Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “How much is your hearing worth?”.
Yes, they’re from Sennheiser, but they’re, not strictly speaking, earphones or headphones. They are that but they’re not just that they’re also they’re kind of a hearing aid, but not it’s the idea with these things. What are they even called? The conversation clear plus, is imagine a situation like I was in last night. I went to a crowded loud bar that had live music and I wore these things and they helped suppress the ambient noise around me and enhance the people talking to me. So I could hear them more clearly and it worked. There was times where I took them out. It sounded worse in there and harder to hear people.
The music was kind of too loud and it wasn’t good enough to make me want to listen to it over the person. I was talking to no offense musician guy for listening to this nice guy, but these actually have a place. So let’s do the unboxing. It’S a simple box, you get the charge case and then, in this section I’m expecting to see a lot of normal earphone. Stuff instructions looks like you can get these kind of fins there’s a couple more sets of ear tips. Of course, a USBC to a charging cable and some like warranty, and you know those little setup stuff.
This is a pre-release product, but this looks pretty final. I I would think if I open this up after buying these, I wouldn’t be surprised to see any of this stuff. Pretty basic charge case is pretty big. It offers two extra charges um.
It really looks like it just has like so much extra space and pardon me wants to give them a pass on that, just because this product’s a little bit different, but part of me, says No. If anything, I’m going to be carrying these around, maybe more than a normal music listening earphone, because if I’m the kind of person who wants or needs this product like, I have a hearing issue and I rely on these things. I really want them to be pocketable. So it would be nice if this is more compact.
Now, let’s look at the earphones themselves, they’re pretty basic. Looking truly wireless earphones they’ve got the little little guy, there’s a default size already equipped on there. I probably wouldn’t wear it without that. It looks like really just exposed hard plastic, but you can see that this default sleeve is way more subtle and Tiny than compared to some of these look at that wing tip on those.
Let’S see that’s supposed to go in here. How deep is your in here and then you can also see on here that they kind of are prioritizing this mic. So that’s the kind of difference between these and normal earphones like. Why? Couldn’T this just be an app? Why couldn’t they just uh update their algorithms? On their existing earphones? Well, it’s because these have more and better mics and they do beam forming. So the fact that this kind of points out, I think, is probably a little bit um quarter with functionality and they slip in like normal and they look pretty normal and we can talk about whether that’s a good thing or not. But then, once you put them on, you can hear yourself it’s kind of like you’re in transparency mode um, and we can talk about whether or not that’s a good thing soon.
Okay, so who are these for um this? The centers are rep told me that there are, what did you say, a hundred million people in the world who have some kind of hard of hearing issue, and then that figure is going to grow to like 900 million. And I don’t know what he said by 2050. sometime soonish and a lot of these people will never go to and speak to an audiologist and many of them who do will walk out of the audiologist’s office without buying anything. Because maybe hearing aids are really expensive or the process of getting one is really arduous and you’re like you just don’t feel like you need it that bad or maybe you’re ashamed.
These are supposed to bridge the gap where they’re not as expensive as a lot of hearing implements in that space and they’re also they’re, just not like as much of a heavy lift. They just kind of give you like a bit of a boost, but if you’re gon na wear these for a night out or at work all day, they ought to be comfortable. So, let’s get them in and check out the companion app, which is optional, but first a message from our sponsor D: Rand uh featuring Riley, so our sponsor for CES 2023 actually dropped out, but dbrand footed the bill, the only catches they want me to come out Onto the streets and offer Tech tips to random people for free it’s, I I’m not optimistic for how this is gon na go hi. Excuse me, do you have any platform shoes for men? No, no! Do you want to hear a tech tip sure uh if you, if you’re using Google and you put a minus sign in front of a word before you type it in before you press, enter okay it’ll? Take it out of your search results? Did you know that? No, I didn’t. Okay, do you want a tech tip? Okay, you don’t need any Tech tips. No, I’m not very techy. You know how to use Google perfectly yeah. Can you do one thing for me, what go to shortliness.com? The reason it’s optional is because everything is adaptive on here, so you walk through different environments and it’ll adjust how aggressive of a suppression it does around you, but the app is definitely good to have because you can actually tune your preference in terms of what kind Of suppression, you want there’s actually a little slider that they give you where you get to adjust, whether you want it kind of smooth or clear, like you can have it crispier and crunchier, where you can probably hear people a little better, but things are a little You’Re going to hear other sounds as well on the smooth side, it kind of sounds like you’re in a in a little bubble, almost like when you have ANC headphones on, whereas if you put it onto the clear side now it sounds like I. I have a microphone set up and I’m hearing the monitoring. So if something I don’t know, if someone drops a glass ball on a table over there, it’s going to be as if it’s like right in my face.
Things are just really really boosted and picked up. So I kind of like it in the middle but toward the clear side and to figure out what your preferences are. They have this onboarding setup through now. The first thing is you just hear speech. The show is a seller you’re in here the weekend is always busy. That’S why I got our tickets in advance, and the next thing is setting how loud you you want that these are they’re they’re all pretty loud.
This is the uh slider I talked about before. I find the best way to go through. That is just to do. The extremes like do number one and number seven, and then do okay put two and six and then just go back and forth, which one do I like better until you land on one? Oh 14., take me down, but you can see, there’s actually other tabs in this app.
So relax is basically just don’t do any kind of boosting or helping me in any way just turn on active noise canceling headphones. So you get to just isolate yourself and read a book, that’s nice and you don’t have to use the app for that. You actually just hold down on the headphones.
The button on the left, so the headphones is interesting because it actually has buttons that Sennheiser logo is a button that you can click pretty tactile, but also this is capacitive, so there’s actually quite a lot of interactions. You can do with this thing. I actually just held the Google Assistant by double tapping on that.
If I want to get out of relax mode, I can hold down the button on the right side to go back to conversation mode, and you can see there’s also this little Clarity boost button. I guess that’s kind of like a temporary maxing out and if I hold down the button on the right side again, I can get into that boost and I can toggle that off by holding it again. The other tab that you see in here is the stream Tab, and this is what happens when you listen to music or any other content on your device. So these are headphones and they’re pretty good headphones.
We’Ll try them out in a bit and the cool thing is when you do play music. I have a song playing now. You can actually decide how pronounced the music is. So I’m turning the slider to the left and it’s actually turning on the volume of my music so that I can more easily hear people talking to me. And I really like this because you could turn your music down to a real background level and still have conversations with people and just wear these around and talk to people, naturally with your own soundtrack playing, which I think is really awesome. What’S the soundtrack of your life James definitely caught Nigel I’ve been married a long time ago. So if I go to earbuds tab at earbuds controls into communication, you can see there’s a short press, a long press and a double tap for the capacitive. And if I click into that, can I edit these? No, you cannot it’s just informational that slider with how pronounced your music is.
You can adjust that on the fly without using the app just by doing short, presses of the of the button. That’S kind of like adjusting your volume, so that’s awesome! So what was it like for me to use them? Well, Comfort, wise? They didn’t bother me, I probably wore them for about two hours and normally earbuds that don’t fit any well will hurt after the first hour. These are are pretty low impact.
I like them. Um there was some weird things wearing them number one people think you’re wearing headphones, so maybe they’re going to be annoyed, although I think that is lessening as more and more earphones have transparency modes people get used to it. I don’t think the stigma is as bad as it was.
However, it would be lessened even more if they looked more like a hearing aid like if they had maybe the style, like those beats that just go behind the ear, but that would be a turn off to some people so trade-offs there. But you also can just hear like who you’re talking to as you turn your head, it’ll kind of just like pick up the person you’re talking to and make everything else, just just a little softer, and it’s weird like I was sitting in between two people. Last night, and when I turned away from one person, they kind of left this pickup cone uh the person over here would be magnified and this person went quieter than even quieter than they would be naturally um. So something to be aware of there’s a little bit of a learning curve when you’re wearing these things. The other biggest issue is that it boosts your voice. So when you’re in a loud environment that doesn’t sound loud to you and you can hear your own voice, nice and clearly, you think you don’t have to speak up to talk to the person next to you.
But you do still. They can they’re not wearing these they’re they’re, not hearing you as clear as you’re hearing them, and so a lot of people were leaning in and not. I couldn’t hear what I’m saying so. You actually have to feel like you’re yelling and to you sound, like you’re, yelling uh, just to be at a normal level, and the thing that’s really tricky about that is at one point I left the restaurant got in the elevator and Nick happened to be in The elevator started started talking to him and he said uh yeah, you sound kind of yelly like I.
I didn’t know that I had to like now tone it down, because the sound that I was hearing, my own voice was constant throughout those different environments. So when you’re not loud enough, people can tell you hey, speak up, you can see cues for people leaning in like they need you to talk louder, but when you are too loud A lot of times, people just think that guy’s annoying and they don’t tell you That you’re yelling, unless you’re, really bugging people around you. So I think that’s a potential bug, not a feature I kind of wish you could adjust how much of your own voice you hear through these another weird bug. I felt it was once in a while. Probably five times throughout the night, suddenly the Adaptive would just kind of freak out and it would change. I could hear the background really loudly and then it would just go back to conversation mode without me changing any variables, I’m still sitting there at my table. I’M still talking the same person and suddenly these things are going wacky going wild. So that’s a bit weird.
Maybe that could be improved, but it wasn’t that disruptive. It didn’t hurt my ears. My years, your mileage may vary. The best test, though, was that I took these off and decided to put them back in after a couple hours, when I was confident that I had used them enough to make this video.
I still put them back in because it was easier to hear people, and I didn’t want that musician in the restaurant, making that much noise I kind of wanted to turn him down, so they should exist. However, they are 850 dollars and I think that’s a lot. It’S definitely a lot for an earphone. It’S not a lot for a hearing aid, so I think that’s why they think they can get away with it, but I really think they should take it down to like 500.
I think I would be more comfortable, but I guess we’ll see if people buy these as far as how good they are as a headphone, I would say that they are comparable to other truly wireless earphones in the 200 space they don’t suck, but they’re, not 850. Good, so if you’re spending that money expecting uh commensurate audio quality, don’t that’s a bad expectation. These are for talking to people very cool, though I would love to see. Sennheiser just have this as an app or a feature that they expand to every headphone.
They make that would be cool, but as a product on their own, I still think they’re cool. I think some people should try them, and these could really change your life they’re, pretty expensive, they’re kind of weird. I think it’s going to take a few years. It’Ll be a Slow Burn, but definitely interested in the concept, and I would consider this pretty Innovative.
It’S like a new product category. So thanks for watching guys, if you like this video hit like hit, subscribe and check out our other CES content all week long and maybe an intern next week on short circuit, Atlantis Tech tips, .