Stephen
Hello there, nice to see you both.

Flare
And you too, thank you so much (for joining us), Stephen. This is really exciting; what you've got in your packet, they’re basically the world's first ear tuner

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The background

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Flare
You know that right from when we first met, we've been focusing on a particle approach to sound. Well, we worked out that there was a problem going on with our ears, and that our ears are distorting sound by around 20%. The ears are not designed to be listening to music.

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The tech

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Flare
What we're going to do with you on this call is, we're going to put this (Immerse) in your ears and I'm going to show you where this distortion is, because unlike our previous technology, this is not subtle. What if I told you that the iPhone speaker actually sounds really good, and it’s our ears that are distorting it, not the device...!

The headphones that you've got (that we sent you), are very cheap headphones, and deliberately so.

Stephen
I have to say, when I opened them, I thought, yes, they are not high-end.

Flare
These sound really bad!

Stephen
Like call centres, aren’t they?

Flare
But with this technology in your ears, they sound amazing.

Stephen
Oh my goodness.

Flare
So, the problem is that the entire audio industry, including all the big brains like Apple and in the music industry, are all crafting what we know as HRTF, or Head Related Transfer Function. They look at it as the boosting that our ears do to sound, and what I've recognized is that our ears are not boosting sound, they are distorting sound. In the recording sense, people are taking out the things that they don't like in the music to make it sound beautiful.

So, with these (cheap) headphones, these don’t do anything to the sound. They don't touch it. They just put a driver in a bit of plastic, and that's it. They just present it.

Stephen
It’s what an audio engineer would call the dry version.

Flare
The dry version, yes. And so once you take this ear distortion away, these (cheap earphones) now sound incredible. If you go and get a pair of more expensive headphones, they sound just the same.

Stephen
Wow.

Flare
A bit more of a frequency response, but these guys are electronically correcting and taking out the issues, so they're not presenting as much information in that area.

Stephen
What wonderful irony, my God. I wouldn't be surprised if the sound companies formed a cartel to buy you out.

Flare
Well, we didn't start this for money, we started it because we were on a mission. We were in the rock and roll industry and I spotted a lot of people having a lot of problems (with sound), and I'm like, something's going wrong. If there's subjectivity in opinion, then it's because there's something fundamentally happening.

The second technology, which you've got with you, is the same but the stereo version rather than headphone. We wore it yesterday at your event at the Royal Albert Hall. I could hear you talking like you were in my head. When I took it out, it still sounded good, but nowhere near as clear and focused.

You've heard our technology, and a lot of it's been subtle, and a lot of it's been - you have to have open ears as you say - with this, it's not like that. You're just going to go off on a magical world (listening to music) after this.

Stephen
I can’t wait.

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The demo

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So, the important bit. Like with our E-Prototype (earphone), it slides in the ear like this. This flat bit, you see that hole? That's the bit that’s scooping up sound, so you want that facing forward.

Stephen
Right. I get you. Lovely. (Inserts Immerse).
Oh! Yes, very good. Oh my goodness. My own voice sounds extraordinary. It sounds amazing!

Flare
Just more clear, right?

Stephen
Exactly the word, clarity. Yes. Extraordinary. Extraordinary.

Flare
We're going to do a particular track, just because we know what this sounds like, and we know that you will immediately hear what we're trying to do. So the experiment we're going to do, if you could cue up ACDC, Back in Black. It's a complicated track with lots of information, lots of energy. Turn your iPhone up full and then just play it back and listen to the track. Wait until they're singing, and you get comfortable and then simply remove the Immerse out of your ears.

Stephen
(Removes Immerse). It's such a mess when you take them out! What's so extraordinary is it doesn't - it's not just pouring a source of bass and a mid-range kind of bland, you know, to make it sound less tinny. It keeps its full spectrum, doesn't it? So it’s real, it's totally real. That's astonishing. I'm going to try something else because it's one of my faves. Extraordinary…! It’s the clarity of it. And the shaky mess of it when you take it off, extraordinary.

Flare
So, our ears are really not designed to listen to music. It's quite shocking that we can even hear high frequencies because of the amount of shells and resonances that are going on.

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The Frequency Sweep

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We can now do another test to show you exactly what's happening at 20Hz to 20kHz. Play it on the speaker, just like you did just now, and listen to that frequency sweep. It will go all the way up, and as you hear it, the perception of all the sound will be the same - it’ll be flat - and then you'll suddenly hear all of this distortion that your ears are correcting. And it’s at that point where you know where your distortion is.

Stephen
And into bat territory!

Flare
Now do that again with Immerse taken out.

Stephen
(Removes Immerse). Oh my God!

Flare
That's your boosting of your natural human ear. The industry looks at the ears as boosting sound and they look at it as HRTF. It's 21dB that the human ear adds. What I've realised is that it isn't boosting, it's all distortion and it's decayed distortion from the shells.

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The tech inside

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We have three reflections inside. You may have seen our Mirror Image Sound animation where we reflect sound like light. So you've got that inside Immerse, which is what we developed with our earphones. But then the really important bit, the Holy Grail of sound quality, is there's a tuning point. So inside here we have a really specific tuning point, and we've got a very controlled area inside. It’s to within 100th of a millimetre and it's taken me hundreds of prototypes to get to this point. Either side, within a 100th millimetre, and you lose that tuning point and you get distortion.

One of the things I find most exciting and intriguing is that for once, we can all hear the same sound as each other.

Stephen
Yes, that's thrilling, isn't it?

Flare
So it means in the studio, when the artist is creating the art and the producer and the engineer are all working together to create the sound, they all know what they're talking about. They're all on the same page. Then the listener, on £20 or £30 headphones, is going to hear exactly the same as they heard it in the studio.

Stephen
I tell you who would love it - Hans Zimmer.
So, should I play some music? This is Muse, "Supermassive Black Hole." (Inserts Immerse and plays headphones). Whoa!!!!

Flare
Okay, now take them out.

Stephen
(Removes Immerse and replaces headphones).
You are s#!tting me!!!! (Pulls off headphones and re-inserts Immerse). Extraordinary. He's got the high voice and this beautiful buzzy underneath. It's just mind-blowing. Extraordinary. It's the range. It's just everything. We're so used to things being done for you. It's absolutely astonishing.

Flare
The more you wear them, the more your brain starts to tune into it, and you start to hear more and more detail. If you go back into your music collection - listen to Frank Sinatra, The Beatles, Help, Greenday, The Foo Fighters - all of the stuff that was lots of information suddenly becomes this lovely audiophile experience.
Fatboy Slim, Norman Cook, has a track called "Weapon of Choice." I always thought that wasn’t such good production. I stand corrected, he's got hoovers going on in it and all kinds of information that just comes alive.

Stephen
You hear the production and the orchestration more than before.
There's a fashion for a little bit more top end, it suddenly becomes fashionable. And then when there’s a mellow boom, it’s all about getting back to the sound of tube amplifiers, you know, valve - those warm sounds. And it’s always being treated at one end or in the middle as well. So you’ve got a tweeter or a woofer, and as you say, it’s all kind of fake, really, because it’s trying to mend something that had never occurred to me needed mending. And that's the genius of it all.

Flare
It’s been incredible at concerts when we've used them. At concerts, you can hear everything. It's like a giant hi-fi and then you take them out and it’s unbearable.

Stephen
Yes, I can imagine… it's extraordinary.

Flare
The earphones (you’re listening with) are the most resonant, plasticky headphones we could find, with the biggest amount of shells on them, if you like.

Stephen
Yes, I mean, you can tell they're made for a cheap call centre, aren't they.

Flare
I've described it to producers as like soloing everything on the desk at once. Now you can hear all of the layers of every stem. Every coming together of two harmonies - vocals coming together. You can hear individual people now. There was one track I listened to 3 or 4 days ago where there's a wonderful snare recording and you could hear it being created in a room. They gave it that depth of reverb as the snares come in. I'm like, this is really going to change music production, because the importance is going to come back to acoustics. It's going to come back to studios.

Stephen
Yes. We all want to feel that presence of a player, of the rosin on the string, the spittle in the tube of the brass instrument, the squeak of the fret on the guitar - those real things that we've been missing to some extent.

Flare
Because of this ear distortion, these high dynamic, hyper-complicated harmonics of vocals and instruments can sound a bit harsh to the ears. And so, over the decades, we now have Melodyne and Auto-Tune, and we're flattening everything to be synthesized because it’s not pleasant.
Well, now we've addressed the issue at source. Now the stuff that you know isn’t like that suddenly pops as being holographic and hyper-real. If you listen to Frank Sinatra now...

Stephen
That would be my first port of call. I shall give that a go, that's very exciting. I shall listen to Live at the Sands with Count Basie as his accompanist, which is one of my favourite albums.
That’s such a brilliant thought. You know who produced and did the arrangements for that? A 21- year-old Quincy Jones. You know, Count Basie discovered him and persuaded Frank Sinatra that this kid is good, and he did the arrangements.

Flare
There’s eight patents surrounding this (Immerse). We've spent the last 2 to 3 years (honing it). This is 17 years of my life’s work that has gone into this point. When we started Flare, we wanted to solve the problem, and we've been passionately on a mission to try and solve it, while realising that the problem is just this simple. To echo back to Greek mythology, in the hero's journey, the problem always lies within - in the end.

Stephen
Yes. Exactly right.

Flare
It’s typical that after making these huge loudspeakers and installing them in cinemas and having flying systems, it turns out the problem was here all along (points to ears). It’s just remained hidden.

Stephen
It makes sense, doesn’t it, as well? That all this, throwing in electronics and algorithms of compression and other dynamic tweaking, all of that is getting in the way. It’s mediating between the source and the brain. And the ear does that to some extent, so it's allowing the ear to correct itself.

It’s such a breakthrough. How does one express it? Because if you say it’s because the ear is at fault, people would bristle and say, "Nature can’t be at fault, the ear is perfect!" So you say, well, yes, it’s evolved to compromise, but what it hasn’t evolved to do is to listen to a symphony orchestra or a rock and roll band or a jazz orchestra.

Flare
We tune everything. We tune our voices, we tune every instrument - whatever you play, you tune. So everyone's missed the fact that you need to tune the ears. This is for the producers. This is for the artists. This is because I've listened time and time again to artists and producers saying, "We do this amazing thing in the studio and nobody ever gets to hear it like that."

Stephen
Absolutely, you're completely right. It's a brilliant idea to start that. I remember thinking, "Oh my God, of course, this makes sense." I was staying at the Chateau Marmont in L.A., many years ago, and Annie Lennox came into the bar and she said, "Oh, just the person I'm looking for, come with me." "Have you got half an hour?" she asked. I said, "Okay."
So, she had this car, a convertible Mercedes, and she put in a cassette. It was her new album, and she said, "It's all very well doing it in the studio, but this is how people are going to listen to it. I want you to hear it with the roof up, I want you to hear it with the roof down, and I want to know if we can tweak it, if we need to." I remember listening to it, thinking, yes, there’s a wind rush here, and she said, "We could boost this for that, but then if the roof’s over, what do you think?" I remember thinking, "Oh my God, of course." What they do in the studio is one thing, but then they have to be prepared for the possibility of pushing it for an interior or listening with earphones. And then they compromise, and they make it sort of fit all those variations. But it’s a long way from how it sounded on the reference speaker or, more importantly, how it sounded to their ears when they were listening to it.

Flare
It’s like blurring a Monet.

Stephen
Exactly, exactly!

Flare
It’s like showing someone a photocopy of a printout of a beautiful painting and expecting them to appreciate it.

Stephen
Yes, and putting sunglasses on them, yellow sunglasses.
Well, I can't wait to start listening to all kinds of different things in both formats, as it were.

Flare
We can't tell you how much we appreciate your time. Thank you so much.

Stephen
And thank you both for letting me in on this incredible development. I feel very, very privileged.