Struggling to hear what people are saying in noisy spots can be a pain, whether that's out on the street or in a busy place like a bar or restaurant, it can make the day-to-day feel a lot more stressful than it needs to be.
Sennheiser has tried to solve that predicament with these brand-new earbuds unveiled this week at CES 2023 in Las Vegas. The Conversation Clear Plus help you listen to what everyone around you is saying even in particularly crowded spots.
In the past, the popular audio brand has released other enhanced hearing products like the Sennheiser TV Clear Set and the RS 195, although both of those were built more specifically for TV hearing as opposed to social interactions. These tiny wireless buds are small and discreet with a charging case that is compact enough to slip into your pocket - it could be a very welcome innovation for a lot of people.
How do they work? To help improve communication, the earbuds use a combination of Speech Enhancement, Automatic Scene Detection and Active Noise Cancellation. So not only will they give voices a boost but they'll be able to dull distracting background noise and analyse your environment to automatically adjust the amount of cancellation, the microphone levels and audio volume.
For those times when you do want to be conscious of absolutely everything happening around you, the Sennheiser Conversation Clear Plus include an Ambient Awareness mode which uses the built-in microphones to purposefully let sound in. The so-called 'Relax' sound mode allows you to choose how much background noise you'd like to hear at any given time.
On top of letting you communicate more effectively, these will work nicely for consuming media when you hook them up to your devices via Bluetooth connectivity. In the dedicated Streaming mode, these have the ability to double up as a pair of regular true wireless earbuds and will adjust the sound settings accordingly. You can use them to listen to music, radio, TV shows, movies and so on without having any issues with clarity.
You'll also be able to use the Conversation Clear Plus to take and make phone calls, which is a pretty handy addition to the feature set because you won't need to rely on your smartphone's speaker system to hear the person on the other end.
What's more, is the ease of use - setup seems to be incredibly simple and there's plenty of extra guidance to help you along, particularly within the adjoining smartphone app which has step-by-step directions and a useful FAQ link.
You'll get up to 9 hours of use from these at a time, and they come housed in a charging case which delivers up to 27 hours of battery to the buds in total before you'll need to plug it in using a USB-C cable.
The only real downside to these seems to be the price tag - they really don't come cheap. You'll be able to pre-order them from the 5th of January and they go on sale from the 20th of January 2023 for £750 in the UK, and about $750 in the US.
