Forget noise cancelling, there’s a new frontier in headphone technology: personalization. Not choosing your own design, or picking from different modular parts, but headphones that tune themselves specifically to your ears.
This is precisely what Nura claims it can achieve with its new £349 Nuraphone. Co-founder Kyle Slater, who has a PhD in psychoacoustics, said the headphones can measure an individual’s audio profile and adjust the resulting sound to their specific acoustic preferences.
“Think of this as contact lenses for your ears,” he said.
Each of us hears sound differently, so we may not be hearing music as it was intended, even if we apply DSP or a standard EQ profile. Once set up, the Nuraphone supposedly reveals how the music should really be heard by adapting the sound to suit the physiology of your very own inner ear.
It does this by conducting a hearing test measuring Otoacoustic Emissions (OAE), the almost inaudible noise given off by the inner ear when the cochlea is stimulated by a sound. Microphones in the earpieces are sensitive enough to pick up these reflected sounds, then the app analyses this unique data to each wearer and creates a distinct hearing profile. OAE is already used to diagnose hearing issues in infants, as no feedback from the patient is required.
A new world of personalized sound that plays tunes in the best possible way just for each individual listener. Too good to be true? WIRED got hold of a pair to try them out.
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