Bose gets into the hearing aid headphone business

@bheater / 9:32 am PST • December 12, 2016

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When you’ve got a punny name as good as “Hearphones” (no Google, I did not mean “headphones”) in the chamber, you owe it to the world to deliver product. For Bose, the emerging space of hearing-assisting headphones was the perfect place for that fun bit of word play.

The company’s newly unveiled earbuds seem to occupy a similar spot as a number of emerging bits of hardware, including Nuheara’s IQbuds, which we described as a cross between a headphone and a hearing aid when we saw them a while back. Ditto for the Hear One and Sony’s MDR-1000x noise canceling headphones, which were unveiled back at IFA.

The Hearphones sport directional microphones that can be used to focus in on or amplify specific sounds, while actively canceling out background distractions. All of that is fine-tuned with Bose’s already launched Hear app, which features a variety of different settings, which can be saved for future reference, along with pre-sets like “gym” and “airplane.”

Bose didn’t do a big announcement this time out, like it did with its new pairs of QuietComforts earlier in the year, instead opting for a soft unveiling, along with some in-person trials, which are running between now and the 15^th at its Framingham, Massachusetts headquarters.

Bose gets into the hearing aid headphone business

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