Hi there John Porter here from TechRadar today
We are looking at the neuro phone headphones their recently funded on Kickstarter
But today finally you can buy them directly from the manufacturer
themselves they're quite an interesting pair of headphones for a number of reasons that are going to get into
There in ear over ear design is quite unique
And they also have a unique sound
Profiling ability that newer phone claims will tailor their sound for exactly how your ears like to listen to music
So doesn't stack up let's have a look so
The first thing you'll notice we pick up these headphones if they have quite an unusual in ear and
Over ear design now for speaking to near a phone the way they described it was that they originally started with a pair of in-ear
Headphones however the beylin found that what they quite wanted was to also isolate with a cushion around
The ears as well
To further reduce the amount of sound coming in what this means is that you have a pair of headphones that look like a pair?
Of over ear headphones been watching put them actually on your head itself
You'll find the inner portion sit quite neatly in your ear canals
I was very skeptical when I saw them
But I bet they'd actually become for however when you put them on you find
They do sit quite nicely because the in-ear portions are being held on by over ear portions
They don't kind of jam into your ears in the same way that a normal pair of in-ear headphones does so so
top marks for comfort
But the thing that neuro phone are especially proud of with these headphones is the way they're able to profile your ears
We wanted to make some special earphone as that could measure your hearing automatically and then adapt the sound to your unique hearing okay?
And it's all based around the idea that we hear differently and in order to deliver the perfect sound
We need to know how you hear and then adapt the sound system to your hearing system
The way this works the first time you set up the headphones you load up the app and it'll then run through a brief setup
process we'll play a number of different sounds a number of different frequencies into your ears it then measures the
Response that it gets and it uses this to work out which frequencies were ears are and are not sensitive to okay so this is
Generic mode, that's like without any sort of okay cool, and they'll switch to personal most
and you can listen to other people's profiles like bezel a
Weird
so you just switch from my listening profile to battles listing profile there and
It just sounds completely different, so your personal sound profile definitely sounds better than the generic sound profile on the headphones
But we wanted to establish whether people could tell the difference between different people sound profiles and when they'd necessarily prefer their own
We went to a couple of members of the tech radar team creates a new sound profile and compared it against other peoples
With the theory being that if this technology works
Then it'll be a night and day difference they definitely prefer their own so the first person we went to ever actually preferred other
People's sound profiles to her own or one
or two
We then moved on to Andrew
Yeah She found Andrew found it fairly easy to prefer his own sound profile to someone else's now the difference here was that Andrew could perceive
a difference in volume between the left ear cup and the right ear cup it felt like the audio balance was off it felt like
There was more being played into the right ear than the left
Whereas the ones that I chose it felt like it was straight down the middle and so actually in terms of this or the color
Of all of it it was hard to distinguish between the two of them
But the ones that I chose were the ones where it felt like it was an even mix
Feel free at me out cuz I'm clearly broken
So definitely mixed results here. We found that the sound profiling definitely gives that little bit of extra performance
But it's not a night and day difference
There's definitely some of us there if you want to squeeze every little bit of performance out of a pair of headphones
When you look at these headphones you actually notice there aren't any buttons on them. There are no volume buttons for example
There's no button for tone them on and off
This is because the headphones were capable of
Telling when you put them on your head when you've taken them off and practice we found this worked most of the time
But there were occasions where it got a little bit confused and it took a couple of moments to work out
We're actually on our head we did want to listen to music
Another thing worth noting is the way they have a kind of vented design
the inventor who we spoke to earlier this week things that this allows it to suck in cool at the bottom and expand out the
top and in practice this means they're fairly comfortable and cool to wear for extended period of time
These aren't noise canceling headphones
but because they're designer we actually found they were very good a
Passively I say to the noise around us we use them in an office
We could barely hear the standard office chatter around us that said because they're not active noise-cancelling
They're not quite as good on public transport on trains or safe planes
where they won't be able to cancel out that low rumble of noise around you now a
Final thing we want to mention is that mere if I'd have done something with these headphones
I really hope becomes a standard across a lot more headphone companies
And they actually include a power cable it allows you to charge the headphones from your phone itself
We've got a number of different cables available
Which means you should be able to charge it from whatever phone you end up using top marks there
We really hope that other people go down this same path so in conclusion
This is a very interesting pair of headphones, but they're also a very expensive pair of headphones
And we're not entirely sure that they stand head and shoulders above the rest of the competition for this price
You could get a pair of fairly good wireless noise cancelling headphones
Which would ultimately cancel out noise a lot better whilst offering much of the same audio quality than the newer phones offer
But if you want to try out something that's genuinely quite new and very very interesting the newer phones are definitely worth a listen
That's what we think about the headphones, but if you want to hear more
And we actually sat down with the CEO of your phone earlier this week
So stick around if you want to hear more about the design process and philosophy behind this very unique pair of headphones cool
So we've we've got the headphones here. I haven't ever seen anything like this before and I doubt many people at home will either
Can you just kind of like talk through exactly like these things works they cover they look
They're a little bit intimidating a little bit scary a little bit futuristic
So what you're thinking when you were designing these headphones
We wanted to make some specially if owners that could measure
Your hearing automatically and then adapt the sound to your unique hearing
But also delivering base frequencies through the skin and by separating the base which is delivered through this
can from the detail treble and
Melodic tones that are delivered through the in earbud we could deliver a more immersive experience
So you might have had the experience before of listening to very bass heavy headphones
That lacked a little bit of detail in the high frequency range
What the neuro phone is able to do is deliver the best of both worlds, so you still get crystal-clear detail
but you can get very very powerful bass at the same time we
Basically have to design a completely new interface
And it really is challenging because you have the challenges of over II cans and also the challenges of the in earbud
If you look closely though the actual ear tip
moves and is very flexible and it's not
Pivoting on a conventional spring it's actually a spring that we've designed using silicon okay?
And the spring has a tendency to have this high insurgent force so that it finds its position in your in your ear canal
But then is it
Depresses it actually relaxes and the force is not very strong at all
oh
So it doesn't you know cause any pressure that could lead to discomfort right and so it's why suppose the advantage
There is like whereas a pair of in ears
They're being held in just by their unfortunately these have this headband
So they essentially can just sit there without needing to be like forced into you're a gangly
It's all okay, and then getting you talked about it kind of reading the specific kind of like
the way your
each person's specific near works
How how does it do that? There's an ear canal?
That's connected to an ear drum and that ear drum is connected through three little bones to the cochlea
The cochlear is like the microphone inside the body that converts the mechanical
Energy in the sound to electrical impulses that are sent to the brain
When you send a sound through that system that hearing system
Some of that sound is converted to electrical energy
That's sent off to the brain, but also some of it is sent back out of the cochlea
Through those little bones and actually turns the eardrum into a little speaker
Right and that that sound
That's emitted from the from the eardrum is actually encoded with information about how you heard the sound that went in
It's called the otoacoustic emission, and we can detect it with a very sensitive microphone
In fact we're using the microphone. That's used for the NASA 2020 mission Mars mission, so it's it's a very good microphone. That's
Detecting a very small signal, okay, so it's almost working like a radar
It's kind of like the sending sound in patent like getting a certain amount of feedback in response and using that to work out
They're kind of the sound signal not sound signature though, Sam listening. Yes thing profile yeah except
It's not it's not a reflection
It's actually a generation from the cochlea so the cochlear actually creates so your ears don't just receive sound they create sound
can I can I try the of course amazing this could take longer than I'm used to just
Okay, so this is generic mode. That's like without any sort of okay cool, and they'll switch to personalized
And you can listen to other people's profiles like bezel a
Weird
So you just switch from my listening profile to battles listening profile there, and it just sounds completely different, okay?
So I was initially a little bit skeptical
When it just did the like before and after thing cuz there's there's so many kind of products out there like I think beats are
Definitely one of them where they have to come up like the beats
Software on on laptops that just kind of boosts like the base and trebles just gonna like make it sound superficially better. Yes, yeah, but
The real kind of like proof of this
The like actually maybe like self and take notice with when you switched from my listing profile to Basil's listening profile
Which is presumably being set up for exactly the same process yes, and suddenly it just sounds completely different
It's got a completely different sound signature
Your sound edit. Oh yeah of course yeah
Is a better
You know you could be of you're completely right lying kind of it
Just it sounded a lot fuller
Across the like entire spectrum it sound like a line warm and rich and stuff whereas Basil's just kind of
Sounded like putting on the wrong pair of shoes, yeah
And that's I mean that's one of the funnest things about the neuro phone. Is that that it enables you to?
share and compare your hearing to
you know the hearing of your friends and
And see just how big the difference is
You