In recent weeks, we’ve told you about new efforts to diagnose and treat hearing loss and about new devices to improve your hearing, but up until now we have not focused on the other major issue regarding your ears: how to prevent hearing loss.
While, for many of us, mild or even severe hearing loss is simply a part of aging, in many cases hearing loss is something that can be prevented. This is especially true for our kids and grandkids who spend endless hours listening to earbuds pumping hard rock into their ears at volumes that aren’t just uncomfortable, they are dangerous and damaging. One company that’s trying to do something about it is San Diego-based Puro Sound Labs.
We recently had the opportunity to chat with both Puro Sound Labs CEO Brett Lacey and Nicole Russell, whose noise-induced hearing loss prompted her father, Dave Russell, to start the company in 2014. The cause: Nicole had spent too much time listening to loud headphones while she was growing up. Dave Russell saw it as his mission to start Puro Sound Labs as a way to prevent future generations of children and adults from running into similar issues. Here’s what Brett and Nicole had to say:
Tech50+: My own three kids are millennials and you can find them with headphones on many hours of their waking and sleeping days. When I try to get my youngest one’s attention, he can’t hear me because the walls are vibrating.
Brett Lacey: Right now, one in five teenagers have some form of hearing loss. And that number is up 31%, I believe, since the early 90’s or the 80’s – Niki, correct me if I’m wrong.
Nicole Russell: It’s 30% since the last decade.
Brett Lacey: So it’s growing at an extremely rapid rate. I believe the World Health Organization recently came out and said 1.1 billion people are potentially affected by noise-induced hearing loss from mobile audio players around the world now between the ages of 12 and 35. 50% of the people between 12 and 35, which is 1.1 billion people. Crazy. And that’s directly because of mobile audio players. That’s not because you’re working in a construction field or anything like that.
Nicole Russell: Because they’re using their headphones every day, either if that’s for music or that’s for their business, they’re watching videos. I graduated from high school in 2013 and my senior year they changed our books to iPads. So a lot more technology is getting introduced in schools too, which is important because more people are using headphones there too.
Tech50+: My oldest is a special ed teacher and one of the things that she’s absolutely thrilled about is that she’s been able to introduce iPads to her classes, which has tremendously boosted the engagement level of her students. But yes every one of them is also listening with headphones.
Nicole Russell: At my school, if you didn’t have your headphones you’d be out for the day because all of the lesson plans were basically with videos. So that’s another part of it.
Brett Lacey: All of the back to school lists it seems like anymore have headphones on it. It used to be Crayola crayons and loose leaf paper but now they’ve added headphones because everyone uses their laptop and iPads in the educational environment.
Tech50+: What is Puro doing to address the issues?
Brett Lacey: Initially, our first product was a kid-safe headphone. We made a durable aluminum construction headphone with leather ear cups and a leather headband that, while looking stylish, also has an 85 decibel limiter built in. It’s a Bluetooth headphone and when you’re in Bluetooth mode, the battery powers a microprocessor inside the ear cup that will not allow the audio to play louder than 85 decibels. It will also go into passive mode. It comes with a 3.5mm jack cable which has our special technology where the inline microphone would be on your standard wired headphone, there’s a resistor in there that does not let the headphone go past 85 decibels when in passive mode as well. You can have your kid listen to it for up to 8 hours safely without worrying that they’re damaging their hearing. Basically what we found through the research we were doing was that there were two main reasons people are cranking up their headphones. The first is to block out external noise, so we made the ear cups so that they isolate 82% of the ambient background noise so you don’t have to crank it up to hear over people talking around you. Then there was some research done by a guy named Dr. Sean Olive from the Harmon Institute and he basically was trying to figure out what people wanted to hear in their headphones. What’s the perfect frequency response? So we based our frequency curve off of his research which is basically a relatively flat curve that is supposed to mimic an acoustical listening room, like a home theater at your house. We put that sound curve inside of the headphones as well so you don’t have the heavy bass that goes into the mid-range and muddles up the vocals and then people have to crank up the music to hear the vocals. You get great audio quality at these low decibel levels, eliminating the need to go above 85.
Tech50+: I gather you guys strongly recommend over-the-ear phones as opposed to earbuds.
Nicole Russell: Correct.
Tech50+: But you still make earbuds.
Brett Lacey: We do. We have one product currently – an earbud that will go in excess of 85 decibels if it’s unlocked. Where the microphone would be, there is a locking mechanism, a little button that you can push in so that when it’s locked you can’t crank it up past 85 decibels.
Tech50+: I assume that’s just because there are places where having over the ear headphones just doesn’t appear to be appropriate.
Brett Lacey: Right. If you’re out running on a treadmill or doing certain activities where you want an in ear monitor, we wanted to provide a solution for those types of situations. We want you to wear ours because we’re going to make this healthy for you to fit the situation that you want to be in.
Tech50+: Where can I find your products?
Brett Lacey: Right now, we sell currently on our website and on Amazon. We’re targeting mom bloggers who are very intellectual and kind of our target demographic. Soccer moms who care about their kids hearing. So we target a lot of mommy bloggers and parenting publications are two of our main focuses. We’re starting to reach out to educators and audiologists. Niki is actually leading our audiology program that we’re trying to grow to get audiologists to be our brand ambassadors and potentially distributors for us as well. We have 10 out of 10 audiologists recommend Puro Sound Labs, which was a big thing we wanted to get the hearing healthcare professionals to sort of solidify us as the healthy hearing company.
Tech50+: Audiologists charge a lot of money for their services. In fact, when it comes to hearing aids, their fees are more than the cost of the hardware. Are audiologists jacking up the price of your headphones?
Brett Lacey: They find it to be very complimentary to their current offering, the hearing aid. One is a prevention model and the other one is life enhancement after you don’t need to prevent it. As far as the pricing, we deliberately do not mark up our headphones because our mission is to prevent noise-induced hearing loss around the world. If we were to go out and price gouge people and sell them for exorbitant prices that people in the middle class couldn’t afford, we wouldn’t be staying true to our mission. There is a little bit of an issue from a market standpoint that they might see but they believe in what we’re doing and they’re really receptive to the idea. We went to an audiologist conference a few weeks ago and I was pretty in awe about how receptive they were and supportive to what we were doing. We do a lot of things where we can give them flyers where we can offer their patients a discount and we’ll give a share back to the audiologist or to the charity of their choice as a way for them to not necessarily purchase units and try to sell inventory like they might with the hearing aid, but just be brand ambassadors.
Tech50+: Given your modest pricing, how does the standard “adult” version of your headphones compare with other headphones in the market?
Brett Lacey: The standard ones have our same audio quality and isolation and so we’ve been hitting tech reviewers trying to show that we do have studio-grade audio quality, which is what a lot of adults like. But in addition we have an LED light on the ear cup that gives you real time feedback as to how loud you’re listening to your music. So you can know if you’re getting to a dangerous level and need to turn it down or shorten your listening time. We put the user in control in the adult model and we display the audio quality that an adult might want in a $130 pair of headphones. But we’re competing at a price where they see a lot of value. We’re trying to mainly hit the parents with the kids’ product and make them aware that we make really quality headphones. They come back and say Puro Sound has quality headphones for adults, now I want to purchase this because I love it and my kids love the product.
Tech50+: So for an older audience that may have lost some of its hearing already, the message here is really for their kids and grandkids?
Brett Lacey: Exactly. You don’t want them to grow up and be parents and grandparents and they’re sitting at the table and keep having to say what, “what?” They can’t have a conversation with their children and grandkids.
Nicole Russell: We are generation iPod. I think back in the day, and I’m only 20 – but you go out to dinner and you see a 3 year old on an iPad the whole time watching a movie or a TV show. That’s why my dad started this also because I have a nephew and a niece that are 3 and 7. We’ve seen a strain in my dad and my relationship. He’s only 50, 51 and as his hearing has gotten a little bit worse, there’s been a strain in our relationship because my hearing obviously isn’t the best and we don’t want that to happen to other people. The thing about hearing loss is that it’s cumulative and you always notice it when it’s too late. You’re not going to notice it when it happens immediately. It’s really gradual. So that’s the hard part. We’re trying to get ahead of the game for people. It’s really important to us.
Pricing for the Puro Sound Labs Kids Bluetooth headphones Model BT2200 is $80. The Studio Grade Adult Bluetooth headphones are $130. And the Puro IEM100 in-ear phones are $30.
You can watch the fun Puro Sound Labs video here:
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