The recording was never the problem. Headphones are.

Fifteen years sorting the fundamental problem with recorded sound and headphones.

The answers turned out to be rather extraordinary.

There is a wonderfully simple way of understanding what we have been missing with headphones for the last hundred and twenty years.

Hold your nose.

Now imagine eating the best meal you have ever had.

You can still taste it. You know what you are eating. You can recognise the flavours, a little. You can even tell yourself it is delicious.

But something is missing.

Now let go of your nose.

The food has not changed. You have simply stopped getting in its way.

That is remarkably close to what has happened with recorded sound. We have spent decades making extraordinary recordings and extraordinary headphones, yet the thing sitting between the recording and the human being has been designed around one very small part of the ear: the ear canal. We have been cutting off a massive part of our sense of hearing.

But your ear is not just the canal. It is the whole thing. Those ridges and curves of the outer ear interact with sound as it arrives, and your brain has spent a lifetime learning what they mean.

You do not have to think about it. You just know.

I spent fifteen years asking what would happen if we stopped designing headphones around the canal and started designing around the human ear itself.

Spherical Media Hub Ltd. holds exclusive worldwide rights to three patent families with eight granted registrations. After fifteen years and hundreds of private sessions, the same reaction keeps appearing.

The discovery

We have been delivering sound to a tiny listening area and asking the brain to invent the rest.

A neural acoustic interface delivers the sound across the complete outer ear so your sense of hearing can receive the full signal.

No software. No artificial surround. No tricks.

The recording is the recording.

We just changed the way you receive it.

Listening IRL

Put on a recording you know extremely well. Close your eyes.

A sound can arrive from above you. Something can happen behind you and your head turns before you decide to turn it. A voice can feel as though somebody is standing in the room. The space around the musicians begins to exist again.

I have run hundreds of private sessions.

People stop. They listen. They look around. And again and again they say the same two things.

“I was there.”

“I couldn’t tell whether it was real or the recording.”

That is the only claim that matters to me.

It can make a recording become an IRL experience.

The honest bit

This is not a flattering interface. It is an honest one.

A beautifully recorded album becomes somewhere you are standing. A badly recorded one sounds worse than it ever did.

The shite is more shite.

I cannot invent what was never captured. If the care was not taken in the room on the day, you will hear that too. Some recordings simply cannot be listened to this way.

Being somewhere

This is not really about headphones, music, film or games.

Those are simply different ways of doing the same human thing.

Being somewhere.

You stop thinking about the technology. You stop thinking about the recording.

You are simply there.

Who this is for

This work is for people who already care deeply about sound: serious listeners, artists, producers, and private clients who want the experience rather than the explanation.

I am Mark O’Callaghan, The Audio Sommelier.

NeuraSeals is the interface that makes Listening IRL possible.

Come and listen

Custom Fitting and Listening IRL Sessions are private, by appointment only.

The session is one hundred pounds and is credited in full towards anything you commission afterwards.

You do not have to believe any of this.

Please don’t.