These headphones adapt themselves to your unique hearing characteristics

Between one person and the next, each of the five senses do not respond in exactly the same way. Which is why some people have differing opinions about how a particular type of food tastes, or how the colors of an outfit are perceived.

The same even applies to hearing--whether it be due to a physiological characteristic (perhaps an injury) or an inherent trait (something you may be born with,) the various sounds heard by different people are perceived differently.

A Melbourne-based startup called Nura, which recently came out of a successful Kickstarter campaign that raised 2.1 million Australian dollars, aims to help listeners overcome these variations in the way sounds are heard. They have launched a pair of headphones that can adapt sound to the listener’s exact hearing profile.

The most intriguing feature of these headphones is the fact that they simultaneously utilize an in-ear and circum-aural design--they are basically a pair of earbud phones encased within around-the-ear headphone cups. The in-ear component handles the midrange and high-frequency sounds while the around the ear part handles the bass sounds.

The real magic in the headphones, however, lies in the way they they map otoacousitc emissions--the sounds given off by the inner ear when the cochlea is stimulated by sounds. The Nura team has effectively incorporated a technology into the headphones that uses this information to ‘equalize’ sounds the wearer listens to, in relation to their specific hearing response characteristics.

The headphones incorporate a sensitive microphone that receives and analyzes a wide spectrum of sounds--both within and outside of the human audible range. The headphones can then be tuned to compensate for losses the listener may be subject to.

This is done by firing up their bundled app on a smartphone and stepping through a brief configuration sequence that consists of listening to 11 different frequencies, lasting about 30 seconds. Once done, the profile is saved and is applied to all sounds it plays back thereafter.

The headphones also have a special feature where they can reproduce heavy bass sounds without harming the listener’s hearing. It does so by invoking a special ‘Kick it’ mode that actually synchronizes bass with a patch that contacts the listener’s skin, lending a feeling of the bass being powerful, even though it is within safe limits.

These headphones will be available in both wired and wireless versions will be sold directly from Nura's website and is expected to hit the markets in April 2017, costing A$533 (approximately Rs 26,968).