Beats headphones are very popular, they’re everywhere, and they sound like trash. That’s a shame, because there’s a century of recorded music out there that sounds really good. [WΛLLTΞCH] forgot about [Dre] and started looking into a better way to listen to music. He came up with bone conduction transducers and started one of the most interesting projects for this year’s Hackaday Prize.
Instead of driving a speaker cone that vibrates the air, passes through the middle ear, and vibrates the eardrum, bone conduction amplifiers bypass the outer and middle ear completely. Not only does this produce a clearer reproduction of sound, but it’s also great for anyone with an abnormality in the ear canal, ear drum, or the tiny bones of the inner ear.
[WΛLLTΞCH]’s first prototype is using a bone conduction amplifier and a cheap Bluetooth module, stuffed into a small 3D printed case. With two 1W transducer modules, it was enough for a proof of concept. The final design is vastly more integrated, with a dedicated Bluetooth audio module. To this, [WΛLLTΞCH] is adding microphones and the ability to take calls over Bluetooth. It’s a great project, and something that could make a great product, something we’re also looking for in this year’s Hackaday Prize.
Easily the most novel entry I’ve seen iin this year’s competition. Very marketable to boot. That’s a solid combination! Looking forward to seeing this continue to evolve!
Thank you so much for the support! :) This project is very dear to me, it feels twice as good as the excitement of the design process to make a difference help others with my projects too. I’m studying EE, IoT, and entrepreneurship at Stanford over the summer, so I’ll try really hard to work on it before the entry deadline, but I’m really excited about the final prototype!
I suffer from profound, mostly-conductive single-sided hearing loss, and I’d love to test these if you need a tester. :)
While I have a bone-anchored hearing aid that I use for daily things, it’s limited to speech frequencies. Something like this that would let me properly listen to music would be fantastic!
Google “bone fone radio”
Just two headphone transducers in the neck-shoulder area, tinny as all get out. If the weight of it slipped the sound burst forth like tiny phones turned up all the way.
Then there is Blurtooth, that century of great sound is like dirty glasses, it takes the definition down generation or two.
There is a great use of this bone stuff. Lookup [SwimP3]. It holds a gig or few and has two drivers, 1 inch plastic cones. There is an air space then thin plastic and your skin. Used on temple area. The smallest of the bass bump and cone-less full range drivers would seem to make a better driver. Pot them in silicone.
The way I know of the SwimP3, is a friend that swims for health uses one. Make that 4 or more. The weak link is the cooked spaghetti thin and about as tensile tough wire. It has up to 7 wires with colored coating in a 2mm thick plastic jacket. I have a box full of these players with bad wires and no way to make what I would want to use for 7 conductor wire work in the tiny spaces that worm of a cable goes. And be able to make it waterproof at the entrant points as well as the jacket, no.
Please make a sealed, inductive charged, blurtooth coupled, bluetooth ported, music player. It will just be two cups worn with a headband elastic, no wires at all. There would be a market for it and for the version coupling to a smart phone which does not work well in water even if waterproofed. Microwaves and water vs. air.
Anyone who read any of the pop-technical magazines in the late 1970s would surely remember these:
http://blog.modernmechanix.com/mags/MechanixIllustrated/11-1980/bone_phone.jpg
We sold these in the early 80’s at a True Value hardware store. All it was was a foam body with a radio in it. The speakers were about two inches across and pointed at your collar bone area. The speakers were just normal speakers and just shot the sound into you body and kind of resonated the sound to your ears. If you were standing next to someone who had it cranked up it sounded like a crappy AM radio from a few feet away. It was not “silent” to the people around you if it was turned up loud. Very basic AM / FM tuner.
I want this.
Where to send $$ ??
Comment about beats headphones was both unnecessary and inaccurate.
While they definitely don’t represent the best value for money, the current line of Beats headphones are actually very well reviewed.
Anyway, this seems like a really cool project, I’ve always wondered how bone conduction sounds, and its use as a hearing aid is a sweet idea
dear shill, your defense of the beats headphones is weak. perhaps you should link to a review like this one.
That’s from over a year ago. Things can change pretty quickly. Maybe you’re the shill. What are your favourite headphones?
Now that apple owns beats it’s obviously flawless by the mere infusion of appleness
Yeah, but good luck finding an unbiased and non-sponsored review by someone who actually understands quality audio that supports beats headphones. Anyone with any experience judging sound quality would quickly label them as terrible headphones.
http://www.innerfidelity.com/content/time-rethink-beats-solo2-excellent
I think you’ll find Tyll Hertsens is very well respected in the headphone audio community.
“It’s fairly safe to say that the original Beats by Dre Solo is one of the most—if not the most—popular headphones in the world. I found its performance abysmal.”
“the current line of Beats headphones are actually very well reviewed”- myself
As for bone conduction, it’s easy to try. Press a bare piezo element to the back of the jawbone, just below the ears. You can tell that you’re hearing through bone conduction, rather than through air, by using a frequency just above the limit of your normal range of hearing. You WILL be able to hear it, and higher still. Maybe even frequencies you’ve never heard in your entire life, even when your ears were new. Those are indescribably odd. I was definitely aware of the stimulus, but my brain wasn’t able to categorize it. It wasn’t certain whether it was auditory or something else. And while I could clearly distinguish between two different frequencies, pitch was ambiguous; I could not recognize and place them on the chromatic scale.
As for Beats headphones, though I’d never buy them, I wonder if they get an unfairly bad rap. Especially in regards to those four pieces of “useless” metal, which people universally claim are there only to add weight, and make the product feel like it’s of a higher quality than it is.
I once needed to fit a piezo tweeter in a small area. To accomplish this I removed the horn. It sounded HORRIBLE. It resonated even at moderate power levels. So I glued a piece of metal to the back of it, roughly equivalent the the mass of the horn. It worked.
I also remember seeing a device for electric guitars that claimed to extend sustain. It was nothing more than a glamorous metal plate that one screwed to the underside of the headstock. The ad claimed that by increasing the mass of the headstock, less of the vibrational energy of the strings would be lost to the headstock and neck. Just to see if it really made a significant difference, I tried temporarily clamping a chunk of metal to my headstock. It worked too.
So while I’d prefer the mass in my headphones to come from large and powerful drivers, are those chunks of metal in Beats headphones *really* useless? I don’t think so.
That’s a pretty interesting anecdote. I haven’t heard of this before but it sounds logical.
Will other people hear the music you are listening to with these headphones? Somehow reminds me of the neurophone which should create the same effect via ultrasonic piezo transducers. But the problem there is that other people also hear the sounds you are listening to. So there you can’t differentiate if the sound was actually conducted by bones or by air.
Yeah, I was gonna post about the Neurophone but it doesn’t use bone conduction. Instead it targets the auditory nerve itself. I tested a Neurophone on some deaf friends and two of them definitely heard it.
As a side note, I also have a virtual reality device that makes you sense movement without mechanical or visual trickery(just 3 electrodes) that oddly enough will also give you visual distortions(for lack of a better word) if you tweak the settings. The inventors didn’t seem to be interested in the discovery though.
Nope, the sound doesn’t leak at all at regular-loud volume levels, it’s the same as regular earuds. At the back of your head above your ears where the sound is best, at full volume (way too loud anyway) from a short distance away it sounds just like leaky earbuds.
The sound doesn’t leak at all, that’s part of the “phantom” effect, only you can hear the music coming from all around you. At max volume (way too loud) it leaks a bit like regular earbuds do at high volume.
A few years ago, the “Cynaps” Bluetooth Bone-Conduction Headset was fundraised on indiegogo.
I supported this Project and got one Headset as pledge, which does its work inside my Snowboard-Helmet.
Current Version of Cynaps can be ordered at maxvirtual.com
There are also cool “maker-kits” with all individual parts to integrate in own projects.
So nothing new about this idea, but cool anyway.
Panasonic also made/makes a bone-conducting headphone with BT and microphone, since many many years.
And there must be a range of others that do.
How was the bone contact achieved?
Didnt you have to bite on them for optimum connectivity? That would make a funny phonecall.
The ideal place for proper reception and soundstage is on the ridge at the back of your head behind and slightly above your ears. Now that I’ve found the ideal location through testing with the wired transducers shown, I can model ergonomic arms and the body of the device to match.
This is a great project. Let me know if there’s ever a kickstarter, I definitely want one!
It seems likely that the response curve for your skull is very nonlinear. How would you correct for that? It’d be very difficult to get objective measurements!
Moron, Beats headphones do not sound like trash, they are just too expensive for you to buy so you say that because it frustrates you.
Coming from someone who calls himself “supergenius” that means… almost nothing.
Check out Aftershokz.com
Why is it that I’m the only one who remembers these? Oh yeah, I’m old.
http://boingboing.net/2006/01/08/dead-tech-the-bone-f.html
Ditto, I miss DAK industries, had a crush on that gal also :-)
DAK are still around. I get their newsletter from time to time. The lead guy(for some reason I forget his name) left a few months ago but it’s mostly the same business overall.
The Bone Fone was sold by JS&A, not DAK.
Any work towards improving bionic ears is great but “He came up with bone conduction transducers” seems a little misleading and disrespects the work done by others that he is building on. Anyway it’s a super important area and kudos for your work.
The following is hearsay / my two cents; the potential problem with bone conduction headphones only need to vibrate an extremely small area yet are connected to the entire skull which would distribute vibration and act as a low pass filter. Which may make them better at lower frequencies but could explain why people think music sounds bad on them.
I agree, I’m by no means claiming to have invented the concept of bone conduction :) It quite hard to explain, but the actual quality of the audio is very clear and rich, it’s part of the “PHΛNTOM” effect. It has strong bass with added haptic feedback as a result of the transmission, but the highs and midrange are clear and present with little to no distortion.
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=bone+conduction+headphones
use these daily http://aftershokz.com/collections/wireless/products/bluez-2?variant=2121136769
decent mic, great battery life and good sound quality
been wearing them pretty much 10 hours a day for the last year
I have made something quite similar in school as final practical exam (maturita) https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=30598C6E9B6BF2CF!63793&authkey=!AF2oqss78CcwyuY&ithint=file%2cpdf
Final photo http://1drv.ms/1D1aujT
Don’t know how much of a difference between this project and these are but would this be of any use to you if you could pick up some second hand one’s or something?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tooth_Tunes
I have a neat bone conduction bluetooth headset. It clips on the back of the ear and does a decent job.
As someone in a music-loving family who also has otosclerosis, this is great.
(Not to mention, from an emergency responder standpoint, the bone-conductor headphones we have right now are HORRIBLE, and I’d love a better option.)
Good luck, I can’t wait to see the final product.
Back in my Navy day 1981 I purchased a bone phone radio. It had an AM FM radio and the bone induction speakers in a set up that looked like a small inflatable vest. It did last long and I chucked it in the trash, I regretted it ever since. It was the radio that went bad not the speaker.