Audio Addiction: Why Some Headphones Are Forgettable and SANWEAR Isn't

“Just one more.”

Whether it’s runner’s high, your favorite chips, a satisfying combo in Street Fighter, or just the vibrant colors and pitch black contrast of an OLED screen, experiences can be addictive.

Addiction is caused by repeated hits of dopamine, the chemical in your brain that is in charge of pleasure and motivation. When doing something that you enjoy, your brain releases that chemical, creating that feeling that you chase, that craving. And certain types of experiences create that feeling more than others. 

Researchers call it ‘positive addiction’: experiences that bring joy, improve your life, and keep pulling you back in. When something is positively addictive, you’ll find yourself intrinsically drawn to it, wanting to bring it to every facet of your life. Nothing else quite measures up. 

What about audio?

Different earbuds have different ‘sound signatures,’ each emphasizing different aspects of the audio experience. Some people want that bass-boosted clubbing feel that rumbles in their chest, while others are detail hounds looking to hear every nook and cranny of their music. But one thing that’s certain is that everyone has a sound signature that works for them. This is what is meant by a headphone’s ‘tuning’. 

The most common measure of the tuning of a headphone is a ‘frequency response chart’ that shows how the device handles different pitches (i.e., bass, mids, trebles). Some audio companies use target curves (e.g. the Harman in-ear 2019 curve), aiming for an ‘objectively’ pleasing sound based on population tested preferences. While this approach makes for a consistently pleasant experience, the problem is that the resulting experience is, by definition, average.

Like the fast food burger of headphones, target curve tuning is meant to appease the widest range of people. It won’t be offensive to anyone, but it’s not going to inspire any particular emotion or stir up some deep latent feelings. And as such, it commits one great sin: It’s forgettable. A jack of all trades, master of none. No ‘it’ factor that keeps you coming back and wanting more. In their words, no addictive quality. And if all you’ve ever tried are AirPods, you don’t know what you’re missing out on.

“Get addicted to sound.”

As we developed SANWEAR, we wanted to create an audio experience that’s one of a kind;  feeling from sound you’re compelled to always want to come back to. That’s why we tune everything by ear, not by target curves. There are a million different factors affecting how an earbud sounds that cannot be captured by a frequency response chart. Our approach is more qualitative, aiming to understand what people feel rather than relying on numbers and graphs.

We listen and iterate, making tiny adjustments based on feeling and emotional response. This takes an incredible amount of time and testing. Tiny changes to the frequency response can cause massive changes in the overall feel of the sound and send us back to the drawing board over and over again. Instead of using population averages, we have our Test-Type program, where people in our community beta test our hardware and give us feedback on how we can adjust the sound. We’ve already made huge changes to HARDWIRE’s sound signature in our 1.0.0 update. Tuning to a target curve would be easier and faster, but we believe that you can only attain a true signature sound.

Our aim is you might try out other headphones or earbuds, but in the back of your mind you’ll always be thinking, “I bet this would hit different on SANWEAR.” The sonic equivalent of your favorite snack. We’ve had testers tell us that compared to SANWEAR, other headphones lack a certain texture, depth, and fullness. Even compared to over-ear headphones, SANWEAR has excellent spatial fidelity thanks to our Holographic Audio ‘recipe’.

You can get lost in it.

And if the sound isn’t exactly to your preference, that’s okay too. Everyone’s ears are different. Our beryllium-infused drivers have the rigidity and bass-response to take EQ changes incredibly well. You can adjust the sound any way you want through the Soundscape app and write it directly to the hardware. Not to fundamentally change the tuning’s identity, but instead customize it for you. Your personal tuning brought to every single device. 

“Just one more song.”

SANWEAR-HARDWIRE is AVAILABLE NOW for $99 

Over two decades of audio engineering have shaped SANWEAR’s philosophy to sound.

Get Addicted To Sound | Explore SANWEAR

//END TRANSMISSION//