New Music Gear Monday: Here Active Listening System

We live in a noisy world and sometimes everyday life just makes it difficult to concentrate. Noise-canceling headphones have been around for a long time, but the good ones are big and bulky and just not suitable for everyday use. Now comes the Here Active Listening System that's designed to be worn anywhere and everywhere to keep your environment as audibly controlled as possible.

The Doppler Labs Here System is comprised of two wireless in-earbuds and a smartphone app. The ear buds aren't designed to reproduce music but to control environmental noise since they act as extremely small noise-canceling earphones.

What's different is that the earbuds are connected via Bluetooth to an app on your phone that controls the digital signal processing. The app features some useful DSP presets for different noisy environments like walking in the city, the subway, the office or on a plane, but it also has a few that audio folk might not feel are needed, like providing EQ, bass boost and reverb when listening to music.

The Doppler Labs Here System will be available later in the year and will retail at $249, but you can find several discount packages if you visit the Kickstarter campaign. The campaign has already surpassed it's goal of $250,000 (its at $569K as I write this), but you can still get involved until July 1st.

Check out the video below that explains more.

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How About Headphone Implants?

Many of us have a love/hate relationship with headphones when we use them. Earbuds usually don't sound that great and they tend to pop out at the most inopportune times. Full over-the-ear headphones sound a lot better, but are bulky and difficult to wear for long periods of time. Has the time come for surgically implanted earphones?

Rich Lee actually had magnet implants in the tragus of his ears that work like headphones, so he has none of these problems. He never mentions what they actually sound like in the video though.

The crazy thing is that he says you can actually buy a kit on ebay to do this, although I couldn't find one. Check out his explanation.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Don't forget to check out my Music 3.0 blog for tips and tricks on navigating social media and the new music business.

Are You Ready For Smart Headphones?

Headphones are a pretty mundane piece of audio gear, which is precisely why it's time to smarten them up a bit. I don't know about you, but one of the things about phones that always bothers me is when the the cups get mixed up where the right and left one are reversed. Thanks to a bit of technology, that may not be a problem that much longer.

Researchers at the Igarashi Design Interface Project recently developed a set of "universal headphones" that are so smart that they can do the following:

• Sense when you've placed an earbud or headphone on the wrong ear, then change the channels to accomodate. 

• Sense when two people are sharing earbuds and change the channels so each earbud contains both the left and right channels (and even allow each listener to hear different tracks at the same time).

• Automatically pause and resume play depending if the phones are on or off your ears.

The way the development team came up with right/left ear sensing is by attaching a proximity sensor to one of the earpieces to measure the distance from the ear. When placed in the right ear, the sensor detects the ear behind it. If it's then placed in the left ear, it knows that the distance has changed and then signals a on-board processor to switch channels.

It's so cool when old technology like speakers, mics and headphones get a new technological twist. Although these updates aren't available in a commercial product yet, expect to see them soon.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.


You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.


Don't forget to check out my Music 3.0 blog for tips and tricks on navigating social media and the new music business.