Ultimately the year 2018 belongs to The Bard’s HeadSpace. This came to dominate Christmas for us in news and quite a few sales. A simple concept where our little gadget ‘corrects’ the image in stereo headphones making that sound more natural and more like real loudspeakers. It also helps to reduce listener fatigue. The HeadSpace is also the least expensive product we have released to date at a mere £14.95 in the
I didn’t want to just copy cross-feed circuits or inversion circuits that anyone can find online. It was important to me that it was simple, corrective and without any loss of signal level. It also had to sound pleasant generally. I made about 8 to 10 different versions with subtly different component values and then listened to them all again and again over a range of headphones. I have about 10 different headsets if you include buds that come with phones and they range in price from, free to about £1000 retail. This took a while as I tend to get lost in the music sometimes. Which then gives me the urge to pick up my guitar and before you know it hours have gone. Anyways,I took lots of notes then narrowed it down to 6 different version which varied from different parameters to a change of component type. I potted them in little black pots, numbered them up and passed them to a few colleagues and friends to listen to.
Keen not to let something, seemingly so simple, be wrong we at Sonneteer wanted to take our time with this. Once we had narrowed them down to one version we liked the sound of as well as clearly having the desired corrective effect (we used some proper measuring tools and stuff) we made a few. We then passed them about for a wider field test.
I kept a handful in my pocket and handed them out to parents I knew at the school gate and at my 5 a side football group. My musician friends also had to put up with me palming them little handmade black boxes with cable dangling from them. They were all great and the feedback was amazing. I tried not to divulge what it did other than to say it enhances their listening experience through headphones. The poetry was different from each person, but the basic message was the same. They basically told us it was working and they felt good using it.
So just before Christmas, we launched version one. To our surprise within an hour of announcing it on social media the sales started to ping on our site. We even had a big handful of orders on Christmas Day. Customer feedback has been exceptional to date.
Earlier in the year we teased some other work relating to products and concepts, some of which will see the light of day in 2019. Here are some images:
