Mossberg has an interesting review of the new Even earbuds. These are active, in that they have their own battery, and so do some interesting A/D work and calibration for your specific ears.
While younger people may not find this very interesting, I find that I have to turn my music up to ridiculous volumes to be able to hear the detail I was able to hear when younger. (I guess that's the price I pay for having seen Motorhead live!)
My right and left ear are very different nowadays, so this is $99 I am happy to throw at testing these things out. I'll let y'all know what they are like.
Oh... and kleinbl00, I'd love your input, being an audio engineer and all.
I was actually preliminarily involved in building a box that would do effectively this. Thing of it is, the equal loudness contours are an average, and you do experience significant roll-off with age (regardless of Motorhead concerts). Putting in a DSP that allows you to balance your headphones is a no-brainer; it's astonishing that nobody has bothered to build it yet. Curious to hear your thoughts.
I hate in ear headphones but I'd love to try these out. I'm pretty sure that I've not been run over or mugged because I use old school headphones. Seems like it would be possible to do this with existing USB headphones, maybe people will licence the technology. I mostly use headphones to listen to podcasts, not music so sound quality isn't super important to me but all the same I'd like to hear what they can do.
It's possible to do it a dozen different ways. They can't license the technology because the technique is nearly 90 years old. It's one of those things that, within the industry, it's kind of surprising nobody has bothered with yet. All they're doing is throwing a graphic EQ between you and your headphones, which you can obviously do at home but is tricky to do on the road. The one thing they did that hasn't really been popularized is doing an audiology test to determine what your ELCs are, which is stupid easy, which is what their website does. Of course, the website also plays back the "equalized" version at about 6dB louder, which automatically makes it sound better, which is pretty unfair but entirely within the parameters of marketing. Sound quality actually matters a lot with podcasts. I listen 95% of the time to audiobooks at this point and speech intelligibility actually matters a fuckload. Music? Music can be whatever. Intelligibility takes a lot more effort. That's why the gold standard of "was the concert any good?" is "did you understand the lyrics."
I bought a bag of 40 pairs of headphones for $40. I keep them at the shop and if someone is listening to their device to loudly I say something along the lines of "Pardon me, it appears you forgot to bring your headphones, luckily I can sell you a functional pair for $1." They either turn their shit off (Trump Speech, race car video or whatever other loud as fuck thing they were listening too) before I have to stab them with something or they give me a buck. I've been using these shitty head phones when ever I misplace mine or forget them somewhere. They suck but they get the job done. I can hear my podcast on the walk home and all I really care about is content not fidelity. Other people lose their minds over shitty fidelity and could never stand to listen to it but I don't mind all that much, or it's better than nothing.