Orange County Register

Just two years ago, I would have stared blankly at you if you asked me what a subwoofer was. But now, I want a set of $1,000 headphones.

That’s about how much Irvine’s Ultimate Ears charges for its custom, in-ear pieces it builds for The Strokes, Foo Fighters, Cake and whoever else will pay that much for them. The blue ones pictured were designed for Air Supply. (Air Supply? They’re still around?). While the pink ones with sparklies were designed for AFI for the MTV awards.

Actually, the highest-end models start at $900 and for a bit extra, UE employee & tattoo artist Adam Roberts will paint whatever you want on them. Why do they charge so much? Besides the cool designs and custom fit, the headphones have three speakers inside, each producing high or low tones — the high-pitched tweets and the rumbling woofs.

My story about Ultimate Ears is in today’s paper and linked HERE. But not everything fit. So read on if you’re curious about my own experience with UE, what UE is doing for the up-and-coming musician and why we may be hearing about this small, 20-person company in the future.

I stopped by UE’s offices last week and marketing guy Mike Dias and others gave the full tour. So full, they insisted I sit down and feel what it’s like to get a set of custom headphones made for me. So I did, biting into a piece of Styrofoam to keep my jaw open and my ear canal propped up. Not a pretty picture, eh?

Part of the reason why musicians love these headphones (a.k.a. personal monitors, in-ear headphones or inserts), they block unwanted loud noises on stage (shrill fans, booming speakers) so musicians can hear what they need to hear — one another, the sound guy in the back, themselves. Technically, its passive noise cancellation blocks 26 decibels of unwanted noise.

As Noy Soudaly squeezed blue goop (liquid silicon) into my ear, it felt like someone was sticking a squishy finger into my ear. Yes, that creepy. But Noy seemed like a good guy, plus he’s worked with a lot of big names. From the bluish silicon, which now looks like a chewed-up wad of gum, it would get scanned as a 3D image into a computer and then sent to a lab in Minnesota to create a hard shell.

It gets shipped back to Irvine, where Ultimate Ears adds its technology (two to three speakers), adds some color and then Adam draws something cool on each piece and, if you beg, the metal case the headphones come in. That’s about it.

Another reason for the high price? These headphones provide nearly the full range of sounds a human can hear. A human typically hears sounds between 20 Hertz to 20 kilohertz, while the custom UEs range from 20 Hertz to 16 kilohertz. If you’re wondering about the 17 to 20 KH, most adults can’t hear those anymore because a person’s hearing degrades over time. I found a nifty chart on this from a story in last week’s New York Times. Remember the story about ringtones that only children can hear? The ringtone is at 17 kilohertz, which is a level of sound many adults can no longer hear. Try it yourself and see if you can hear this annoying buzz.

Of course for those of you who aren’t about to blow $1,000 on headphones, Ultimate Ears launched some lower-priced, universal-fit headphones two years ago. With prices between $100 to $250, these are still kind of high for some people. But they also get rave reviews from everyone, including Register headphone geek Matt Degen, who helped me test the UE Super-Fi headphones last year.

UE is doing pretty well in the universal market, which now brings in more revenues than its custom market. Both are still growing but the Super-Fi headphones are growing a “few hundred percent’ each year, says Bob Allison, the private investor in Irvine who helped fund the effort and is sticking with UE as it expands into bigger markets.

One way it hopes to grow is by reaching musicians before they hit it big…
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