A new audio brand hailing from Japan’s NTT is showing off some personal audio tech at CES 2024 that’s notable not for what it has, but what it doesn’t have — in both cases, literally anything between you and the rest of the world. There is nothing there!
Nwm (short for New Wave Maker and pronounced “noom,” a representative told me) makes headphones that use a similar technique to noise cancellation, but kind of turned inside out. Instead of canceling out noise coming into your ear, the headphones cancel out any noise they make that isn’t coming your way.
The principles are similar: sound waves can cancel each other out if you tune them carefully in what’s called destructive interference. This is usually not a problem with headphones or closed-back headphones, which naturally contain the sound they produce. But the whole point of the nwm is that its headphones are more like a pair of small speakers next to your ears.
The idea is that you can hear your music or call, but also the real world, so you don’t have to take out your AirPods every time someone says something and force them to repeat it. Also ideal for walking around town. Of course, the flip side to this is that the music or call is broadcast to the world – unless, as nwm’s headphones do, they also broadcast a devastating sound wave to cancel out any escaping noise. They call it a “personal sound zone”.
Image Credits: nwm
The company has released a few small headphone-style headphones, but at CES they showed off two very notable new audio options. One is a chair with speakers built into the wings next to your head, where the sound of music is perfectly clear when you lean back, but muffled and quiet even a few inches away. The chair is pretty normal looking for a gamer type chair and you wouldn’t know it had speakers hidden in it.
In that case, you should both like the chair enough to make it your primary choice for seating, and have a reclining posture whenever you want to hear sound, which I’m definitely not (hunched over and leaning towards forward, occasionally remember to straighten up, like now). That’s why he attracted me their other new product, the MBH001.
The impressive design looks like a normal set of on-ear or over-ear headphones that had everything but the middle and the edge. There is nothing there!
I was skeptical, but I got to try these early versions, and while it was hard to judge the sound quality on the noisy show floor (especially since nothing was blocking it from coming in), I could definitely hear the sound clearly while wearing them, and at all when it was off my head.
The silicone gasket that served as padding wasn’t much for comfort, but otherwise the headphones were pretty light and easy to use — nothing fancy, just a simple design except that about 75% of their mass was missing.
The company said that the MBH001 is definitely its next shipping product, but it won’t be for a few months at least. I will keep in touch with them and try the final product when they make it available.
