by Mike Tuttle
Listening to music as you go to sleep used to be a whole lot simpler. You’d set your boom box on your headboard, turn the volume down low, put in your ninety-minute Pink Floyd chill-out mix cassette and drift off. The next day, you got up feeling mellow, made it to the bus on time, flirted with that girl in study hall…
Now everything has gotten complicated. The spouse doesn’t want to go to sleep listening to “Shine On You Crazy Diamond.” That means headphones. But ‘phones are too bulky, even the ear buds. What’s a committed audiophile to do?
Eric Dubs wondered the same thing. The mechanical engineer from New York was still in college when the idea came to him. He knew then what we all know: no headphones are comfortable enough to wear to bed. So Dubs set out on a mission to make a headphone that was up to the task.
Well, kind of. What really happened was that he set the whole thing aside for a couple of years, finished undergrad, and went to work for The Man. After college, Dubs was working for General Dynamics as a Plant Propulsion Fluid Systems Engineer in the Electric Boat Division. He was doing nuclear reactor safety systems testing, managing a group of engineers.
But the idea of designing headphones you could wear while sleeping was still there, churning in the back of his mind. After some computer design work and nearly one hundred handmade prototypes, Dubs hit on a design that worked. He called it Bedphones.
In February of 2010, Dubs officially launched Bedphones as a company. By September 2010, he was out of the submarine business and grinding for himself as CEO of Bedphones.
Bedphones are very thin – less than ¼ inch thick; about the thickness of four pennies. They are the thinnest headphones in the world. The wire to the earpiece is mounted in a very low-profile fashion and curves through memory wire over the top of the ear. When inserted, there’s no lump that protrudes from your ear like with standard buds. Only a little wire sneaks over the top of your ear, down your back and out to your player.
But it gets even better. Bedphones also has a free iOS and Android app. The app has three modes:
- Smart Mode – shuts your music automatically when you fall asleep using your device’s accelerometer to determine when you are sleeping still.
- Timer Mode – option to gradually decrease music volume to zero as timer runs down (Android only)
- Basic Mode – turns your entire phone screen into a giant play/pause button so you’ll never fumble with your phone in the dark again
The app can be used with any set of headphones, but when paired with Bedphones, it’s the best of all worlds. A “white noise machine” designed to help you sleep is $40-50. But there are white noise tracks all over iTunes for 99 cents a pop. And Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here,” including all nine parts of “Shine On You Crazy Diamond,” is only $9.99! You do the math.
But wait, there’s more. Because of the memory wire construction that keeps Bedphones in place as you drift to sleep, they are also well suited to workouts and jogging. Adjust the over-the-ear wire to hold the ear buds snugly in place and get busy. The foam earpiece cover is replaceable, and the memory wire can take reshaping indefinitely.
The video below is a piece that Good Morning America did on sleep products. They cover Bedphones and three other products. At the time, they reported that the price of Bedphones was “about thirty bucks.” Now they are only $20 at the Bedphones website.
And if Pink Floyd isn’t your bag, try some of those groovy brainwave synchronization tracks the kids all dig. Or learn a foreign language in your sleep. The sky’s the limit.
Mike Tuttle is a freelance writer who digs on music, tech, and political topics that twitch his in-laws. Catch him on Google+ and Twitter at @MikeTuttle.
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