Concerts Will Never Be The Same Again Thanks To This Insane Technology
Imagine this: You've paid a premium to attend your favorite music festival. You've packed your bags and all your buddies are onboard.
You travel for hours on end and finally make it to the festival grounds to hear your favorite band play your absolute favorite song. Only, it sounds like complete and utter crap because you're way back in the nosebleeds or 100 yards out in a field.
Your once-in-a-lifetime experience has now been ruined thanks to some sub-par audio.
But, thankfully this isn't a reality, because you live in 2016 and this is the mother f*cking future.
Heading into Coachella 2016, Elite Daily was sent a pair of futuristic-looking headphones to help us experience every single note coming from the stage. This tech is known as Here Active Listening.
"We wanted to give people more control over how they heard the world," Noah Kraft, Co-founder and CEO of Doppler Labs told Elite Daily about his invention.
The Here Active Listening earbuds look pretty standard, minus the awesome and totally badass case that charges the buds and the outward facing microphone used to pick up sound.
And while they may look pretty standard when it comes to earbuds, the technology inside is anything but.
The earbuds, in conjunction with the app, work by adjusting the way you hear every little sound around you via a Bluetooth connection. The app allows the wearer to control everything from the volume to the echo, plus adjust flang, fuzz and more to augment their personal audio.
To help hone in on their invention, the team at Here Active Listening partnered with Coachella to sell a very limited sample of the product. In exchange, Here worked with the audio techs at Coachella to create stage-specific listening experiences throughout the festival.
Of the festival partnership, Kraft says,
For us Coachella is really important… for us it's incredible testing ground.
Putting in the earbuds for the first time is a pretty wild experience. It sort of feels like you're hearing the world around you for the first time, or perhaps like you just acquired a new superpower.
As a tech lover, but not tech-savvy person, the app was a little cumbersome. If you don't know how echo, bass or flang will affect your listening experience, you may have a hard time adjusting the device. But with that said, I did have more than one "whoa this is cool" moment while making my adjustments.
At the festival, I popped in my earbuds while jamming out first to Frances, a UK-based songstress who stole my heart with her Adele-like lyrics and vocals. Getting to listen to her while throwing on a bit more echo and turning up the bass was great at first, but then I adjusted something wrong and all of a sudden felt like I was taking off on an airplane. (Note: This is not the fault of the device, but rather my own ineptitude.)
Next, I put the earbuds in for Ellie Goulding. I was looking forward to watching her performance, but I was too late to get anywhere near the stage.
I used the Coachella-specific filter for the experience and it helped me jam out like I had never jammed before. The pre-set filters were the true winners of Coachella.
The makers of Here Active Listening are hoping more Coachella attendees will provide them with greater feedback on the product before the company takes it to mass market later this year. Kraft says,
After Coachella we are going to go back to our lab and iterate.
Overall, if you love music, concerts 0r want to cancel out your noisy coworker in your open office environment, this will be a product for you. And at the projected $199-$299 price point it's one well worth the small investment, as long as it comes with some serious instructions for those of us who barely know how to work our phones.
Get on the waitlist for this totally awesome tech here and learn more in the video below.
