Hush: The World's First Smart Earplugs | Hacker News Reader

Hush: The World's First Smart Earplugs

hush.technology

77 pointsnamuorg93 comments

The large 70db next to "hush the world" makes it sound like the earplugs offer 70db of noise reduction.

Which I know is BS, because the best earplugs made offer 33db of noise reduction.

I can only assume that the 70db number is the sum of the noise attenuation and the speakers' volume, but specific claims about the earplugs performance would be nice.

Yeah, it is the sum of the passive attenuation of the earplug and the noise masking. We don't have the test equipment yet to make a dB calculation of NRR for the foam component, but from subjective tests when comparing with other earplugs, the foam seems to block out about ~30dB!

Thanks, that makes much more sense. It's really misleading because most pairs of IEMs and earplugs do list the NRR in db. I routinely sleep in my SE535's, which offer 37db NRR (I looked it up after seeing their 70db claim).

Hacker News just broke our website, LOL

You could check out what we're doing on our Kickstarter, haha.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/hush/hush-the-worlds-fi...

Off topic, but possibly useful information for the OP. Your use of "haha"s are quite off-putting for me, I think because to me they imply you are not taking what you just wrote seriously.

Do they bother anyone else, or am I just out of touch with da yoof?

Hmm, I do use it quite often - haven't had anyone call me out on it before though. Will note, thanks

I'll stick my own off-topic comment under yours. I agree. All the emoticons and LOL's and extremely liberal use of the exclamation mark just rubs me the wrong way.

We're probably picking nits. I'm sure Mr. Lee doesn't intend that impression at all, and is probably overcompensating to make sure his tone isn't misread as hostile or argumentative. I've noticed myself doing this at times, seeing how often other commenters infer a different tone than what was intended.

That kind of language works for most of the internet.

It doesnt work on HN, which tends to take itself more seriously (for better or worse)

These are definitely not the world's first smart earplugs - Etymotic has been offering this kind of technology for quite a long time now.

http://www.etymotic.com/gsp15.html

We're the first "smart" earplugs in the modern understanding of the word "smart" as a connected device! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_device

I think it's a reasonable claim. Those Etymotics are just a mic-and-speaker system that does 'compression' (in the audio engineering sense of that word)--they're actually more analogous to an in-ear hearing aid.

[Edited to be less snarky, before I noticed the reply]

They dynamically adapt to the environment. I'd call that pretty smart for earplugs - certainly more directly applicable to their intended usage than smartphone-style connectivity. [edited to remove snark]

Yeah, those etymotic's are smart in their own right. I'm just riding the "smart wearable" trend and making the "world's first smart" claim based on the understanding of smart being a connected device! :)

Fair enough.

Arguments about marketing aside, the 'Hush' and the 'Gun Sport Pro' have very different capabilities and serve different functions and markets.

It's too easy when you see a new product to point to something similar and say 'Meh--nothing new here'. In this case I think there's real innovation and I responded to your post to try to make that point.

Fair enough. I'm a musician so that's the first thing that came to mind when I heard "smart earplugs" (Etymotic have a wide range of products beyond the GSP). I do have to work in a noisy office environment sometimes, and so these could be great for that. Right now I have a giant pair of construction-site style over-the-ear cans that I combine with various noise generators.

The problem as I understand it, is that the skin in the ears isn't really tough enough to stick something in there for too long. Reportedly US marines abandoned those linked above, as troops started bleeding from their ears after a certain number of hours of use. Now, that was probably 20 hours+ - not really a problem if used only for sleep or only for work. But for any kind of 24/7 use, something molded to the outer ears is probably better.

There are a lot of weird plastic shapes to the Quietpro design that I can see irritating and making someone's ear bleed. If it was the foam causing people to bleed, I'd find that very strange as there are millions of people that use earplugs for hours and hours on end with no problem :/

Maybe i wasn't clear: the problem appears for troops that use them in war zones: essentially days on end, not merely hours. If it was just the foam type used, I'm sure they'd try and mix it up with something more soft. That was a huge contract that was partially cancelled.

Hmm, yeah. That's some pretty interesting insights though! Thanks for sharing. Then it wasn't the foam, it's probably that their ears got irritated from that plastic housing - I've learned a LOT about designing for the ear these past months and that shape is not ergonomic, haha!

I've always worn hearing aids, with ear moulds. They're worn all the time, except for sleep. Other deaf people I know, wear them while sleeping for some odd reason. I couldn't fathom to wear anything while sleeping!

They've never made my ears bleed, nor anyone else I know.

Maybe troops should wear properly fitted moulds :)

Well, you do take them out 8 hours of the day then. Here we're talking 24/7 in dry desert heat.

My ears get irritated after using foam earplugs for a few night in a row.

"...is that the skin in the ears isn't really tough enough to stick something in there for too long…"

I use earplugs every night. The ones I think are most comfortable block up to 38 db at low frequencies and 48 db for high frequencies. They are really soft - and I mean: really. I sleep like a baby (and I don't miss my alarm in the morning). Still, in case of fire during a REM phase, I probably will die ;o).

I also have professional plugs from the acoustician that were fitted to my ears, but they are much harder (silicone). Those I can wear during the day (underground, bus etc.) but not during the night. They do hurt the ears brutally. The little movements that happen, when the ear rubs the pillow are sufficient to cause severe pain.

I've got two kinds of custom earplugs (different materials). Both literally have a perfect fit for my ears. Both suck to sleep in. Horrible if you're a side-sleeper, but even if your not, I find that by half-way through the night my ears don't want anything in them anymore.

The idea is great, but I think that many will find that having plugs in your ears all night is not comfortable.

This is true for some people but there are a lot of people that do sleep with earplugs/earbuds in!

I do agree that our idea doesn't work for everyone - people with sensitive ears aren't going to like it no matter how comfortable we design it! :/

For anyone who sleeps on their side, earplugs with plastic extending outside the ear canal is a very uncomfortable experience. How is this an improvement over soft foam inserts?

Also, how is this different from using in-ear headphones with Comply tips? http://www.complyfoam.com/

We've done a lot of tests with the ergonomics of it - even delaying our launch for a month so that we could iterate more because the side-sleeper comfort wasn't up to par. it's smaller and rounder than what you see in the video as we filmed the first half of the video before our final design. ~70% of the people we had sleep with it for an entire night noted that it was comfortable. that number will get even better as we implement the inner silicone layer.

the main difference between using in-ear headphones with comply tips is wires. I've had to used wired for a long time and it was terrible. They'd tangle and get pulled out of my ear. They'd pull my phone out of the charger. I've even had my phone run out of battery in the middle of the night because it got disconnected. When you roll around, wires in bed are not a pleasant experience. :(

Also, the software built in is very different. Normal earphones don't have our user-friendly software that has features designed for sleep. I.e. when an alert sounds on your phone with normal earphones, it sounds in both your headphones and your phone's speaker - waking up others around you. There might be some hacked homebrew way of getting some of Hush's software features on normal earphones but our software makes it easy. :)

So your main selling points versus the competition is lack of wires and ease of use?

Would you agree if you're not bothered by wires or complexity a pair of active noise cancelling canalphones with Comply tips will outperform Hush by a wide margin?

I wouldn't quite say "outperform" as I'm not aware of noise cancelling+foam tipped IEM's that are comfortable. Someone could very well make their own app to have the same software features as us, use a very comfortable foam tipped iem and have a very similar experience if they don't care about the wires! I do agree with that!

If anyone is looking for mid-price dumb earplugs, I read this article today.

https://illmethodology.com/2014/11/tried-earplugs-amazon/

TLDR: A working DJ tried all the mid-price dumb earplugs on Amazon, and recommends EARASERS.

Note that this recommendation is for DJ purposes, not maximum sound attenuation for sleep.

Totally second this - I am not a DJ but I go to a lot of concerts and shows, these are the best earplugs I've tried for reducing volume while retaining sounds quality throughout the frequency range.

Very cool product. You can get a similar effect to these isolation+masking plugs by wearing normal earplugs and then playing loud masking sounds externally (either over speakers in the same room, or through over-the-ear headphones).

On planes, for instance, I wear headphones over my earplugs and crank up the volume to watch movies. It's the poor-man's noise-canceling headphones! If you can, also turn up the treble to try to flatten out the combined frequency response of the plugs+phones.

Obviously my hack doesn't solve the same problems this product does, but it's a trick I've found useful.

Yeah you can! A lot of the people I interviewed actually did that - they'd wear earplugs and have a sound generator going... Haha. Kind of counterintuitive since they'd be blocking out the noise masking as well, ha!

That is a good workaround though to get a similar effect! Funny how you tried to digitally equalize the earplugs low-pass filter, haha

I sleep like that, with earplugs and a white noise generator. The frequencies that make it past the earplugs are the ones you want anyway for blocking other sounds that make it past, so it's not that counterintuitive. The only sounds that now interrupt my sleep are low frequencies coming from below, through the pillow-side ear which doesn't get to hear the sound generator much.

Interesting thought on how the lower frequencies that make it through mask out that frequency spectrum.

Doesn't Kickstarter have a policy against using renders?

https://www.kickstarter.com/rules

"we prohibit photorealistic renderings."

When I spoke with someone from Kickstarter, they said that it's a safeguard against 'vaporware.' As long as you show evidence of your actual prototype (boards, CAD models, etc) and that real engineering is complete, it's fine!

So why aren't there photos of your final 1x scale prototype? The evolution pic is a render, which leads me to believe that engineering challenges will prevent you going from breadboard to 2x to 1x scale, making this project dead in the water.

The bottom right picture in the evolution of hush montage is our final 1x scale prototype. We zoomed a bit but it's much smaller than the prototypes to the left of it.

Would be nice if I didn't need to download a 2.1 MiB image to view this page. Could probably keep the visual appeal here without the bloat by simply switching to JPEG.

Edit:

Also I'm having a hard time understanding your value proposition. Are these doing some active noise canceling, or are they just simply a bluetooth headset with semi-decent passive noise suppression?

Also, why would I want these to be connected to my smartphone while I'm sleeping? Am I going to be woken up by every text/e-mail?

Point being, when I read the copy at the top of your page I instantly think that your product is going to make my ability to sleep worse rather than better.

Edit 2:

The rest of the page clears up some of my questions, but I think you'd have a lower bounce rate if you worked on the headline copy a bit more.

Dang. Thanks for noting that. We'll swap that out :)

They are not doing active noise cancelling - they do passive noise reduction with an earplug and noise masking using soothing sounds. These are two of the better noise isolation solutions out there combined into one small package.

You want to be connected to your smartphone so you can hear some of the things you need to hear - those being an alarm clock, an emergency phone call from someone important, etc. We have a dashboard so you can control which notifications you want to be disturbed by.

Hopefully by giving you the control to block out everything and only hear the things that you ABSOLUTELY need to hear, we can give you a peace of mind to be able to sleep better

Developer here! Hoping to get some feedback if possible!

What about the need to be woken up by external events which aren't connected to your smart phone? The immediate example I think of is a fire alarm.

Our plans are to tie into the greater smart home! Think Nest, smart baby monitors, smart security systems, etc. We've already been talking with a number of OEM's like Samsung who want us to use their ecosystem :)

But for this V1, we can't effectively block out a fire alarm.. those are really loud.. We can block out maybe 70dB max with our device whereas fire alarms are generally much much louder!

Was active noise cancellation technically infeasible for this product?

Battery limitations :( And cost. It's also not the best at blocking out the sudden transient sounds that are responsible for jarring people out of sleep. Passive noise reduction + noise masking are much more effective for that!

My biggest concern generally is in-ear comfort. Short of molded customs, every in-ear headphone I've tried causes canal soreness within an hour or two, including the "sound delivery straw" designs with delicate foam or rubber surrounds. Secondarily, it looks like the current model sticks out, causing pressure if one's head is resting on its side.

That said, my ear canal soreness is largely due to canal deformation relating to jaw movement. Perhaps this is not an issue for sleeping. Also, foam earplugs (compared to earphones) are not uncomfortable for me.

There are some people that have very differently shaped ears that we simply can't account for with a single design. Can I ask which part of your ear got irritated so that I can make a note?

http://www.rudyard.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/external-e...

Was it the tragus?

I do get canal soreness from foam plugs. I've recently found that the silicone blob ear plugs are much more comfortable (perhaps because they stay in the outer ear), and are also more effective at sound reduction.

I guess one of the challenges for this project will be handling the variations in ear geometry.

Some people do like the silicone tree design earplugs more than the foam. It varies. We are considering providing some of those as a stretch goal!

Yeah, the variations of ears is definitely the hardest challenge in our product

I really like this idea! Combining isolation and masking in a standalone in-ear device is very clever.

Personally I'm less interested in the ability to be interrupted by alerts from a smartphone. When I'm sleeping I want to sleep. When I'm working, I can get vibration alerts from my phone.

Have you considered a 'dumb' version with just pre-recorded masking audio and no wireless features?

Thanks! :D

Haven't considered that :/ I would have to ask around to see if there is significant interest enough to merit the engineering costs to make a cheaper version :/ Thanks for the input though!

Combined isolation and masking is a great feature! You might consider working with the author of Noise Machines[0] for a later iteration. That site is a lifesaver in a noisy office.

[0] http://mynoise.net/noiseMachines.php

Your site is down at the moment, so let me ask - as a musician, what do these get me over Etymotic's earplugs? I have a $160 pair of custom-molded plugs with replaceable filters that go from -5 to -20dB attenuation.

They're meant more for sleep! Musician earplugs offer a completely different value proposition in keeping the frequency response the same while reducing dB. Our earplugs' purpose is to get maximum dB isolation so that your sleep isn't disturbed!

Are the batteries going to be replaceable? I worry when the battery ages it won't last through the night. At 10 hours of charge maximum, if the battery loses just 20% of its max capacity, I would run risk of the battery not making it through the night.

No they aren't. We have 500 cycles (I believe, maybe more if we change the charge rate) of our battery before it goes to 80% of max capacity, which is still 8 hours.

Even if you were to use the same device for years, the sound masking would just turn off prematurely in the night and make sure it preserves enough juice to sound the alarm in the morning

Heya! Just backed the project, seems super promising! As a developer have you tested these while coding? I've tried rainymooods which works alright, but I'm wondering now if this wouldn't be more effective (because of the cancelling). Also I may have missed this, but do you have any ideas with regards to motion sensoring or opening the API? It'd be great to buy a motion sensor compatible with Android and hook into the wearables to alert if someone (or in the case of camping something) is nearby.

Cool thanks! :D I use a wired version all the time and I love how I can zone in and ignore the things going on around me! Motion sensing would be a bit of an expensive add-in. :( We would want to open up the API, thinking about it but we're a little worried because we don't know if there will be much application as our feature set is very tailored to the use case that we've defined :/

Well this is what I mean. You say expensive; I say damn cheap : https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/192833321/pebblebee-the...

This is why you need to open up the API in whatever form you can. Developers are going to want to use your tool in ways you aren't thinking of.

I guess we're just hesitant to add extra hardware now because fitting everything initially was a bit of a pain.

True on the opening up of the API - we'll most likely end up opening it up!

If you can deliver on the promise, this would be worth way more than $150 to me. Probably more than $500. I'm a light sleeper and I live in a city - not a great combination.

But I am for now a little skeptical: - I have never used a pair of earbuds or earplugs which are comfortable for more than ~20 minutes. This includes soft foam earbuds and plugs, small-sized musician earplugs (I have tiny ears), and earplugs custom fit by an audiologist. - Even that custom fit pair (which I bought for sleeping) doesn't work for sleeping: I'm a side sleeper, and sleeping on my side applies a little pressure to the ear canal. It's enough that those custom fit earplugs don't fit right when I'm on my side. - Those custom fit earplugs are not even close to mirror images of each other. It's not obvious to me that the same piece of foam can be appropriate for both ears, no matter how deformable it is.

My main point of feedback: focus on comfort - specifically sleeping comfort for people with odd ears and odd sleeping positions - over everything else. I would pay piles of money for earplugs comfortable enough to sleep in with say 10dB reduction, far better that than not-quite-comfy enough smart earplugs with 70dB reduction. Similarly, I would happily sacrifice battery life, aesthetics, cost, smart features, etc. for comfort.

Unfortunately, there is no physical way that we can be significantly more comfortable than soft foam earplugs as we have to house electronics and a battery inside :/

Have you tried good quality soft earplugs? Maybe some Hearos Ultimate Softness? There are some really bad earplugs that are uncomfortable that we will be more comfortable than. But if you've used good earplugs and found them uncomfortable, I'm sorry to say, but there's no way we'll be able to make it anymore comfortable than that :(

Hmm, I don't really see any benefit over my current solutions. I can wear cheap foam/silicone ear plugs and just set my alarm louder. Sometimes I just sleep with small rubber wired ear buds in (not the hard plastic ones) if I want to listen to audio while going to sleep. Never had any trouble with either method enough to pay this much. Props to these people if they can manage to market people into paying that much for not much different than current solutions, though.

Out of curiosity, which small rubber wired earbuds do you use?

Also, you may have not had trouble with either method but others have. Wires are pretty dang inconvenient in sleep to not only myself, but a lot of the people I've interviewed

seems like it's sure missing the chance at sleep tracking -- a connected hardware implement that you need to wear while sleeping.

LOL yeah, we decided to take it out of this version to keep the value of it very clear in "Block out the world. Hear what you need." But that is something we plan on implementing into V2!

Noise cancellation is a big, existing market. If they really have a better technology to offer, they don't need a Kickstarter.

We're not noise cancellation. We're noise isolation for sleep - something that investors have told us time and time again that they didn't think people would pay money for. I think it's a big market and I need Kickstarter to prove it :)

Oh OK, my bad then.

Do these work well on flights? Especially when you are sitting close to the exit row near the engine(s). OR am i better off buying the Bose Noise Cancelling headset?

Active noise cancelling is actually more effective if it's the engine drone that's bothering you! If it's the baby crying next to you, Hush can be more effective.

And yet another widget that needs to be charged...

What happens when I forget charging?

Will I miss my alarm in the morning or will it wake me up with a low battery alarm in the middle of the night?

I'm going to venture a wild guess that if you forget to charge, it will stop working, as it's probably not magical.

A low battery alarm would be about the most idiotic feature imaginable for a sleep aid, so hopefully they won't do that. Probably a blinking light on the host charger.

If you forget to charge, the earplugs will automatically turn off the noise masking early to make sure it has enough juice to still sound the alarm in the morning.

New thread going on at the FP. This one was brought down for a reason unknown to me as all the traffic was organic! :(

man i so thought this played music, it would be the perfect headset for me. i like listening to audiobooks before sleeping and every single bt headset i tried doesn't let me move around while laying down (mostly because the wrap around the back of my head).

Yeah, we had to limit that because it is first and foremost a noise isolation device for sleep and we had to have 10 hours of sound generation to be able to get through the night :( We're considering in V2 to let it be an option to stream audio for like an hour or so and then autoshutoff! This is our "MVP"

Good. Keep it simple! So many Kickstarters fail because the founders try to overreach and end up making products that do a mediocre job of their USP and a worse job of all the tiered extras they throw in. Feature creep will kill you.

Exactly! Thanks for understanding dude!

Couldn't you skip the music altoghether then? (although I guess then it would lose value?)

Wristwatches produce a sound tuned carefully to the peak sensitivity of the ear, so the battery lasts a lot.

http://www.earin.com/

What I want are plugs that quiet sounds from within the body / ear canal...

The noise masking we do allows you to mask out the breathing/bodily sounds you make

another http://www.motorola.com/us/accessories-bluetooth-headsets/Mo...

Are the tips replaceable or can the buds be cleaned to remove wax build-up?

They are removable and can be washed under the sink. You can also replace them when they wear down! We'll keep our foam pieces pretty affordable!

Find it shameful that even though it seems most of the developers are clearly non-white (see about-us), they use standard stock images of Caucasians. I would never buy a product promoted this way.

Hmm, I can't fully follow the logic here but that's alright. agree to disagree.

That may be an issue with yourself - Honestly the first thing I noticed people-wise was that they're all named Daniel

The Israeli education ministry recently launched a new site, in which they've used stock photos of, mostly, Nordic looking children and families.

Israel is a melting pot. Eastern Europeans, North African and near eastern Jews, and recently lots of Russians. None look particularly Nordic or even European (ie Slavic, Eastern European etc.) , unless they're not Jewish to begin with (many Russian immigrants, according to Israeli press, are not Jewish).

You want find many blonde Israelis, except for women who dye their hair (mostly Russians, but not limited).

So looking at an official site which represents a false idea of who we are as people, was disturbing, and in deed, people quickly responded and objected to what was done with tax payers money.

My problem is that using stock images blends and makes real people transparent, not present.

I understand that this is the easiest option, marketing-wise, but it's offensive.

There's a flip side too. People that can't connect to promotional material that misrepresents reality. Weather non-realistic women in fashion media, removal of diversity from promotional material and so on.

It's just wrong.

Taking a risk here generalizing, but I feel that with Asians it might be even worst, because of their perceived obsession with "whiteness". It's just offensive.

hush.technology , i'll probably never remember the domain...

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