Here – Active listening earbuds

Interesting product. I wonder how often people would use these. Fiddling with an EQ curve while at a concert is the last thing I’d want to do.

Here does not stream or play recorded music. Instead, the Digital Signal Processor (DSP) inside Here acts as a studio in your ears by providing you with a volume knob, equalizer and effects to transform real world audio. Use this “remote control for your ears” to have an optimal listening experience every time.

Here has been engineered to give you control of any and all live listening experiences: Suppress the jet engine on an airplane. Reduce a baby crying. Boost the bass at a club. Live mix a concert by adding reverb. Enhance your senses and personalize every listening experience.

Reduce the noise from jet engines and a baby crying… but usually on a plane I like to also listen to music or watch a movie – there’s no way to listen to other audio streams with this device. Many people already have ANC products that achieve this goal.

I hadn’t heard of Doppler Labs before, but I skimmed through their documentation on their first product – the Dubs earplugs. I like what they’re doing – producing interesting and innovative hearing protection devices to the market. But here’s dubious claim:

We chose to use a polyurethane reticulated foam within the low pass chambers as they best slowed

the speed of sound through our filters.

I really hope the speed of sound doesn’t change as it goes through the filters.

Hearing Loss – affecting more people as our lives get noisier.

Speakers (Photo credit: sebilden)

Every week I see more and more articles on how younger people are losing their hearing. They’re not paying attention to the warnings:

“Although hearing problems are normally associated with aging, our youth will need hearing aids earlier in life if they continue to damage their hearing by listening to music at dangerous volumes.”

Research by Australian Hearing’s National Acoustic Laboratories shows it is not just mobile devices that have the potential to cause damage to hearing. Attending nightclubs, pubs and live concerts, can also impact on the hearing of young Australians.

And do you know what causes hearing loss?

The sad truth is that many of us are responsible for our own hearing loss,” writes Katherine Bouton in her new book, “Shouting Won’t Help: Why I — and 50 Million Other Americans — Can’t Hear You.” The cause, she explains, is “the noise we blithely subject ourselves to day after day.”

…

We are born with a fixed number of hair cells; once they are dead, they cannot be replaced, and auditory sensitivity is permanently lost. Usually, sensitivity to high-frequency sounds is first to go, followed by an inability to hear the frequencies of speech.

Furthermore, the effects of noise exposure are cumulative, as Robert V. Harrison, an auditory specialist at the University of Toronto, noted recently in The International Journal of Pediatrics. Although we start out with a redundancy of hair cells, with repeated noisy insults, enough are destroyed to impair hearing. Thus, damage to hair cells incurred early in life, as has happened to many rock musicians and rock concert aficionados, can show up in midlife as difficulty understanding speech.

Behind the ear hearing aid (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

And then you get articles like saying that people are embracing hearing aids:

But Saad said a new market has opened up among younger adults who are increasingly likely to embrace hearing aids as a technological tool like an iPod or pedometer.

“The stigma is gone,” Saad said. “Because of young people’s perceptions of technology, they are more inclined to get hearing health care. They’re not afraid of it.”

Okay – it’s good that there’s less of a stigma surrounding it, but hearing aids are not the solution – we need to preserve our hearing!