Review: Rumble K Earphones

Bone Conduction Technology. BCT sounds more akin to skeletal surgery than consumer electronics, but Pineapple Electronics has brought the power of vibration to your headphones to add more BAM to your bass.

My first experience with these mini-woofers was at CES 2010 earlier this year. After just a brief hands-on, I was struck by how neat it was to “feel” the music thumping inside my head without resorting to blowing my ears out with a super-high volume. Now that I’ve had a chance to spend more time with the Rumble K, the question must be asked: is this tech an explosion of sound worthy of your $80 or a ripple of noise in the crowded headphone market?

The Design

Pineapple has produced a chunky product that appears to be form following function. A distinctive, drum design reinforces that the Rumble K is all about vibration.

The black and silver colour-scheme is simple and tasteful with the silver colour drawing attention to the drum. Clearly, the design is all about the BCT. Conspicuous design is a legitimate choice.

I am a fan of the small, angled earphone that fits snugly in the ear canal when fit with the right size of silicon cover (there are three sizes). Unfortunately, while you’d think this would keep the earphone fit tight in the ear, I often felt the buds slipping out. While that may have just been a trick of the vibration, it was a slight annoyance.

The Sound

Bone Conduction Technology is part of a long history of vibration-based sound devices–a popularity that appeared renewed at CES this year with gadgets such as the Tunebug. In the Rumble K, the earbud (or “earwoofer” as Pineapple prefers to call it), contains both a normal earbud speaker and a bone conduction drum that rests on your ear cartilage. Rather than just rely on air conduction of sound through to the eardrum, the vibrating drum communicates low and mid frequencies of the music through the bones in your inner ear.

So, in short, the auditory feature of the Rumble K is, well, the rumble. And you know what? That’s kinda cool. Without throwing the volume to 11, you can experience a vibration that’s essentially a localized version of being next to a loud speaker or attending a concert.

Pineapple even goes so far as to say it’s “the sensation of live music brought to life”. This, unfortunately, is a bad case of marketing exaggeration. Yes, the headphone creates a novel vibration in your ear that lets you feel an added dimension to your favourite music, but it hardly simulates the powerful bass thump of a live concert that shakes your body to the core.

And so, it’s in the promise of the Rumble K that Pineapple starts to lose me. I’m promised that I would “feel every frequency and range of sound”, but beyond the vibration, the music sounds flat and muted. In fact, despite the fact that the silicon earbud (which is comfortable) fits snugly in my ear canal, the music seems as though it were coming from a distance, competing with the vibration of the BCT. It is certainly not the “dynamic surround sound” I’m led to believe I’ll hear.

In theory, the application of both bone and air conduction for transmitting music does create a fuller experience (although not the “4D” experience Pineapple claims, which is, frankly, ridiculous). But, it just doesn’t make for a big sound as expected.

Unfortunately, while the Rumble K is rumbling away at making a “powerful, wide-ranged, balanced and vivid sound” (which I can’t quite agree with) it fails at producing any significant volume. Sure, I’m getting a vibration, but I have to crank the sound to hear the lyrics. In my case, I listen to a few podcasts and songs on my iPhone that require I put the volume on full to hear clearly. But when I was using the Rumble Ks, I could barely hear anything at all. A quick comparison between a standard iPod headphone and the Rumble K demonstrated that the volume was definitely lower once the latter were plugged in.

To give Pineapple the benefit of rebuttal on this issue, I asked why I might be noticing a volume change. Their response: “Other headphones only emphasize the high sound, therefore they feel louder, but with the Rumble K, it boosts the bass sound about twice more than the other non-bone conduction headphones. So you would feel much deeper and wider sound but less stressful to your ear.” Respectfully, I have to disagree with this one–when the volume is so quiet you can’t really hear, that’s an obvious difference.

I should also note that the value of the “super bass” headphone is lost when not listening to bass-heavy music. The Rumble K is wasted on a spoken word podcast. This makes these headphones not as versatile as any other “standard” headphone.

The Bottom Line

For an earbud that rumbles and gives the feel for the bass, it does what it sets out to do. So, if you like the rumble of a bass line, but want to save your ears from super-loud volumes, these were meant for you. (As an aside, I loaned the Rumble K to a friend to try out. His response: the vibration is oddly reminiscent of a throbbing ear infection. Clearly, rumble is not meant for him.)

But a quick read of a marketing material on the box reveals a company that is trying so hard to get noticed by using ridiculous hyperbole and marketing speak. As a person who deals with a lot of marketing, it’s amusing and borderline offensive; as a consumer, it’s simply misleading. Although it was just my subjective experience with the sound, I can say I wasn’t blown away by “powerful” and “vivid” sound. Never mind the “4D” audio.

A good example of misleading marketing is a line from the Rumble K box: “When the Rumble K is placed on a flat horizontal surface, you can enjoy your favorite music amplified like from a speaker as a result of the Bone Conduction feature.” I tried this on a number of surfaces (metal, wood and plastic) of various thicknesses and I could not make this happen at all. Even after an email to Pineapple to clarify the special voodoo that I must do to make this happen, I couldn’t replicate the amplified speaker to which the box referred.

For me, the bottom line is the Rumble K over promising and under delivering. And while I hesitate to call BCT a gimmick, it isn’t as revolutionary as Pineapple claims. After using these headphones for the past couple of weeks, I find myself reaching for my old, and much cheaper, earbuds. While they don’t rumble, they have the volume and sound clarity I want from my headphones.

The Good
In-ear bass vibration (it is what they do)
Comfortable

The Bad
Volume is weak
Sound is mediocre
Misleading marketing

The Specs
Product: Rumble K in-ear bone conduction headphone
Frequency response: 20Hz-20,000Hz
Rated input power: Min. 5mW / Max. 12mW
Cord length: unbalanced 55 inch
Plug: gold-plated
Net weight: 0.03 lb

[Pineapple Electronics]