Bose Hearphones (opens in new tab)

Are you sure you have decent hearing? I thought I could hear what people were saying in noisy environments, but couldn't understand anything. This was one of the major symptoms for me before I was diagnosed with moderate/severe hearing loss. It's very isolating. No problems now with a decent set of hearing aids.

Have yourself tested! The quality of life improvement from a set of hearing aids is incredible!

edit: I was 31 when I was diagnosed, so don't think because you're young that you're immune. Generally hearing loss is very gradual so you don't really notice it. If you frequently have to ask people to repeat themselves though...

This is a known condition, apparently, called "Hidden Hearing Loss" and was covered here a couple months ago:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/cant-hear-in-noisy-places-its-a-...

(if the direct link from here gets you to the paywall, it looks like a referral thing. Oddly going to it form Twitter worked, though Incognito and Web didn't: https://mobile.twitter.com/Jieqian_Zhang/status/780613322097...)

HN comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12637996

Direct link to the papers cited in the article: http://www.nature.com/articles/srep24907

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2812055/

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

(you can guess I also have interest in the topic...)

You get no sympathy from people who can hear what's going on. They simply will not understand why you are so withdrawn.

Oddly enough, my wife has somewhat degraded hearing but she hears a lot better in noisy environments than I do. Must be like applying a filter to the noise, maybe she is losing the frequencies that cause confusion for me.

This will be an interesting product to try out - I hope there are more in the area of enhancing everyday interactions, rather than providing new distractions.

Enhanced vision is another area where I am hoping to see new products.

Try these: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0044DEESS. I keep a pair in my pocket. They're shockingly good, and unless someone is looking closely for them they're not real noticeable.

They're also cheap enough that a lost pair is not catastrophic.

I have the opposite problem. I can understand people fine in noisy environments, but I can't speak loudly enough for other people to understand me. The end result is pretty much the same, though. I end up not really talking to people much in super noisy environments because it's too much of a struggle for me to try to talk loudly enough.

There is a lot more to hearing than just your ear. Signals have to be processed by the brain and that's often where the problem is. A good example are children with sensory integration problems: a child will often go through phases when it will have trouble "hearing", but the actual problem will be with processing. You then have to repeat things several times so that the child "hears" you, but at the same time the child will have no problem with hearing quiet sounds. Kids are especially interesting because as they grow (and with therapy) you can observe as these things change over time.

Same. I often wonder how bartenders do it.

Granted it doesn't stop me from being outgoing, but people having to almost shout or otherwise talk directly into my ear gets old after a while. I suspect it's not an issue with hearing itself so much as the brain processing the information.

In quiet conditions I can usually hear whispered conversations a good distance away.

+1

I've been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder somewhat recently. Before the diagnosis, I had my hearing tested a couple of times over the course of my adult life but nothing was found. It was during my ASD diagnosis that I've learned that people on the spectrum may sometimes have sensory issues, and sometimes hearing is affected. It explained why I can't understand what people were saying in noisy environments where everyone else seemed to carry out conversations normally.

I often have difficulty parsing speech in noisy bar/club environs. This has always made me into a bit of a wallflower. Then I started dating a woman who was also very wallflowery, but mostly because it was a lot of effort for her to talk loudly.

We ended up having a lot of arguments, because she'd say things to me, I'd tell her I couldn't understand what she was saying, then she'd refuse to talk louder but still hold me accountable for remembering what she said.

Auditory processing disorder sums up a lot of what you are describing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_processing_disorder

Same issue, although exacerbated by a misspent youth near noise sources like teletypes and machine rooms. Certain high frequencies in my hearing spectrum were damaged which, as an audiologist demonstrated for me once, means I can't hear some allophones, especially from people with high voices (children, women). When its nominally quiet, my brain can fill in what those allophones would have been and I "hear" them normally, but when there is wide frequency noise in that spectrum the missing allophones cause the phonemes to become impossible to decipher. She had this tool that would play back words and could remove frequencies with a notch filter and replace the missing sound with either silence (still understandable) or noise (not understandable). Tuning a hearing aid to boost those weak areas works well for me with the exception that hearing aids don't benefit from the brains ability to focus on sounds in particular directions so they enhance the spectrum areas from all around rather than just where I'm looking.

There's a little bit of a life-hack for this (assuming your hearing really is okay) in loud environments... Push the little flap of the recipient's ear (the flap is called the 'tragus') over their ear canal to seal it off. Then you can lean in and speak loudly enough to overcome the ambient noise without hurting them.

The Army Rangers have headphones that cancel gunfire and explosions and enhance voices, they say they can have a normal conversation in the middle of a battle. Very clever!

I... Uh... Doesn't everyone have this problem?

Maybe this is another reason people think I'm brooding. I can only hear the people directly next to me in a noisy environment; not the people on the other end of a table for example. I typically assumed they couldn't hear me either, but now I'm wondering.

My mother has this issue (and so do I). Her doctor told her that the problem was a cognitive issue. Apparently some brains have a hard time filtering all of the noise into something we can understand. Have no idea if it's true but seems plausible.

Did you get tested for ADHD? Many people with ADHD have problems with focusing on a conversation, especially when there is a lot of noise around.

Their hearing is perfectly fine, but they drift away a hundred times a minute.

You don't have to move a lot to have ADHD. Here is a fun test/explaination on how it works in adults: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iozAFIr3BEw#t=50

I have the exact same problem. This could really be a life changer for me. Only recently I was at a reception at work after one of our town hall style meetings and in the large room with many people talking, I could barely hold a conversation. It literally took all my mental effort just to hear what the person if front of me was saying. I left shortly after because I couldn't talk to anyone.

Actually just getting some earplugs helps this. Will filter your noise and make it really easy to have a conversation at normal level with someone near you. Use this myself for sports events, sometimes lounges, and of course flights. They cost way less than these headphones and work just as well to quell the problem you have.

Or if you don't want to use earplugs, just plug your ears when someone is talking to you. Same effect really.

Possible fix:

I suffer a bit from tinnitus and as a result have taken to carrying earplugs for noisy environments. I find in addition to protecting my ears I can hear conversation better. I think basically the ears work better in the normal db range and don't function so well if overloaded. My kit, approximately:

Holder: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Large-Emergency-Cash-or-Pill-Keyri...

Wax ear plugs: http://www.boots.com/en/Boots-Muffle-Wax-Earplugs-5-Pairs-_1...

Wax is quite good because you can adjust the effect - put in loosely they don't block much, squish them down and they do. I also chop them down to fit which the packet advises against. I recommend for tinnitus avoidance if nothing else.

I'm the same and it drives me (and my wife if Im honest) crazy. For whatever reason I pick up background noise with much more intensity than most people. Surround sound is useless to me, I'll hear cricket chirps and background music over the dialog.

I can more of less push through it at a pub and in other social situations but its extremely draining.

You have described my problem exactly. It's impossible to explain to someone who hasn't experienced it. I've been tested and other than tinnitus, I'm told my hearing is normal. This could be awesome.

Please checkout King–Kopetzky syndrome:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King-Kopetzky_syndrome

Had that my whole life. I was diagnosed with "Hyper-Hearing" were normal people have a frequency bumps and dips in their hearing my was a straight line all at the top.

Now that I am lower I have ringing ears and lost the high frequency range of sound to a "slightly bellow level" and will probably never have to have hearing aids. My brain just couldn't figure out how to filter out all that noise.

Get medical help to test yourself. This is not to scare you but there are large number of sometime even trivial health issues that might cause this. It will hurt your social professional life.

I use to avoid drive-through, phone conversations etc. because there was always a 10% chance that everything I heard seemed like other person mumbling something. Medical help helped me correct the problem.

You may have auditory loss that affects only certain frequencies.

The problem is easily masked in a quiet environment, since your brain has more aural information to put the words together, but in a noisy environment, where many of the speech frequencies are cancelled by ambient sounds, you don't receive enough aural information.

Woah, so many people "suffer" from the same thing!

edit. As for these hearphones, would be interesting to test them, but dont think I've used them. Never seen the problem as a big thing. More like annoyance perhaps. And yes, I am cheap.

+1 I have this same issue. I can hear but can't quite make out the details especially in places with a lot of background or competing noises.

This looks like a new spin on an old concept though. Perhaps it's made more practical since we all carry phones now.

Too many 80s rock concerts mean there's a giant downward notch in the center of my hearing range. I gave up on socializing in loud environments long ago because people speaking is what I hear the least. I will definitely give these a try!

Happy to see (with your comment and subs) that I am not alone. For my case, it is explained by the fact my right ear is deaf (I was born like that). The left one has perfect hearing, but I guess missing stereoscopic sound totally changes the game.

Sounds (no pun intended) like APD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_processing_disorder

I have great hearing and totally agree. I am always annoyed being out with a bunch of friends around a restaurant table and no one can hear further than about 2 people away from them. This seems kind of neat!

Not to piggy back off randlet, but I would venture to say that most people would consider being unable to hear conversation when there is background noise the opposite of "decent hearing."

I have this exact same problem. It's been something that has bothered me for over a decade. I'm really excited to see if these work for me!

As a non native speaker I have same issue.

I'm not alone! I always assumed I had something like the auditory equivalent of color blindness.

This is an even bigger problem in a non-native language. Not just a social issue but hinders learning.

For me it's the height. I either have to lean in for 10 cm lower or I start missing pieces.

I thought I'm alone!

I think (or rather I hope) that it's the price tag and ease of acquiring them that makes this special.

I have wished to friends and to a couple people like me for a hearing aid for hyper-vigilant people. Something that turned down the entire world, except for human speech, by 10-20 dB. I have my fingers crossed that these Bose devices can be re-purposed for this, just by turning down the gain to near ambient, so I can finally have some fucking peace and quiet.

Then maybe I won't think these open seating environments are the worst development in software for the last twenty years...

My dad has tinnitus and pretty bad hearing (was a rock drummer in the 70's) but he found the hearing aids he got (they were at least a few thousand $ or more) made everything sound very digital/tinny and it was unnatural enough that he stopped wearing them. I wonder if these will sound any more or less natural than a nice set of hearing aids.

What do hearing aids with those feature cost? I feel like even premium Bose products would be cheap in comparison

> play "fractal" like tones

What does that sound like?

Are those hearing aids linked together like the hearphones are? It seems to me that a large part of being able to cut down on ambient noise and boost local conversation is because local conversation is more directional than ambient noise.

Do you think they'd be worth getting just for the ambient noise cutting abilities alone? My daughter has complete hearing loss in one ear and normal functionality in the other. Normally she's fine, but in a crowd she's completely lost.

This sounds like something I need, what technology are you using, is this doctor recommendation equipment?

Can you share a link? I know someone who could really use the help

A project I worked on suggests vibrating the bone just under the earlobe at around 50kHz with a piezoelectric stack might help. 8 years or so ago I helped make a pocket sized and rechargeable medical device that operates on this principle. Last I checked it was still in FDA hell but helping the majority of sufferers in the trials. The theory of operation is that is breaks up tiny air bubbles stuck to the hairs in the inner ear.

An interesting side note is that you could 'hear' a very high pitched sound when using the device even though 50kHz is far outside the standard human hearing range. We still are not sure but think we were hearing a lower harmonic of the tone bouncing around the skull.

I suddenly lost the hearing on one ear and it got replaced by a strong and permanent tinnitus. I quantify it as strong based on my talks with others with tinnitus.

What worked for me was stop fighting and start loving it. Now it's a perma mantra. Some somatic malfunction that enables me to ear the hum inside of me or whatever poetry works for you. Try it maybe.

I think there already is a kind of therapy. I read that they basically determine the exact frequency of your tinnitus. Then you give them music you like and they filter the frequency out. By listening to the altered music, the tinnitus is reduced. It seemed to work quiet well, but I forgot what the procedure is called.

I'm hearing a tinnitus for over 10 years now, so I know what it's like. :)

> Would it be possible to generate anti phase wave out of these things to cancel out tinnitus?

No. Tinnitus is not caused by a real sound. It occurs somewhere after the phase-erasing Fourier transform performed by the physical structure of the ear. If it were caused by a real sound, or the brain added sounds in the time space (rather than the frequency space), it would work. But neurons are not fast enough to handle time-domain sound processing, so they offload Fourier transformation to the ear and then work with the (presumably phaseless) frequency-domain representation.

There's a technique that has the potential to temporarily (around 1 minute) clear tinnitus.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yDCox-qKbk

It's not much and doesn't seem to work for everyone, but if you've been suffering from tinnitus for years, one minute is better than nothing.

see my other comment. I wish they didn't start by forcing you to have tinnitus to begin with. I'd use foam inserts if they were given out at concerts and clubs etc - but not if I'm the only one bringing them with me, that's ridiculous.

tinnitus is caused by people listening to music that is too loud. Music is too loud at most venues, if you are standing where you are meant to.

EDIT:

people don't like this comment, and point out that in many places inserts are available. All the same, the general clubs that I go to where I live, don't have them, and, more to the point, nobody else wears them. it's a social problem and perhaps a marketing problem. many bars / clubs are too loud and I as a consumer haven't been solicited to pay for a solution on-site. (even if this exists.) others I'm with don't wear anything either.

The responses here have convinced me that I likely should invest in some and bring them with me - but I don't like that I'm the only one doing so, and it seems kind of anal. i'm just being honest about how I feel. it would be easier if they were more readily available / being sold, and if everyone were using them.

I like to be cool and do the same thing everyone else does. just being honest.

I'm afraid that's not possible. There are, however solutions that help making it easier to endure. Here is one: http://www.oticon.global/solutions/accessories/tinnitus-soun...

I believe tinnitus is neurologic, in that there is no noise to cancel out.

An ex-coworker founded http://www.neuromoddevices.com/technology. It's still in the clinical research stage, but it's a cool device that utilise bi-modal neuromodulation and aim to promote positive therapeutic change within the human nervous system.

I can't personally endorse their services, but there are companies working on treating tinnitus. Check out http://www.ttsrelief.com/

There was some discussion (on HN I think) a while ago where basically you flick/drum fingers at the base of your skull about 10 times.

I've tried it and it seems to work at least for a while for me. YMMV.

I have read that NMDA agonists (DXM, Ketamine, PCP, other arylcyclohexamines) work pretty well for this. Anecdotally, their withdrawal symptoms include tinnitus so I'm not surprised the inverse could be true.

It also looks like more specific NMDA agonists are being developed as a treatment? http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

I found blocking loud noise with earplugs allowed my ears to recover naturally over time to a fair extent. It may not work for everyone but it's easy and cheap to try.

This is great. My wife has meniere's disease, so we need to protect her hearing in all moderately loud situations, (bars, music venues, movies). In advance of SXSW one year, I bought her a pair of these: http://amzn.to/2gK8qZv

"Musician's earplugs", so-to-speak, they attenuate all frequencies more evenly than standard foam plugs would. In effect just turning down the volume of the world a bit, not muffling it.

I don't have meniere's, but do get drained by bars and loud music. I hate to seem lame by wanting to leave a party/bar early, so I bought a pair for myself recently. They're just fantastic. Highly recommend.

These are not just earplugs...they can enhance conversation in loud places as well.

Laser Lite earplugs are the absolute best. They work so much better than all the other plugs I ever tried, I can wholeheartedly recommend them.

I was pretty excited for the Hear One's but now they've been delayed until March. :(

If they can actually land a product with a truly wireless experience, that would be awesome!

Time to go play outside.

Mirror: http://archive.is/iFcM7

Disclaimer: I am not an audiologist, but I am married to one :-).

Because of the way your ears function, the vast majority of people who have hearing impairments have them at specific frequency ranges. Hearing aids do amplify sound somewhat, but they mostly work by pitch shifting voices away from your personal weak spots to wherever your hearing is still strongest. They also do some signal processing to differentiate voice-like noises from other sounds, amplify the voice, and actually mute the non-voice sounds.

For people who have some hearing loss, blanket amplification can be counterproductive and dangerous. Turning up the volume across the board doesn't help at all with differentiating signal from background noise, and can cause what hearing you do have left to degrade much faster than it otherwise might due to the increased stress placed on the ear.

Hearing aids are expensive, because they are a medical device. And they are also only available to people with a hearing deficiency. By not being "hearing aids", these are available to a wider audience.

Even if there weren't any difference, competition in the hearing aid business is more than welcome. The prices can be staggering.

This is really like having cheap, off-the shelf reading glasses even though prescription reading glasses are available and attuned to your eyes.

And folks would be interested for similar reasons. Insurance might not cover the testing that often or the device itself, for instance, or someone might not think they have the time to go to that doctor. Maybe it is only a problem every once in a while, and so on.

And like cheap reading glasses, it might not be a perfect solution, but a solution nonetheless.

If the app could filter out distant sounds, or be used to filter directionally -- and do it in a non-crappy way -- then this would be genuinely useful.

One requires satisfying a vast overweening bureaucracy.

Based on the photo on the website, they look very different. Instead of being in/around the ear, they appear to have a piece that sits on the back of the neck. This could be for the battery or for an array of mics that are used for noise canceling and focusing.

Hearing aids compensate for a health problem, the goal here seems to be to improve hearing even for those that don't have hearing problems.

If hearing aids are glasses, these are binoculars/telescopes/microscopes.

Do hearing aids allow someone who is not deaf to tune out ambient noise (active noise cancellation)? Looks like these might do that.

Came to the comments to say this. Slightly awkward use of cheap classical marketing tricks, for such a big company.

It may still work for emails, because people might be unsure of how many mails are actually sent out, but this is cringe in 2016.

Their are already headphones let in ambient sound and headphones that fully block ambient sound. I don't think adding a volume knob to the ambient sound is going to change your brain's hearing calibration.

That means you probably have hearing damage. I read an article recently regarding this, many younger people have issues with this and it IS physical damage.

I have the QC 35's, and I have to agree with you. It was, I thought, an extravagant purchase, but after having them for a month I think not. I use them at least an hour a day and they are amazing, albeit expensive.

This is fascinating, because for years I've noticed that I have an acute opposite thing - I can separate sounds drastically when otherwise it shouldn't make sense. As in, I can hear a conversation, focus on it, and pick it up faintly even though it's something like 15 feet away and around a corner and mixed in with lots of general white noise. It's not a 100% thing but I think it came from years and years of practice in music (identifying different instruments, their lines/notes) and also intentionally eavesdropping conversations at bars and stuff (to practice writing better dialog).

It's a very interesting condition to have, because sometimes certain sounds will jump out at me in ways that wouldn't bother most other people - for example, the newest GMC TV commercials on US TV have this marimba chime thing that kicks in at the very end and it's a purposefully off-tempo, non-harmonized cacophony that drives me effing bonkers.

Good god. Baffling and scary.

Are those products you have at stages.co already developed and built or are they in development? Why would someone use that desktop device instead of the headphones?

I think you mean the QC30's. I just got those and the app seems different. I'm betting they're probably the same hardware with different software and will be sold separately. Because... more money

Didn't know about the QC30s. Amazon review mentions that the noise cancelling is not as extreme as QC20 or QC35 (by design, according to Bose).

My guess is that the new buds will allow the iPhone as a 3rd microphone, with Apple's "Live Listen"

You are spot on. Please, let augmented reality help us with this without ads. (Edit: I personally would be willing to pay a monthly subscription)

Depends on price for me.

I have trouble hearing in noisy environments. When I was young I was diagnosed with an auditory processing problem so I assume it's related to that.

When I meet with someone in a noisy environment I just accept that I'm only going to understand every other word that someone says. Which leads to a lot of smiling and nodding blankly.

I know very expensive hearing aids could handle this for me but it's not a big enough problem for me to check into that route. However if this was $150 bucks or so I might get some. Though I expect the price tag will be more like $600.

Think of augmented reality. It's generally conceived as modifying what you see, but why couldn't you benefit from a computer able to modify what you hear? It ought to be possible to do a lot of Google Glass-like things, not to mention Black Mirror-like, without looking as much like a space cadet or demanding as much of the hardware. (As a hearing aid user I was thinking about this 10 years ago.)

Like a hearing aid induction loop (a transmitter that plugs in to a venues mono-out and [I gather] transmits on a frequency for specially hearing aids).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_induction_loop

Somebody's been coding on production I think:

    Warning: date_timezone_set() expects parameter 1 to be DateTime, boolean given in format_date() (line 2062 of /var/app/current/hearphones/includes/common.inc).
    Warning: date_format() expects parameter 1 to be DateTimeInterface, boolean given in format_date() (line 2072 of /var/app/current/hearphones/includes/common.inc).

It usually means that Drupal can't establish a lock on the database. The reason why has lots of answers, but in this case it looks like the database isn't scaling.

It's a Drupal website. 10 concurrent users probably gives it a hug of death.

There's more money to be made in certified medical devices. My father worked in medical device certification before he retired and fought a long and eventually losing battle with a businessman, who wanted to have his vacuum cleaner product certified as a medical device(ostensibly it was supposed to somehow deliver drugs by spraying them on the floor).

Music sounds bad with foam plugs, because the cut the highs more than the midrange.

I wear these at concerts: https://www.amazon.com/Eargasm-Fidelity-Earplugs-Musicians-M.... A fairly flat 12 dB drop across the whole spectrum. Everything sounds normal, just not excessively loud.

> Every time I go to a club, I don't wear hearing protection, and this means that I am consciously making a choice to lose some of my hearing.

Maybe you should consciously make a different choice, such as bring ear plugs with you. There's plenty of brands that come in a container that fit easily on a keychain so they're not forgotten.

Most ear plugs I've used in clubs or at concerts actually improve (or at the very least make no difference) ability to have conversations.

Probably the best way to have a conversation with someone in a loud club is to stick your finger in your ear. Once you've sealed the hole completely, you can hear them fine!

Yeah, what you want is an earplug that will basically cut out the noise, and then a sophisticated device like this, to allow you to hear directionally, or to reduce background noise, to emphasize speech, and so on.

Yeah. I just tend to avoid the noisy establishments.

There are passive versions available as well. Obviously they won't have the same capabilities as active noise canceling, though. https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B01BCR0MNO/

Moral of the story: don't hit the database for brochure pages, except in an async way that won't block page loads on fail.

The technology behind them isn't groundbreaking, but I can think of some good uses for devices like this.

Basically it appears to be a combination of noise cancelling and directional microphones so that you hear more of what you're pointed towards. If you want to get a better feel for how these devices could work, I'd recommend taking a look into directional microphones.

Their noise canceling headset and earbud products are better than anything on the market, so that's not quite right.

I use the QC20 earbuds, which are even better at noise canceling than the QC15 headphones. As a developer, they are my number one tool to get into the zone.

They're also very calming on airplanes and elsewhere with a lot of low- or high-frequency noise.

I have tried a number of noise canceling headsets, but Bose is the best, something reviews also confirm.

(Audio quality is also in the top range, according to me. Not quite as good as my Sennheiser HD25, but close enough.)

You're probably referring to their speakers but their noise canceling earphones and headphones are widely considered to be excellent. When I was shopping for noise canceling earphones (I work at home, with three kids 5 and under) my research led me to buy Bose.