Now You Know Your XTZ Headphones

( photo taken directly from XTZ Kickstarter )

This article's coming to you a little earlier than usual because I finally have some time to do work. "Whaaaat...?" I know; scandalous. "This looks a little repetitive, doesn't it? Another headphones kickstarter?" Heh, what can I say—I love them. You could say that I like to encourage healthy competition. Now let's, for lack of a better phrase, kick this into gear.


XTZ is a Swedish team offering "the World’s First High-End DSP Wireless Headphone" set. DSP, for those who don't know, stands for digital signal processing and is meant to improve or modify the signal received in some way. The signals vary from voice and audio to temperature and pressure, for a few examples. The signals are then processed quickly and transformed into other uses. That's a very quick and clunky explanation, ahahaha. If you want a more articulate explanation that's a bit more informative, then you should check this article out.

Pressing forward, XTZ wants to take this technology and expand the headphones playing field with it. These headphones are also wireless, of course, and are iPhone and Android compatible. With the Bluetooth technology, it can also be used with Macs and PCs. The headphones also have a built-in microphone, which is a step up. I'm curious on how it works with recordings. Another thing that I really like is that the DSP headphones also have play and volume controls. To me, that's a very, very important and very, very handy feature to have. Because of my current headphones, I've gotten very used to having even basic play controls.

XTZ Headphones work with something called Headphone Divine, which is an app that helps control certain functions like the various presets. The presets are shown in the short 52sec video on the Kickstarter. My only complaint is that there's no real differentiation between the presets. This wasn't really a good demonstration, but that's just me, I'm sure. I think this is something I can come to understand better using the app and headphones.

Touching back on the Bluetooth briefly, they say that you can move up to 10 meters/32 feet away and still listen to your music. That's a pretty good distance, y'know. I can walk around my room and still jam without worrying about losing quality. And I feel like this would also be very helpful during Skype calls. That's something I really want to test myself.

XTZ boasts many 'competitive features'; all of which sound good on paper, and I admit that I'm very interested. Right now, the Kickstarter is fully funded (heck yeah). As of writing this on October 18th, they've hit $63'421 of their $25'000 goal. (sniffle) I love success stories. They have 15 days to go—14 days by the time this articles hits. The project'll end on November 3rd at 03:40AM EDT [your timezone will vary].

Is it worth checking out? Definitely. Give their Kickstarter a looky-loo, and remember tell 'em GDR sent ya.