One of my projects in college that I’d love to revisit was a set of headphones that would be built tough enough to survive use as tactical shooting earpro, with the sound-blocking ability for such, but also has drivers inside that deliver sound quality that’s at least on par with mid-tier consumer level headphones, and also would have jacks on each cup that would allow installation of an durable microphone. So want to do gaming? These could handle it as well as any other gaming cans with a modmic, maybe better. Want to hook up the boom to a radio for tactical use? Totally able. Need to just answer a call while on a noisy bus? Sure.
Basically in many ways this is something similar to an aviation headset but less specialized in execution. But many of the tech is already out there from Bose, Sennheiser, David Clark, and the like. All it is doing is reworking the shapes and streamlining the presentation so that it would look acceptable on the bus, in the office, in a machine shop, or out in a shooting range.
I would personally use them in the shop instead of my 3M muffs when running the air compressor or CNC router, as currently I put in earbuds and then put muffs over top, but thats ad-hoc as fuck.
I would also use them when on a noisy-ass shuttle van. I’d use them at work when I want to not hear people yelling in their phone becuase they lost their hearing in the shipyard in the 70’s. I would use them on the rare occasion I go to said shipyard now that they enforce earpro use. I would use them if I ever get out to a shooting range. Certainly they’d be useful in an airplane.
It’s been in the back of my mind and I’m starting to learn just enough about how headphones work, and starting to have enough access to high-quality 3D printing equipment via friends of mine that I could maybe develop these for reals.
I suppose if these fabled earpro headphones with not-crap audio existed, the ability to add bluetooth and maybe ANC would not be out of the realm today. I think the key is that they could indeed be rugged: throw them on the ground, drop them in dirt, into a pile of greasey metal shavings or a dusty saw table, (or onto the couch) and they would not break or even seem to mind (unlike some of my Samsung headphones)
Maybe this belongs in shitposts of the day or something but, I’m really into headphones and I see a big need for my use case where I’ve had to collect 4-5 different devices that all mostly do the same thing just without having one set to rule them all.
