Compression Headphones
High-fidelity manufacturing study - Personal Project
Create a pair of headphones for athletes - allow for high-fidelity audio while maintaining comfort on head during intense movement.
Date:
Spring 2024
Tools:
Duration:
2 Months
High fidelity audio is phenomenal in a closed system—but it’s hard to come across in areas such as fitness. A large problem with athletics and over-ear headphones is the lack of tightness, causing them to fall off easily during rapid changes of pace such as running, or at awkward angles such as weightlifting. Similar to that of an athletic headband, we want to use tension to keep the headphones tight on the head. The goal would be to implement a tightening mechanism into a pair high fidelity over-ear headphones to keep them on the user’s head without falling off.
Criteria:
Keep on head
Mobile and flexible
High-fidelity audio
High fidelity audio is phenomenal in a closed loop—but it’s hard to come across in areas such as fitness. A large problem with athletics and over-ear headphones is the lack of tightness, causing them to fall off easily during rapid changes of pace such as running, or at awkward angles such as weightlifting. Similar to that of an athletic headband, we want to use tension to keep the headphones tight on the head. The goal would be to implement a tightening mechanism into a pair high fidelity over-ear headphones to keep them on the user’s head without falling off.
Mood boards are meant to capture the mood of the product you’re intending to develop— I’ve started to utilize MidJourney to get further inspiration on what the product might end up looking like, using the images not as a substitute, but an addition to the image curation and mood board process before sketch ideation. In MidJourney, I upload images from my board and receive images back that reflect those characteristics.
I experimented with a multitude of mechanisms in order to create a self-tightening effect. I believed a BOA system may succeed with a string wrapped around the headband, but the physics didn’t allow for it. Additionally that added increased stress on the plastic headband, so I moved on to a better mechanism. I chose the worm-gear which has incredibly high torque. This allowed me to implement it just above the earcup to adjust the tightness at a more extreme rate. Along with the adjustable headband, this made the headphones some of the most adaptive system for not just athletes, but for users of all head sizes.
The worm gear allows the entire earcup to twist and rotate. The difference between this and a traditional pair of headphones is that the angle is stagnant due to the worm gear mechanism. You can choose how tight or loose the headphones are, and with a sliding adjustable headband, they can fit almost anyone.
