Wireless headphones are fairly rare, a few current models excluded, and good wireless headphones are exceptionally rare. The guys at Wearhaus, however, have created some wireless cans that might just be the coolest things we’ve seen all week.
The headphones play back music, as you would expect, and connect wirelessly to any Bluetooth phone. There is a built-in battery and a ring of LEDs around each earpiece and they last about eight hours on a charge. But when you get two or more of these headphones together, one user can begin broadcasting music from the phone to all of the other headphones, creating a sort of private concert. This concept isn’t new – people have been holding silent raves for years – but this takes things up a notch.
Wrote the team:
Early bird Arcs cost $179 on their Kickstarter page and the team is looking for $50,000. I have seen and worn an early prototype of these and they’re surprisingly comfortable and quite cool. The design language is late-2000s-Tron while the usability is excellent. One button turns them on and off and that’s it. There is also an external headphone jack so you can listen to music even if they battery is dead – a feature not many wireless headphones have. I was unable to test the concert mode but a very early prototype I saw worked well. As for sound quality the team has been careful to make these things well-balanced and future upgrades should allow for finer audio controls.
The team is nearly half way to their goal of $50,000 dollars and I’m really excited to try these in the real world. You all can come to my back yard and we can all listen to my favorite make-out song, Enigma’s “Return To Innocence”, backwards.