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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.

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

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

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

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 :(

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 :)

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!

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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!

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 :/

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 :/

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.

I thought something had triggered wrong with the algo because we were at #9 then 10 seconds later were at #99. I just didn't think that was normal :/

Yeah, some others I've talked with didn't like that with normal earplugs, because it brings down the noises around you, it amplifies the sounds inside your head. That's also one of the reasons Hush is nice because the noise masking makes it so the noises inside your head, like breathing, aren't disturbingly loud

The $99 isn't any different. Yeah a couple people got confused :( It's just a cheaper early adopter price that has a limited quantity!

Well there are notifications that most people need (i.e. alarm clock, emergency phone calls, etc) If you had a daughter out past curfew and a snoring spouse, you can sleep through the snoring but still hear your daughter call.

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

Developer here! We had a great discussion going on a second ago here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8620617 We were shooting up the FP up to the #9 spot but for some reason, our post was suddenly pushed down. I don't know what triggered it - let me know if I did anything wrong but I am trying again!

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! :/

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!

Exactly! Thanks for understanding dude!

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! :)

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?

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!

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