- Cheryl Tan
CES 2023: Brainwave-Hacking Earbuds for Better Sleep or Productivity & More Cool Stuff!
So you might have seen our Klipsch X Ear Micro T10 video, and here are some other cool audio products we saw at CES 2023.
Sennheiser Conversation Clear Plus
Let’s start with one of the more unique products launched this CES, which is the Sennheiser Conversation Clear Plus earbuds. As we all know, Sennheiser was acquired by Sonova Holding AG, which predominantly worked on hearing solutions previously. The Conversation Clear Plus earbuds is sort of a combination of the expertise from Sonova and Sennheiser; You get earbuds that are able to dial in and focus on a person’s voice, while eliminating background noise, and these earbuds are also able to steam music if needed. At US$849.99, it’s a niche product for sure, as not everybody needs to enhance speech near them, but if you want great sound quality while still being able to hear what people around you are saying to you, this might be something to look out for.
LG BRID.ZZZ
So this isn’t quite audio in that sense, but it is a pair of earbuds that monitor your brainwaves in real time and provides binaural beats to help you standardise your sleep cycle to ensure that over time, users get more deep sleep and their sleep cycles don’t fluctuate too much. The company is expecting to release these in Korea soon, with a launch in the U.S. planned for later this year.
Vie Zone
If you’re into biohacking, this might be an interesting product to keep an eye on. The Vie Zone earphones analyse your brainwaves and customise the music playing on the earphones to ensure that the listener is in a focused and alert state while isolating unwanted background noise. It’s certainly interesting to see how our brainwaves were reacting to the music, so I’m sure our boss is looking forward to trying these out to make sure we’re all focused and productive at work!
Cooler Master audio software
We all know that audio is super important when it comes to gaming, and Cooler Master is taking it to the next level. While they didn’t have any proprietary hardware to show at CES 2023, they did give us a short demo of their surround sound audio algorithm which is toggleable via a huge button on their demo unit. This is incredibly early in the prototyping phase so take this with a huge pinch of salt, because you’ll most likely never see this in the final product, but wow, does it sound incredible when the software is turned on.
The soundstage opens up and sound effects just really come to the forefront, whether it’s music or gaming sound effects. Like I said, this is super early and Cooler Master is looking to develop their own hardware to go along with this software. They did mention a optimistic late 2023 timeline, so we’ll see if we can get these in for a review by the end of the year.
And those are some of the coolest audio stuff we saw this year at CES 2023. Thank you for watching, and hopefully, we get to see some of these products in the market very soon.