About five minutes after Eden, the 20-year-old Irish phenom you really ought to hear, took the stage at Rickshaw Stop, the sound changed. Profoundly. It was as if I'd pried the stage out of a tight, sweaty club in San Francisco and dropped it into Carnegie Hall. Everything felt enormous, the sound reverberating off cavernous ceilings and expensive upholstery. A moment later, it got quiet. Eerily so. Eden looked the same, still brooding and banging on a synth, but the volume of the room dropped by half.
Then my left earbud fell out and everything went back to normal. Turns out my superhuman ability to control how the world sounds is only as good as the fit of my earbuds and the life of the battery powering them.
Over the last several weeks, I've worn Doppler Labs' Here earbuds all over the place. To concerts, on the train, at home and work, in restaurants, and, once, in a public bathroom. In short, these two round, white buds provide almost total control over how the world sounds. You can amplify certain sounds---human speech, the bass guitar---and attenuate others---the airplane drone, the subway screech. You can shut out the world entirely. Or you can tweak things, like Mickey Mouse conducting an orchestra of the world. Add some reverb to that falling broom, give me just a smidgen of flange, and for Pete's sake turn down that bus! This is augmented reality, people. It's not just goofy headsets and crazy flying jellyfish. It's what you're hearing.
Here isn't perfect, and the interface is occasionally clumsy. At $1991, the buds are expensive, given what they do, and given how often you'll remove them because you'd rather wear actual headphones that let you listen to actual music. (My primary volume control on the world is a pair of crappy headphones and deafening pop music. It works just fine.) But every time I use them, and every time I show them to someone, they're remarkable. They feel like a magic trick.
Before we get to any of the technology, let's talk about the buds. If they don't look cool and they don't feel good, the technology isn't worth a damn (the Glasshole Maxim.) Here buds are neither beautiful nor inconspicuous, but they're tolerable: wearing them looks and feels like having quarters sticking out of your ears. Not quite Her-style seamlessness, but you're not The Great Gazoo, either, with giant antennae for ears.
The designers made Here comfortable enough to wear for a few hours at a time, which is the life of the battery and the longest you'd want to wear them anyway. These aren't for all-day use. They're for the concert, for takeoff, for nap time. Then you take them out and do other stuff after sticking them in a charging case about the size of a big pack of gum. It charges and protects the buds. Once you've paired them---an amazingly simply process that takes about 10 seconds---the buds turn on the moment you pop them out of their charging pods.
Devices like the Bragi Dash put most of the UI on the buds so you can control everything with taps and swipes. Here features an app where you play with the equalizer, choose various effects, and reset everything once you've gone totally off the rails and made the world completely unintelligible. Controlling it all through an app is far easier than learning a new gesture language. The downside is you're that guy, constantly pulling out your phone and loading a blindingly white app to fiddle with frequencies. Here makes the best case yet for an Apple Watch; being able to quickly tap filters on and off from my left wrist is infinitely better.
Here relies upon a complicated mix of signal processing, frequency filtering, and software algorithms, but Doppler tries to blur all of that in favor of simple commands. I want the bus to be quiet. I want the Rickshaw Stop to sound like Carnegie Hall. I want to hear this concert the way Tiesto might have mixed it, which is always "like this, only with 10 times more party." And can do all of that and more. But such tricks are merely an add-on to Here's music features. Doppler did a big partnership with Coachella this year, and it's working with SoulCycle so you can tune the music to be a little less SoulCrushing. This is very much a live music product. You put them in, tune them, and forget they're there.
When you're wearing the earbuds, even with no filters on, you're not hearing the real world. You're hearing Doppler's processed version of it. It occasionally felt like I had water in my ears. Given all the tech involved, and the processing it does, you never get perfect sound fidelity with Here, and your ears will hear the difference with careful listening. Moshing at the Warped Tour? Not an issue. Standing in line at Starbucks, fine-tuning the sweet guitar strains of whoever replaced Norah Jones on the playlist? You'll notice.
By far the strangest thing about wearing Here was growing acutely, Spidey-sense aware of how everything sounds. I don't know yet if this is a good thing, or if it will drive me insane. So many drivers blare their horns outside my office, joining the cacophony of screeching tires and rumbling trucks that fills every city. Construction just started on the building next to my apartment, and I hear every shovel, every hammer, every angry guy yelling from the deep hole where the foundation will go. I swear I can hear everyone on earth chewing. I could keep going. (Have you ever noticed the air conditioning on the subway? It's so loud!) Once I started paying attention to how loud the world is and enjoying the ability to tune it out, it became increasingly obvious that this infernal racket is a real problem we must solve.
I found Here most useful at work. I can tune out catchy songs at coffee shops, or turn down all the chatter that I normally can't help but totally eavesdrop on. Filters like "Bus" and "Car" and "Subway" are self-explanatory, but my favorite is "Office (Loud)." Turn it on and the world vanishes. It's like watching a silent film of the world. To be fair, though, this also describes earplugs. Doppler makes those, too, and they're much cheaper than Here.
As someone who doesn't go to five concerts a week and, let's be honest, will probably go deaf anyway thanks to loud music and a general disregard for my eardrums, I'm probably not going to buy Here. But I think a lot of musicians might---Doppler's certainly done a good job of signing up name-brand artists and composers. And they're right to be excited. If you want what this product offers---a mixing board for the real world---you should buy it. It delivers. Personally, I'm looking forward to the long-term vision, to the real-time translation stuff and the music stuff and the voice-interface stuff. Doppler's ten-year plan is really exciting. And maybe by then I'll be a little less self-conscious about these discs in my ears.
1 UPDATE: An earlier version of this piece misstated the price of the Here earbuds. They're actually $199. Hurray!
