Designed by a 16-year-old, these headphones are meant to save your hearing

We’re going deaf using headphones. Everyone who’s ever tried to listen to music, whether in tiny earphones or big expensive cans, knows that – because that’s what your mom kept telling you.

16-year-old Kingsley Cheng got the same speech from his parents whenever he rocked his big headphones, the music leaking out in the room around him. “Turn down the volume or you’ll go deaf!” his father, Rayman, would shout, trying to be heard over the racket.

Most teenagers’ reaction would be probably to sulk for a bit, type some passive aggressive quip into Snapchat accompanied by an angry selfie, and then resume listening once you’ve been left alone. Kingsley, on the other hand, decided to find out for himself whether his dad was right by breaking out the Google.

Listening in

After doing some research online, he realized the danger of hearing loss by listening to music too loudly isn’t just something parents say because they can’t stand your music. According to data by the World Health Organization and the American Academy of Audiology, the recommended listening level is 85dB for a maximum of eight hours at a time.

Most devices we use today to listen to music, however, can crank the volume up to more than 100dB. That volume level is comparable to a jackhammer. The same data says that 12 percent of children aged 6-19 suffer from hearing loss caused by bad headphone use.

There are a few headphones on the market claiming they can protect your hearing, but none of them were quite right for Kingsley. The designs were too childish for him. Plus, most of them just employed some kind of noise cancellation or volume limitation system. The experience was not ideal, in other words.

Earlier this year, Kingsley and his dad – who’s a 20-year veteran in the US consumer electronics industry – put their heads together to produce “the world’s safest headphones.” Their first effort, the Aegis Pro headphones, is now on Kickstarter.

Along with serial entrepreneur Anthony Lye, the startup they co-founded, Aegis Acoustics, is on a mission to prevent further hearing loss among kids who love consuming their music with headphones.

Kingsley offered design ideas for the headphones and came up with the company name, Rayman and Anthony handled the business side, and sound and audio tech specialist Gates Tan came in as CTO to tackle the technical details.

The sound of music

At first glance, the Aegis Pro headphones don’t look like a particularly revolutionary product. It’s definitely a stylish pair of cans, though, which wouldn’t look out of place next to a pair of Beats or Sennheisers. But if Disney movies have taught us anything, it’s what’s on the inside that counts.

The Aegis Pro’s key features focus on ear protection. The company uses both hardware and software solutions to achieve this. Its system, bearing the catchy name JamsDefender, combines active noise cancellation, digital volume normalization, and a dual speaker on each headphone to ensure protection and performance.

On the software side, a method the company calls digital decibel equalizer technology normalizes the volume at a safe level. The tech decodes the source volume down to zero dB and then sends it out the speaker at a volume of 85dB. The difference between that and the volume limiting technology in other brands, it says, is that the output stays at 85dB no matter how much the original recording fluctuates.

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