Bose Hearphones

Wow, this address a major problem I have.<p>I have decent hearing, but when I&#x27;m in a noisy environment like a bar, I can hear but can&#x27;t understand what other people are saying. It&#x27;s why I don&#x27;t like going to bars&#x2F;pubs with live performances or ambient music.<p>People think I&#x27;m bored or brooding because I&#x27;m not talking to anyone, but I just can&#x27;t understand anything anyone says, so I can&#x27;t participate in a conversation.

For what it&#x27;s worth, this tech has been available in hearing aids for a long time already. I carry a remote that can:<p>* switch my hearing aids between 5 different programs depending on the environment.<p>* play &quot;fractal&quot; like tones to combat my tinnitus<p>* adjust the volume including muting the outside world<p>* play music from anything with a 3.5mm jack (bluetooth also available)<p>* hear calls from my phone<p>* probably more I&#x27;m forgetting<p>If it wasn&#x27;t for the being hearing impaired part, having hearing aids is pretty cool :)<p>It looks like Bose is trying to bring this technology to a bigger market which is cool.

I really wish someone was working to solve the problem of tinnitus. Would it be possible to generate anti phase wave out of these things to cancel out tinnitus? I would pay anything and&#x2F;or wear any goofy device in my ears to live life tinnitus free.

I&#x27;m a drummer. Fortunately before I destroyed my hearing my dad forced me to wear ear defenders.<p>since then it&#x27;s been a habit. These look nice and all, but basically all you really need are ear plugs.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thesafetysupplycompany.co.uk&#x2F;p&#x2F;449062&#x2F;howard-leight---laser-lite-disposable-foam-ear-plug-uncorded---box-of-200-pairs---hw-3301105.html?gclid=COjc2c7u59ACFekp0wodkRoLsg" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thesafetysupplycompany.co.uk&#x2F;p&#x2F;449062&#x2F;howard-leig...</a><p>comfy, snug and 32db (depending on version) of attenuation. That means that you can go to a loud gigs (95db) without the risk of tinitus.<p>same goes for bars. Loud noises are draining, have your hearing shattered by someone shouting in your ears is a pain.<p>Yes, if you choose the colourful ones its obvious. there are natural colours.<p>Bose makes a lot of song and dance about how you can adjust for noise, your ears do that already. The advantage of normal ear plugs is that you still retain some of the dimensionality that earphones loose.<p>Sadly I&#x27;ve had a child, and all that shrill screaming has basically killed off 10db of sensitivity of my hearing. but I&#x27;m 10db up form most of my musician friends

So, same market as the DopplerLabs Hear One?<p>I am the ideal customer: some hearing loss from my VJ days, but still appreciate frequency response. I render all my music at 192Khz.<p>Basic hearing aids suck at frequency response. Most drop off at around 8KHz Meanwhile, Apple has created a pipeline for hearing aid. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.apple.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;HT201466" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.apple.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;HT201466</a> I haven&#x27;t used it.<p>I often work out of noisy cafes. So, I wear Bose Quiet Comfort 20 earbuds. If I forget, I will go back home to fetch them. Have even taken the QC 20&#x27;s to public concerts to use the noise cancellation feature instead of earplugs.

I was reading this paragraph.<p>&quot;...and people always talk much louder to compensate for the noise. I was pleasantly surprised that I was able to hear the server without any extra effort...&quot;<p>And initially was wondering how he got an audio feed to his server in a restaurant and then was like &quot;Why would he want to listen to his server&quot;. And then realized that there are human servers in restaurants.

Can&#x27;t open the website.<p>PDOException: SQLSTATE[HY000] [1040] Too many connections in lock_may_be_available() (line 167 of &#x2F;var&#x2F;app&#x2F;current&#x2F;hearphones&#x2F;includes&#x2F;lock.inc).

This is basically the same idea as electronic ear protection of the kind typically used for shooting sports, with the addition of a directional microphone to the existing global microphone.<p>It works extremely well in that form factor, basically like having Superman ears. Conversations are audible, you can turn up the sensitivity to where you can hear footsteps clearly in a house, and gunshots are reduced to the level of, eg, a heavy book falling off a shelf.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;smile.amazon.com&#x2F;Howard-Leight-Amplification-Electronic-R-01526&#x2F;dp&#x2F;B001T7QJ9O&#x2F;ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1481307350&amp;sr=8-3&amp;keywords=electronic+ear+protection" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;smile.amazon.com&#x2F;Howard-Leight-Amplification-Electro...</a>

Hard to tell exactly what this entails, but there is a very functional low-cost solution already on the market called the Pocket Talker (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Pocket-Talker-Ultra-System-Headphone&#x2F;dp&#x2F;B000S01IOE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Pocket-Talker-Ultra-System-Headphone&#x2F;...</a>)

Looks like Bose smells the same opportunity as Doppler Labs with their &quot;Here One&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hereplus.me" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hereplus.me</a>

Someone will have to explain the difference between these and your average hearing aids, which perform a very similar function, but tuned by an audiologist to your needs.

&quot;You’re one of the select few invited to the Bose Corporate Center facilities to demo Bose Hearphones for yourself.&quot;<p>Wow, I feel so special, and all I did was click a link on HN. This sounds like the Bose version of those cheap late-night &quot;as seen in TV&quot; amplifiers. Yeah, Bose is overpriced for what you get, but at least their stuff is if decent quality. Dunno, after too many years of standing in front of a Marshall stack, be it my own or other&#x27;s, I could see myself interested in this.

I wonder what the side affects of prolonged usage would be. As in, would my ability to block out ambient noises without the device decline from not using the ability?

I&#x27;m not hard of hearing but I often have trouble understanding people at noisy meetups or conferences (or hell, parties). This sounds like an awesome solution. I&#x27;m sure I&#x27;m not the only one. But what compounds the problem is that I seem to be worse than most at understanding accents (thanks, growing up in middle America). I&#x27;ve gotten better recently, but still.

This is cool. Something i&#x27;ve wished for. Its kinda sad that many restaurants&#x2F;bars are so noisy that one cannot enjoy a conversation - <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;SB10001424052748704022804575041060813407740" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;SB100014240527487040228045750410...</a>

This reminds me strongly of when cigarette companies started to produce nicotine patches. Without sounding too cynical (it does look like a product that could be useful for people who just happen to be in noisey environments a lot) , I can&#x27;t help but think Bose are trying to position themselves at the top of a new product line: hearing aids for people who damaged their own hearing through excessively loud earphone music but rebranded to not be considered so obviously as &quot;hearing aids&quot; in the current sense. Not that that&#x27;s necessary all that bad, it makes sense for a top consumer audio company to tackle this &quot;problem&quot; if it is a thing; I&#x27;m by no means an ear expert but I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if a surge in hearing aid demand is due as the effects of prolonged earphone usage starts to surface.

I have Bose noise cancelling headphones...possibly the best purchase I have ever made since they allow me to basically turn off the environment when on a train (or plane but I commute about 1h each way daily via train so that&#x27;s where they shine). My soundy friends tell me Bose sound quality is not in the upper echolon (my hearing is not fine grained enough to hear a difference so I don&#x27;t really care) but the filtering is really amazing. Not surprised they improve on that and branch out a bit. I usually listen to stuff without vocals (X meets metal: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;user&#x2F;331Erock" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;user&#x2F;331Erock</a>) when reading as I can&#x27;t concentrate if there&#x27;s lyrics.

I never understood my poor ability to focus sound could be a thing until I read Douglas Coupland&#x27;s account of sneezing out a lump of...well..his lung...his brain? I don&#x27;t really know...but it&#x27;s a great anecdote:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;boingboing.net&#x2F;2011&#x2F;09&#x2F;09&#x2F;how-coughing-up-a-piece-of-his-lung-inspired-douglas-coupland-to-write-a-bio-of-marshall-mcluhan.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;boingboing.net&#x2F;2011&#x2F;09&#x2F;09&#x2F;how-coughing-up-a-piece-of-...</a>

As someone who is unilaterally deaf, this is very interesting to me. I hear fine in one ear, but am completely deaf in the other.<p>People who hear in stereo seem to isolate particular sounds (like a voice) much easier from background noise without any&#x2F;much conscious thought; whereas, I have to consciously focus on filtering out the ambient noise. Having 2 audio channels seems to allow for a sort of spacial filtering&#x2F;differentiation to pinpoint particular streams of sounds. I have found that turning my head in space allows me some ability to differentiate foreground&#x2F;background noise by comparing their relative change in volumes as my ear changes direction. That is more fit for deciphering sounds coming from a distance and not helpful in the case of a close conversation. If I am having trouble with a conversation in a noisy setting I normally revert to lip-reading. Unfortunately lip-reading makes it difficult to read body language and facial expressions.<p>As a young kid I felt a bit left out of the experience of stereo music. I experimented with setting up several of my family&#x27;s radios around my room and tuning their equalizers differently to roughly separate parts of the music. By moving and turning through the room, I was able to experience the music in a slightly more spacial way.

Long time reader, first time caller...er commenter. I might be biased since I work for them, but at www.stages.co we&#x27;ve JUST unveiled a headphone and a tabletop product (that lets you use any existing headphones) that I think this thread would find relevant. Directional listening, noice cancellation, noise reduction, high quality audio, user configurable admittance criteria - we have it all.

Aren&#x27;t these just the QC35&#x27;s with their companion app? What am I missing?

We (in Alango Technologies) liked the HearPhones for this product type. Actually, we liked it so much that two years ago we used it to name the category of Bluetooth headsets with hearing enhancement and assistive listening functionality as HearPhones™ (www.alango.com&#x2F;hearphones, www.old.alango.com&#x2F;hearing&#x2F;index). As a DSP software provider, we started working on a licensable software package that allows transformation of a Bluetooth headset into a powerful hearing aid. Of course, BOSE were aware of it as well and, apparently, liked the idea and the name so much that they decided to name their upcoming product HearPhones™. We, obviously, don’t like their idea… Anyway, our company will introduce our own concept product from HearPhones™ category. It will be a stylish Bluetooth headset with fully customizable hearing enhancement capability. You will get much more information about it very soon (hopefully next week) on www.wearandhear.com

So basically this is augmentation of the ear. Focus sounds you want to ear, block the ones you don&#x27;t. Pretty cool, but at the same time its kind of the first step towards the concept shown in Black Mirror where you just block out people you don&#x27;t want to hear or see. They just become a muffled background noise.

These seem to me, at least, to be a clever, premium re-branding of hearing aids. I found myself wanting some despite having only moderate (if detectable) hearing loss, especially for the ability to focus in on a conversation in a loud environment. That is a very draining situation for me to find myself in.

If they could just remember someone&#x27;s name for me the first time they say it that would be great ;-)

Not limited to those with bad <i>hearing</i>, auditory <i>processing</i> issues are common amongst those with ASD &#x2F; autism spectrum disorders &#x2F; Aspergers &#x2F; The Geek Syndrome.<p>This looks like an excellent product, and great work to their engineers.

Neat prospect, but I&#x27;m not convinced this is a big enough problem for the majority of people which is how this is marketed. I would also expect a price point comparative to other hearing aids to further distance the average consumer.

Hm, okay. Not quite Google-Glass level overkill personal tech in the wild, but I&#x27;m not sure these will find a good patch of target market. Not quite hearing aids, not nearly as cool as headphones <i>intending</i> to keep the world out...I just have my doubts as to how well these are going to be adopted.<p>Oh, and if there comes a time when there are YouTube&#x2F;Vine videos of jerks coming up behind people wearing these and screaming and&#x2F;or otherwise messing with them, well, I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised. Not that I&#x27;d approve, mind you. But would I laugh? No comment.

Kudos to Bose for marketing. Can&#x27;t wait to see the execution.<p>Today, people who wore glasses or had to wear hearing aid were those with vision and hearing problems. We are moving to an era where we would voluntarily wear visual&#x2F;hearing aid all the time because they enhance our natural abilities so much that it would be hard to do without it. We are now starting to augment the most basic senses with technology, in a way that is affordable enough that everyone will be doing it. In that sense, this is the dawn of an era of bioelectronic super humans.

I am totally bothered by noise in the bars. Or the fact that you go to sports bar, but you cannot hear the audio. I was thinking of building on Pi something that would plug to TVs audio output, and then broadcast that to local Wifi in the bar. So that smartphone that&#x27;s connected to same wifi could receive the audio and you could listen to it on your smartphone. Turns out there is someone already doing it: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.limeonair.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.limeonair.com</a>

We have similar directional, sound-suppressing &quot;headphones&quot; for use in the military. Specifically I used them as a gunner on a Bradley (BFV) and a gunner on a regular ole Humvee gun truck. This kind of thing is pretty impressive. I could talk to other gunners in other turrets in our security element that were reasonably close without using the radio. You could still hear everything happening around you -- incredibly important -- without blast sounds and weapons fire causing your ears to ring.

OT: I&#x27;ve seen an error page when opening it for the first time:<p><pre><code> PDOException: SQLSTATE[HY000] [1040] Too many connections in lock_may_be_available() (line 167 of &#x2F;var&#x2F;app&#x2F;current&#x2F;hearphones&#x2F;includes&#x2F;lock.inc). </code></pre> Reloading once made it work.<p>Out of curiosity, is this an amost-hug of death or something else broken? (I know nothing about Drupal.)

Are they calling these headphones to avoid medical device testing? These aren&#x27;t headphones and that&#x27;s not their main feature.

I humbly submit that they need to work on the name. I&#x27;ve had a long day and not much sleep and my eyes didn&#x27;t recognise the difference between &quot;hearphones&quot; and &quot;headphones&quot;; the two even sound pretty similar. I know it&#x27;s intentional and clever, but it&#x27;s quite subtle. Especially if you don&#x27;t have good hearing...

I actually use my normal noice cancelling BOSE headphones for this sometimes.<p>If one presses the passthrogh button it has a somewhat enhancing effect.

I guess that we hugged them too hard, connection error - <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;webcache.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;search?q=cache:http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hearphones.bose.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;webcache.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;search?q=cache:http:&#x2F;&#x2F;...</a>

I have always used my QC20 noise cancelling earbuds in this way so I&#x27;m glad it will get better. Just last weekend in a noisy eatery I put them in and my SO and her friend thought I was listening to music, but I said, &quot;No, now I can hear YOU&quot;. Cool.

As someone who lost hearing in one ear as a young kid Its always exciting to see companies work on this space. Honestly from their marketing websites its not 100% clear where this is going but I do look forward to seeing

they need to get into something they can rent at clubs and concert venues. Clubs are ridiculous. Every time I go to a club, I don&#x27;t wear hearing protection, and this means that I am consciously making a choice to lose some of my hearing. I should be able to get some foam things that reduce my hearing damage to something reasonable.<p>but imagine if I could rent some kind of insert that actually lets me talk with others who also have theirs (because it filters using also a microphone.) how awesome would that be.<p>clubs and concerts, dance halls etc suck. waaay too loud.

I&#x27;d be interested to see what happens to the noise level of a bar room with everyone using these. Would the clarity of sound reduce everyone&#x27;s volume to conversational?

When I go with family to the shooting club, we have these hearing protectors that double as hearing enhancement. This seems like a natural extension off the range.

really interested in the technology behind this. Obviously non voice frequencies can be filtered but how are they determining which voices are too far away to matter?<p>I&#x27;m sure I could probably read up more, but if these work it&#x27;s definitely a &quot;shut up and take my money&quot; situation for me. I&#x27;m about as ADD as it gets and I have a really hard time when there are multiple conversations going and I try to listen to them all.

If they can&#x27;t do the acoustics right, this is the solution. But the focus should be to push good architectural design. Which is lacking almost everywhere.

What is this? Hearing aid, directional headset, hybrid?

It&#x27;s so weird that we create personal products to address noise in public spaces rather than addressing the unnecessary noise first.

The hard problem to solve there is not the filtering - but the calibration. That&#x27;s going to be the interesting bit to observe.

I wonder if that could be useful for people with misophonia. Having power over what sound one ears could have a dramatic effect.

Experience new [potentially] super [maybe] coolexotic headphones by coming to Bose event in MA.<p>Ok. Duh?<p>Why so many points to this story?

So are these just like normal hearing aids (with a diff design), designed&#x2F;marketed by Bose?

The military already uses similar tech to be able to shoot and hear voice at the same time.

Am I the only one that seeing those things thought of the Seashells from Fahrenheit 451?

Bragio has had this feature for a while. What&#x27;s the innovation&#x2F;news?

Yessssss... can just turn people and environments down... love it! WANT!

This is augmented reality.

&gt; Error messagePDOException: SQLSTATE[HY000] [1040] Too many connections in lock_may_be_available() (line 167 of &#x2F;var&#x2F;app&#x2F;current&#x2F;hearphones&#x2F;includes&#x2F;lock.inc).

archive is case of DDoS <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;iFcM7" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;iFcM7</a>

Hasn&#x27;t China ventured into this?

Wow - this is hololens for your ears!

How is this on the top of HN? It&#x27;s barely clear what these actually be like or how they work? Am I missing something?

Not going to be awkward at all!

I can pretend to be listening to the wife while my ears focus on the game score from the TV?

Buy Other Sound Equipment. Bose is largely overpriced given the quality of headphones.

Bose has not delivered in tech since the 70s. Color me skeptical, but this seems like a cheap hack for an existing product of theirs with a crapload of dodgy marketing.

I have a hard time hearing only my wife.<p>It&#x27;s like an fine-tuned harmonic anti-sound barrier that turns on automatically after 4 secs.. Wifephones please.

Is it just me or does this landing page suck? The top banner doesn&#x27;t go all the way to the edges, logo is square but buttons are circular, grey icons on a black background, only black and white, etc, etc. Then you get this absolutely butchered review:<p>&gt; I was with my husband at Smokey Bones<p>What is that?<p>&gt; …The room was very noisy as it always is there because they have tv&#x27;s going and lots of music and people always talk much louder to compensate for the noise.<p>I&#x27;ll let this one slide<p>&gt; I was pleasantly surprised that I was able to hear the server without any extra effort order my meal with smooth going.<p>With smooth going eh?<p>&gt; My husband and my conversation was not strained<p>Glad to hear your husband were comfortable