 Anyone who knows me would tell you that I'm super obnoxious about sound. I mean, that's why I'm recording this in a soundproof closet. How would you describe my taste in headphones? Problematic. Are you working on sound right there? I am working on sound right now, and it sounds so bad you'd hate it. What's it like to see a movie with me? It's one of the worst experiences. I saw Jurassic World with you and you complained about the sound the entire time. Yeah, I'm that guy wearing custom-molded earplugs to a concert to make it sound better and protect my hearing. So I got pretty excited when I saw this Kickstarter for something called the Hear Active Listening System. It's essentially putting a studio in your ears so you can live curate the audio you hear so you have the perfect audio experience for you every single time. This is super cool, right? The idea is that you can put these things in your ears and take control of the sound around you. The company making Hear is called Doppler Labs. They're an... Immersive wearable tech company. What we mean by that is we create products that hopefully help you get computing out of the way of your daily life. Look I know what you're thinking and it's definitely not lost on me that we had sound problems in an interview about sound. Anyway Doppler's goals sound really broad, but basically they want to make hearables, tiny products you put in your ears to enhance your world. Hear is just one of those products, and one of its main goals is to mess with the balance of frequencies in the sound around you. So the way it works is the audio goes to your ear, the stuff you don't want to target reduce goes back, but then we create anti-noise in that specific frequency. So what your ear ends up hearing, again with zero latency, is the real world minus the frequency you've told it to remove. So for instance, I'm listening to this loud indie band in a super cool underground club you've probably never heard of. The sound guy is completely drunk and there's too much snare in the mix. If I find the frequencies the snare is occupying, I could turn down just those frequencies and smooth out the mix going to my ears. This is what sound engineers have been doing for decades in live sound and recording, but what the Hear system aims to do is bring these effects directly to your ears and tailored directly to your tastes. It goes a little beyond EQ too, and I should say the effects you're about to hear are just an approximation of what Hear actually sounds like, but it is pretty close. I can flange your entire world, which is kind of nutty. Or I can reverb your entire world. Or I can echo your entire world. Or I can fuzz your entire world, which is intense. Or I can bit crush your entire world. It does sound wild and it's a lot of fun. I haven't tried the finished product yet, but the prototypes I tried did have some issues. It's hard to have a conversation with them in your ears because of something called the occlusion effect where you hear your own voice resonating through your skull. A lot like this. There's also this whiny grainy layer of noise that sits under everything just loud enough to be perceived. They also tend to clip and distort when the sound level rises above a conversational volume. I have to imagine Doppler is going to fix these issues by the time Hear is actually available, but there was one problem I'm not sure will go away. The seal between the earbuds and my ear wasn't that snug, and that means that Hear isn't completely isolated from the outside world. So when I turn down the volume, for instance, sound from the outside still leaks in, and it sort of kills the illusion and removes some of the control that the product needs in order to work. You know, ears come in all different sizes and shapes, and once you try to make a product like this, you realize quickly that we can fit the vast majority, but there's probably still going to be an ear or two out there in the world that we may not fit optimally in. They've definitely thought about this problem, though, and they'll include three sizes of rubber ear tips with each pair. So are you the guys at a party checking out other people's ears, like inspecting shapes and sizes? You sit in somebody's car and look at people's ears. We text each other images all the time of weird ears. It's a good thought process, like how would I fit in that person's ear? Those are really funky ears. It's that borderline obsession with ears that drives Doppler, actually. Their first product, Dubz, was a simple pair of earplugs. While Dubz were a compelling product on their own, Doppler used them to see if people really wanted to be seen in public with designer objects in their ears at all before moving on to more ambitious projects. It helped us see that, you know, these categories, and especially in-ear wearable tech, is something that people really do get excited about if you approach it the right way. That really built the foundation for our flagship product. You look at people's ears on the subway, I guess, where Google Glass was super weird to see a screen attached to somebody's face. It's not uncommon to see ear buds. So you guys kind of had a head start in social acceptance. Yeah, I think that's what we, from the very get-go, was excited about. To introduce technology into the ear, we felt, was a more approachable place to start for people. It's easier for people to kind of accept that you may have something in your ears when you interact with someone. And it sounds like here is just the beginning of that. Being able to change the acoustic properties of a concert is great, but here isn't designed to be worn all day, or in every situation. For one thing, their tiny batteries only last for about four or five hours, although they do come with a nifty charging case that can charge them on the go. But Doppler is definitely moving in that direction of the hearable, an object you put in your ear when you first wake up and you leave it there until you go to bed. We want to put a computer speaker mic in everyone's ear, right? That's a, and a computer, of course, along with it. And that's a lofty mission. And as evidenced by the Doves as a starting point, we're very conscious about step functions to make sure we can get there. And this product for us is very much a episodic, nuanced product for a niche audience that will use it when they go out. But if they get all the steps right, Doppler could be the company that creates the Babelfish, or tiny in-ear virtual assistants like the ones in her. We look at this much more in that vein of kind of things that enhance your life, are hopefully, you know, your smart assistant, the thing that allows you to communicate better, that allows you to really, we're trying to put something in your ear that becomes indispensable long term, and really becomes part of the way you interact with the world. The Hear system is probably not that indispensable hearable NOAA is talking about, but it could be an important step in the right direction. The prototype is only six months old and it's already really impressive. So who knows, maybe Doppler will be the ones to put a personal assistant in our ears. But in the meantime, I'm pretty pumped about being able to mess with the sound around me.