Resoniks launches industrial AI microphone for factories

Resoniks has launched the MPK801 industrial measurement microphone, designed for use in industrial AI systems.

Priced at €1,170 per unit, the microphone is aimed at factory settings where sound data is used to monitor machinery, manufacturing quality, and equipment faults.

Based in The Hague, Resoniks describes the MPK801 as an Ethernet-based device that captures sound across a 20 Hz to 80 kHz range. It is housed in an IP54-rated enclosure and connects to a standard Ethernet network through a single screw-lock M12 cable.

The product grew out of microphones the company developed for its own QCFlex system. Customer demand to buy those microphones separately led Resoniks to offer the hardware as a standalone product.

Fabian Oberndorfer, Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder of Resoniks, said existing products had not met the needs of industrial users.

"Factories are full of cameras and yet are still almost entirely deaf. The microphones available to them were designed for recording studios, not production lines," said Fabian Oberndorfer, Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder of Resoniks.

He said the company had adapted its internal hardware for wider sale.

"Customers have been asking to buy our microphones on their own since we first built them for QCFlex. The MPK801 gives any team the same calibration and synchronization we developed for our own use," Oberndorfer said.

Industrial use

The microphone is intended for tasks such as detecting cracks forming inside a part after welding or additive manufacturing, monitoring tool and drill-bit wear in machining centres, and locating gas and compressed-air leaks.

Resoniks says one of the main barriers in acoustic AI projects is not the software model itself but the consistency of the data used to train and deploy it. A model trained with one microphone setup in a lab may not perform the same way when moved to different hardware in a factory.

To address that, the company says units are calibrated to within ±0.5 dB of each other, with calibration data stored on each microphone. That allows a replacement unit to be swapped in without recalibration or retraining the model.

The system also includes the ARK141 Sensor Hub, which synchronises up to 14 microphones to within 100 nanoseconds and monitors the health of each channel. The setup is intended to support multi-microphone industrial applications where timing alignment matters.

Market context

Resoniks linked the launch to growth in predictive maintenance, a market Fortune Business Insights expects to rise from about USD $11 billion in 2024 to more than USD $70 billion by 2032. It also cited Mordor Intelligence as saying ultrasound is the fastest-growing sensing technique in machine condition monitoring.

The company argues that users have often faced a trade-off between more expensive specialist hardware that offers bandwidth and synchronisation and lower-cost devices with more limited performance.

Felix Wassmann, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Resoniks, said the company reviewed a large part of the market before building its own product.

"The market for acoustic AI is growing faster than the sensors that feed it," said Felix Wassmann, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Resoniks.

"We benchmarked 27 commercial microphones before we built our own, and the trade-off was always the same: pay thousands per channel for bandwidth and synchronization or give up the bandwidth and hope your model does not need it. With the MPK801 that trade-off is gone. More than 20 companies and research institutes approached us before this launch to explore taking acoustic research into production," Wassmann said.

Data from the MPK801 can be used in Python, MATLAB, and Linux-based toolchains. Windows support is due by the end of 2026.

The microphone is shipping across Europe, and Resoniks is seeking distribution partners in Germany, France, and Spain.