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 gonna 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
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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 ShortCircuit Atlantis Tech tips