Nothing is worse than noisy colleagues when you just want to sit there and work in peace. A child crying midflight, huge crowds, and noisy roads are some things that no one has a good tolerance for. Solution? Easy! Plug in your earphones and crank up the volume, but no one wants to listen to music all the time. For some, it is hard to focus while listening to music. The best alternative is a lousy, sturdy, over the ear headphone or ear plugs. What if you only want to get rid of the noise and not become totally deaf to the world? There is one company that offers you that kind of peace so you can turn up or turn down the volume of the world around you with a pair of ear plugs.
Knops is an Amsterdam-based company offering a noise solution beyond the simple ear plugs. The fully acoustic Knops are designed to look like gramophones. They are the easiest to use. There are four different steps, for the kind of sound setting that you need. The step one does not filter anything, twist a little to step two, and the volume will slightly turn down, and a little noise will be filtered. This will save you from screechy children but will let you hear the oncoming traffic. The step 3 will turn the volume down a bit more while twisting further to step 4 will mute nearly everything, and you can dwell in silence.
The best part is, you don’t even have to take them off to change the levels, you can twist to go from full noise cancellation at level 4 to none at level 1, with just a twist. The design is quite sleek; no one wants those foamy big and ugly ear buds anyway. The design is a result of months of computer simulations and lots of prototypes for testing in all kinds of acoustic environments.
The team behind Knops holds the same engineers Koen Brouwer, and Quinten Huigen that were behind Europe’s best ear plugs called Thunderplugs. The Thunderplugs sell mind-blowing numbers in 26 countries worldwide. The Knops say on their website, “Their experience in the music business including worldwide shipping is something we use to our advantage for Knops.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1UgNVdRyXI
The crowd funding campaign for Knops is live on Kickstarter with just a few more days to go, and it has already made way over its initial goal of €30,000. You can you pair delivered to your place by this November for a pledge of €99 (~US$ 104). Oh, and they come in white, gold, black and some different ring colors.
