Earplugs with noise suppression control: The story of Veer creation
I have always wondered how people run hardware startups. Everything’s clear about programming: you just push buttons and draw other ones. But what about physical products? How to find molds? How to choose the right technology? How to make gadgets comfortable to use? Where to look for manufacturers?
I was lucky to come across the Veer startup. They explained everything about the creation and launch of their first product — earplugs with a noise suppression controller. They even answered my questions about ear anatomy, ear tip construction, and the differences between the left and right ears.
What is your product for?
Veer earplugs are designed for people who struggle with ambient noise problems. And, above all, for people who work in an open space and constant background noise affects their performance.
Compared with noise-canceling earbuds, the Veer earplugs do not require charging, can be washed with soap, and are also cheaper. Moreover, some people complain that active noise suppression coincides with headaches.
Compared with regular foam or silicone earplugs, Veer allows the control of noise suppression within the range of 5 to 40 dBA. The noise suppression controller is made to eliminate the need to take the earplugs out when a user needs to hear sounds and words properly and to adjust the required level of noise suppression.
Some types of sounds will be muffled completely, the loud ones will become quieter. Thus, loud subway noise will become no louder than street noise.
How the idea was born?
Our company’s office is always noisy: 3D printers operating, people walking around, kettle’s boiling, phones ringing, sounds of saws, cutters, and compressors.
So the part of our team, which at the moment is engaged in brainwork, struggles to focus on a task: noise is distracting, you haveto pick yourself up to get back into the mindflow — and it is exhausting.
Some members of our team used to wear regular earplugs that could be easily purchased in any local pharmacy, but it was not very convenient for work in an office:
● every time you needed to talk to or hear someone, you had to take earplugs out and then re-insert them into your ears. And that’s inconvenient.
● foam or silicone earplugs make you feel as if you are inside a seashell. And that’s annoying.
One day, a brainstorming meeting gave us the idea to create earplugs that were a perfect fit for office work. Having searched for existing solutions we found out that the idea is not innovative. At that time, several similar projects had been launched on Kickstarter. But neither had been brought to reality and become available on the market — most crowdfunding projects remain dreams. So we started the development.
Basically, the earplugs unite two parts: body and silicone ear tip. I will describe one after another.
What did you do before the Veer project?
«River» is an incubator of B2C startup gadgets that solve old problems by inventing modern and better solutions: from initial idea to production.
Veer earplugs are the first product that has been brought to launching into serial production. Another one, a three-headed toothbrush is at the stage of concept finalization, and the third one — an easy-to-pick-up saxophone — has been deferred until the right moment. And we have also worked through and rejected around 15 potential products. Now, along with production, we are developing concepts for several new products. The team consists of 12 people.
Chapter 1: engineering of the earplugs body
What was the first decision?
We mutually decided that Veer must reduce noise by at least 40 dB — to completely muffle unimpassioned conversation taking place near the user. We wanted them to not require charging or taking out to talk to people, and we also wanted them to look classy. These points became our basic requirements.
The first idea was to make two off/on modes: silence vs complete audibility. But when we started designing the concept, we realized that it would take us around the same effort to implement 3–4 modes — to make noise less perceptible, but keep the ability to hear what’s happening around.
At the beginning of the development, we managed to reduce noise by only 25 dB.
The first prototype’s body was a metal cylinder 1 cm in diameter. Inside the cylinder, we used a filter: 3D printed controller and 4 round plates — each having a hole in different places. The plates were positioned one above the other and closed the holes one after the other.
We planned to make four modes switched by gradual positioning of each plate, but we only got 2 modes: off/on. In the intermediate positions of the plates, there was no difference, the sounds were always muffled to the maximum possible level.
In the next iteration, we decided to try and achieve the aim by using different hole sizes. We placed a foam rubber damper on the cylinder bottom and made three holes in a circle, and the body was 3D printed. The entrance to the body itself was slightly off-center so we could overlay it with different holes when turning the body around. The prototype only reduced noise by 25 dB.
How did you measure noise reduction?
To measure the level of noise reduction, we molded an artificial silicone ear and made a plasticine imitation of an ear canal. This construction was attached to an ordinary sound level meter. We measured the level of white noise with and without the earplug in the silicone ear. This construction did not show the frequency spectrum and frequency response but showed the overall noise level.
How did you manage to increase sound reduction?
When we started to actively explore the topic of passive systems creation, we found that higher levels of noise reduction could be achieved by adding weight. So we started figuring out how to increase the earplug’s weight while keeping the body compact. The very first prototypes were made of plastic, and their weight was not enough at all, and after a week we started making regulators of heavy brass, which then were inserted into plastic frames. This really allowed noise reduction of 40 to 50 dB, and the earplug’s size was reduced by several times. And then we started making regulators of aluminum as it was not so heavy, but sufficient for good noise suppression.
Inevitably we faced the challenge: in the closed position, the earplugs produced an occlusion effect accompanied by an unpleasant buzz, which was caused by resonating due to the construction peculiarity.
In the open position, the earplugs produced hissing sounds, and the noise reduction level was too high — 10–15 dB, where we had planned a maximum of 5 dB. At about the same time we got the idea to make a gradual noise reduction control so that the user could adjust the level to make it comfortable for any given moment.
To sum up, at this stage we’d achieved the level of noise reduction we aimed for. And we needed to get rid of the excessive noise suppression in the open position, the occlusion effect in the closed position, and find a solution for the gradual regulation of noise reduction.
To get rid of the excessive noise suppression in the open position we put a sound diffuser (a crater which increases sound) into the earplug body. Then we placed a metal grid outside the diffuser and this helped us to get rid of the resonance. The grid removed harsh percussive sounds and lowered the Q factor of the resonating channel. As a result, there was no hissing sound when the earplug was open and no buzzing when it was closed.
How does the gradual noise regulation work?
It was obvious that for gradual regulation we needed to make a cone-shaped hole instead of several round holes. So we elongated the cone and turned it around to get a drop-shaped hole.
We made the first prototype using the diffuser, grid, and drop-shaped hole. The diffuser was molded, as we had no way of bendingit in hard material. In the next iteration, we chose the correct diameter and made a diffuser from aluminum.
Everything was alright apart from one thing: the controller was hard to work. At about the same time we started testing new ear tips, which seemed as though they would not cause any problems.
Chapter 2: Ear tip development and the main adventure
Let’s talk about the ear tips. What development stages have you passed?
Ear tips help to fix an earplug in an ear, it adapts to the ear anatomy and should not roll around when a user regulates the level of noise reduction.
Hydraulic ear tips? Unreliable.
The first insane idea was to make hydraulic ear tips. The way it was planned, the ear tip would adapt to a user’s ear canal shape. We made a little silicone “bag” and poured liquid inside. Once such a bag burst inside our lead engineer’s ear. We decided to reject this idea because of its implementation complexity, perhaps we might return to the idea in the future.
Multi-flange ear tips? Uncomfortable.
When exploring the world of ear tips we came across cone-shaped multi-flange ear tips that are used in military aviation. We prototyped one with 15 flanges that resembled a spiral. The ear tip was very uncomfortable to wear — its sharp end rested against the ear membrane. We rejected the conical ear tips but decided to keep the flanges and made cylinder-shaped ones.
First, we developed a 3D model. Based on the model, we 3D-printed a casting mold. To make a prototype quickly, we manually poured silicone into the mold using a syringe.
The thin flanges couldn’t be made, because of air getting inside and forming bubbles. We decided to vacuumate — to place the mold with silicone into a vacuum container, it pumped air out through running canals. Some prototypes were vacuumated in an empty pickle jar.
We had managed to make ear tips, but it did not help us to reach the required level of noise reduction, and, besides, this sort of shaped ear tips were uncomfortable to wear.
What if we were to make ordinary vacuum ear tips in the shape of a spiral? Uncomfortable as well.
Then we thought it would be a good idea to try and use ordinary single-dome ear tips as used in regular earbuds. As an independent option, such ear tips did not reduce the noise enough, because it was necessary not just to cover an ear canal, but to plug it in to achieve the required noise-blocking in the ear canal. We thought that combining ordinary ear tips with our previous spiral solution might turn them into something interesting.
We made ear tips with a dome at the entrance to the ear canal and with a spiral that plugged the canal and got a high level of noise reduction.
We started testing its wearability among the team members, and almost half of the team liked the effect. Then we decided to start testing the ear tips on the target audience and gave away the prototypes to our friends and people we found on social media — as our own ears had got used to testing odd ear tips and stopped feeling uncomfortable, and we really wanted to finally get something worthwhile.
We got so excited about the results we could get and created final renders for the product’s web page but screwed up with those ear tips. The majority of testers complained about an itchy feeling inside their ears after a long time of wearing the earplugs. We analyzed the feedback and the prototypes and realized that the sharp ends of the spirals irritated the inner skin. So we rejected spiral ear tips and continued looking for a solution.
Double-dome ear tips? Cannot be fixed in the ear.
We still believed in the idea of plugging the ear canal itself and blocking the entrance to it. After several iterations, we made a double-dome ear tip.
Regular double-dome ear tips did already exist on the market, but they were more the shape of a hemisphere than of a small pompon, while according to our tests a pompon-shaped ear tip with more rounded inward edges was easier to take out of the ear because of the vacuum created inside the ear canal.
It took us three days to design earplugs and mold, to print the mold and cast the ear tips. We gave away the new ear tips to people that had tested the previous ones and received controversial feedback. Two domes were hard to insert, though easy to take out and they would even occasionally drop out of the ears. The fact that an ear canal was twisted while the ear tip was straight led to vacuum breaks which affected the domes’ shape. We had wanted the ear tips to adapt to ear canal twists, but this did not happen.
All the time, we were actively studying the ear canals shape, and the results made us slightly frustrated. It turned out that eachperson’s ear canals are different from any other, and not only in diameter but also in shape, not to mention the variety of sizes and shapes of ear canals of different people.
We started thinking that the idea to make a universal, comfortable ear tip that perfectly cancels noise is a utopian dream.
Anatomically curved ear tip. The final solution.
After all the tests and trials we made an anatomically curved ear tip. It became the final result of our experiments. It was a challenge to produce such an ear tip and took us several approaches: in the first few weeks, it got torn when we took it out of the mold.
The final solution showed a high enough level of noise suppression, was comfortable to wear during the day, but first, it was necessary to get used to this ear tip. We accepted the complexity of first use by almost unanimous consent, as the comfort of wearing them for a long time was obviously of more crucial value than difficulties that could arise in the first use.
We sacrificed the convenience of first use for the level of noise suppression.
If you try to insert an earplug without knowing exactly how to do it properly — the miracle won’t happen: it will most likely feel uncomfortable to wear and won’t work.
To do it correctly you need to first select the proper ear tip’s size and its position on an earplug body. Our tests show that in 95% of cases people’s left ear canal is smaller than the right one, so for the left ear, a user is most likely to pick a smaller size of an ear tip.
Then it is necessary to find the right angle of an ear tip to the earplug body — to ensure correct insertion of the ear tip into an ear canal. To make it clear we’ve recorded a video tutorial.
After releasing the first batch, we are going to get back to this issue and look at inventing a pneumatic super-ear tip the world’s never seen before, but until that happens we have put four different sizes of ear tips and a “how-to-insert” guide in shipping boxes and hope nobody will judge the product without having read the guide (ha-ha).
Chapter 3: production
Where to look for manufacturers?
We use Alibaba: send our requests to manufacturers, they respond, and we select those who fit our criteria. We have a team member responsible for procurement, he communicates with our Chinese partners in English.
What do you order from the Chinese partners?
Our ear tips are produced in China, the contractors use our models. For example, according to our first technical task, connectors of the mold should not fall on the domes of the ear tips, to make the domes seamless (domes are the two hemispheres the ear tip consists of).
The contractors accepted the task, but after two weeks told us that they could not do it this way. We found an alternative option, and there will be only one seam at the lower dome.
We also ordered the production of earplug cases in China. The smaller cases for ear tips are produced in Russia, which is quicker and costs the same price.
What do you produce yourself?
The aluminum bodies and controller rings are made in our country. We’ve found only two production sites that have the necessary machines and expertise. The first cases were made with robotic machines — a metal hand embraced the aluminum cube several times and made a precise and perfect shape.
It turns out that the machinery breaks down if it works continuously. So a machine can make five pieces, but cannot ensure a production stream. A collet closing mechanism holds the body, and the robotic arm inserts a workpiece. The machinery breaks down during mass production because the metal dust that is the result of the machining gets inside the mechanism. Because of this, the mechanism cannot grip a body firmly, and the body drops out causing a machinery break.
The new equipment is installed on the milling table. An operator places 12 workpieces in a lodgement and clamps them. The tool that grinds the part has been designed and manufactured specifically for our product’s body. It is a cutter, its frame follows the contour of the body’s nose.
What do you do?
Using only our efforts and resources we make inner parts: dampers, ring sides, grids for the controller ring. We anodize the aluminum bodies, assemble the earplugs, and test their performance and the ease using the ring before shipping.
Chapter 4: Test drive
The story of production turned out to be interesting: numerous iterations, desperate situations, failed first tests, production challenges. Let’s see what it’s brought in the end: I’ve got a test product and used it for a couple of weeks.
Fitting
As we’ve learned an ear canal shape is very individual and a left one can be different from the right one, that’s why it is necessary to first make the earplugs fit, taking into account individual peculiarities. I watched the video tutorial but acted a bit differently: I inserted the ear tip in the default position, and then twisted it a little to place it comfortably in my ear.
At the beginning I got odd feelings, then I started to understand how my ear canal was curved.
After that I turned the main part of the earplug, so the outer noise controller could fit correctly on my ear and was convenient touse the wheel control.
If the earplug is not inserted correctly, it leads to several disadvantages:
● You cannot control the noise suppression — when rotating the earplug would drop out your ear.
● The noise reduction won’t reach the required level.
● The earplugs will be uncomfortable to wear and can drop out of your ears.
If you can wheel the controller ring and the earplugs do not drop out your ear — you have inserted them correctly.
Noise suppression
The main product feature is the possibility of controlling the noise reduction level. If you wheel the ring by a half circle, the sound starts entering your ear canal and you can talk to people as normal.
The overall noise remains a bit lower, but not too much — like in the first version of Airpods when you are listening to music. You can set the desired noise-canceling level between the maximum (40 dB) and the minimum (5 dB) values.
When the earplug is set at the maximum level of noise reduction, you will still hear sounds, but they will be muffled. I found the sound to be optimal: you do not feel as you’re in isolation, as you still can hear the highest and loudest noises, but the noise does become quieter. This would not save you from noises at a construction site but would make drill sounds from the neighboring flat more bearable. So, the sound does not disappear, but it becomes pleasantly quieter.
Appearance
It looks good in the ear. I like the grid, and the controller ring has a metallic shine. The grid reminds me of a retro microphone.
Comfort
If you’ve managed to insert the earplug correctly, there will be no discomfort, and it doesn’t get any less comfortable over time. The fact that the ear tip is difficult to insert is leveled out by the fact that you don’t need to take it out when you want to talk to someone or answer a phone call.
The earplugs can be worn all day and do not cause unpleasant feelings, but I plan to use them only in the following cases:
● On my way to work when I take the metro. The environmental sounds get quieter, but I still can hear people around me.
● In the evening at the office, when everybody starts working less and talking more.
● When I work from home and my kid is engaged in a loud game.
Shape and maintenance
The ear tip shape is more complex than a regular earbud. During the first few uses I took out earwax along with the ear tips, but after a couple of uses, the problem vanished. This made me draw some conclusions:
● It is better to wash the ear tips regularly, as the earwax can accumulate inside the ear tips.
● You’d better not give your earplugs to someone to try, as you risk getting someone’s earwax.
There are no external differences between the left and right earplugs. It can be a bit confusing, as you insert it differently into each ear. But normally, the left ear tip is smaller than the right one, so you can use the sizes for identification.
Summary
Earplug development and production turned out to be a complicated endeavor with challenges at each stage. But the Veer team managed to achieve a good result: they’ve made good-looking earplugs which do make sounds quieter and can be used in office, or home, and make subway trips a bit more pleasant.
If you are interested, you can subscribe to their Twitter account, where they are posting updates.
And if you like the concept, you can preorder a unit, the official sales start is planned for the second half of October.
This article is written by guys form Dodo dev for Veer Earplugs
