From Hearing Aids to Earphones
November 18, 2008
From hearing aids to earphones
By GRACE GAGLIANO – gagostin@bradenton.com
BRADENTON – As president of Ear Tech Inc., Mark Krywko knows plenty about building and testing custom hearing aids.
After about 33 years in the hearing-aid industry, Krywko is now using his knowledge and resources to build and retail custom earphones that fit with the latest MP3 players.
Krywko and his staff at Bradenton’s Ear Tech Inc. have combined loudspeaker technology with innovative hearing-aid science to invent earphones that users can adjust to meet their hearing needs and preferences.
The earphones sold by Krywko’s other Bradenton-based company, Sleek Audio, come with interchangeable parts that allow users to tweak the bass and treble to desired levels.
Sleek Audio has been selling the earphone systems since January after debuting them at a consumer electronics trade show.
Since then, the earphones – called SA6 – have gained favorable reviews by Popular Science, Wired and Tech Power Up and now have several international distributors that are selling the product.
“This exceeded our expectations as far as how it’s taking off,” said Krywko, chief executive officer of Sleek Audio.
Krywko has been operating Sleek Audio, which has seven employees, out of Ear Tech’s office at 3904 Ninth Ave. W.
By December, Sleek Audio will move into an 8,000-square-foot office in a Palmetto office complex.
“We never thought of preparing this for another facility,” said Krywko, who also plans to expand staff to about 20 employees.
Krywko’s son, Jason, is chief operating officer of Sleek Audio and helps market the product with a public relation’s firm it employees.
The graduate of USF Sarasota-Manatee describes the earphone system as something that works in synch with each individual’s “audio fingerprint.”
The earphone system comes with three bass ports and three treble ports that range in levels from low to high.
The ports plug into the in-ear monitor, letting the users decide what audio components they want to maximize depending on their music playlists or hearing preferences.
“It’s all about finding your audio fingerprint,” Jason Krywko said. “That’s finding what you want out of your music. It enables you to start hearing things you never knew were inside music.”
That includes picking up the sound of a squeaky pedal on a bass drum or a musician turning pages of sheet music.
The device retails online for $249, and the Krywkos recently launched a wireless bundle system that retails for $320.
The wireless earphones come with an adapter that plugs into an MP3 player but gives the user listening capabilities of up to 60 feet without the cable.
Mark Krywko wouldn’t disclose how many sales have been made this year for competition reasons.
However, he said Sleek Audio has contracts with international distributors in China, Japan, Korea, Russia, France, the United Kingdom and New Zealand.
The earphones have about 29-32 decibels of noise reduction compared to other noise canceling headphones that have about 15-20 decibels of reduction, Mark Krywko said.
“These are ideal for business travelers,” Krywko said. “So when you’re sitting in an airplane, it’s like sitting in your own utopia.”
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