sale.”

MEMS (micro-electro-mechanical Systems) are micrometre-scale devices that combine tiny mechanical parts (like gears, springs, or moving masses) with electronic circuits on a single silicon chip to sense, control, or drive physical phenomena.

Canada leads in MEMS through a strong national ecosystem of research centres, specialized foundries, and scale-up support that commercialize advanced microelectromechanical systems for sensors and optics.

FABrIC is strengthening Canada’s domestic capacity to design, fabricate, and commercialize MEMS devices—especially in strategic areas like AI-enabled sensors, defence/aerospace dual-use applications, and quantum technologies.