Build Story - GHS Wireless InfinitePlay

01 It Started With Post-Its

This is another headset that started out as a whiteboard full of Post-Its. Comfort always ranks at the top of needs for a headset; it could be the best sounding headset on the market, but if you don’t want to wear it who cares? Of course it needs to sound amazing! You need to be able to hear every detail and be fully immersed into your game otherwise you could just use a $20 pair of wired earbuds. And this was where the Post-Its started to get spicy. We all want freedom in our headsets, but what does this mean? It’s easy to hit the “wireless” easy button and brand your headset as free of constraints. In our research we found there was more to this story. Day after day we witnessed our colleagues and friends fumble with a cable to plug in their dying headset or fumble with cumbersome battery changes and disconnects missing key moments of their games - this was the epiphany!

02 The One-Handed Battery Swap

We got work immediately engineering and designing a battery system that would allow users to swap their batteries with one hand and to never lose connection. It was no small feat. Mechanisms are large; thick and heavy headsets are no fun. We looked to parallel and abstract industries for inspiration. All sorts of mechanisms we built into “mules,” or test rigs that we could put on users’ heads to validate the experience, but also carefully observe and interrogate the learnings into the experience. Maybe the battery should come out the front? Maybe it ejects from the rear? Is it a cylinder-shaped battery or something else. The rocks we threw at it were questions like does the headset stay stable, can you really do it with one hand, where do we fit the electronics and all the acoustic parts, and where do all the buttons and knobs live so that they are still super usable? Every one of these thoughts was carefully prototyped, tested, taken apart, redesigned, and experienced again until we had distilled the concept down to exactly what it needed to be.  

03 Where Art Wrestles Engineering

Like evil geniuses with their pens and their pads our internal industrial designers, in combination with one of the best design firms in consumer electronics, explored forms, textures, and materials so that the headsets invoke the emotions and performance we were engineering into the headsets. So many hours of standing at whiteboards, markers in hand, conference tables covered in products, and monitors full of inspiration from space vehicles, bicycles, cars, architecture, and we designed and iterated. We put machinists and 3D printers to work to crank out iteration after iteration. The team would sit around these samples, hold them, wear them, and live with them to make sure we were getting the look and feel perfect. One of my favorite parts of the process is sketching on models, modifying by hand, and sifting through a never-ending catalog of samples. This process is where art wrestles with engineering to find equilibrium. In my humble opinion we crushed it! 

04 Chasing the Sound

We spent a bunch of time in anechoic chambers from the UK to Asia listening, hand modifying, and tuning the sound of GHS Wireless. It is important to us that the listening experience hits our flavor of how games are heard no matter how you are connected - no digital eq required. We consulted with industry experts from lifestyle audio, the best in the world at spatialized audio, game audio producers, and gamers from the casual to the most competitive to nail our base tuning. A part of this included sitting with the engineers at the manufacturer of our speaker drivers and defining every aspect of the complicated structure of a speaker driver. This birthed our custom tuned drivers that work in concert with the restrictions of the overall design of the headset to create the sound you hear in the Glorious Mode equalizer setting. We didn’t want to leave out the ability to custom tune the headset sound for you, so we made sure the audio electronics and our custom drivers have enough headroom to turn the explosions up or dial in the sound of the quietest footsteps with our graphical equalizer tool in Glorious CORE.  

05 It All Comes Together

After many flights, video calls, vendor visits, mules built and destroyed, and hours and hours of listening and gaming we hand built the GHS Wireless InfinitePlay you see today. We perfected our battery swap mechanism that accepts the battery no matter which direction you fire it into the ear cup and presents the battery when the time comes in the heat of the battle to swap. The sound and the form came together. Next came the hardest part, we had to be able make them at scale… 

06 Now Make It at Scale

One of the hardest things a product development team has to do is to wrap all the insights, experiences, and performance into something that can be mass produced and live a full life in the wild. This takes a lot of engineering, prototyping, and testing before we ever consider moving into the tooling construction phase and production. Massive (read Never. Ever. Going. To. Fit) bench top electronics, precisely tuned acoustic architectures, and fit requirements all get massaged into the industrial design; never an easy feat.  

07 Off to Asia

Off to Asia we went where we met up with our expert team on the ground and sat down with our manufacturer. We poured through every detail, every decision we made and why we made that decision and got to work on bringing the entire system to life. This phase dials in the final iterations of everything from the materials and design in the headband, to the fit adjustments, the materials the cushions are made of, fine tuning of the feel of the buttons and knobs, and the battery swap system. Even more prototypes are worn, broken, thrown on the floor, stressed in labs and real life. Once happy with what we had and knowing we could maintain our performance and quality in production we got to the construction of the tooling and fixture for production.  

08 While the Tooling Cooks

Tooling takes months to build and finalize. This is time to focus on the other aspects of the product. We worked on the user journey for the tuning and customization tools in CORE. Many hours were spent with our UI/UX designer to wireframe and finesse all of the audio parts of CORE. Packaging was sketched on white boards, hand built, designs and the out of box experience was scrutinized, and tested from shipping to the store to living on the shelf, to getting your brand new headset home in pristine condition. We worked to fine tune the firmware of the headset to ensure that every function and feature worked as intended.  

09 No One Tests Like This

We also worked on designing a rigorous testing protocol for all aspects of the headset. This process entails sitting with the design of the headset and examining every aspect for points of failure. Thankfully our product team has over 40 combined years of building high quality headsets and that history gives us the insight to really stress designs. One of my favorite meetings of every project is when you sit down with your manufacturer and review that test plan. I’m proud to say that the initial feedback we always get is “no one tests like this” or “no one else tests to this limit.” Every single test procedure and criteria is reviewed until our intent is well understood; well more than 200 individual testing procedures were defined and refined to ensure we could find all the failure points and ensure that the GHS Wireless headset would survive them. These tests included stressing the firmware, beating up the mechanical parts (life is hard on a headset), trying to wear out every adjustment, and stressing the headset in a range of environments from 60 degrees C and 95% humidity to surviving operating, flexing, and cycling in -40 degrees C.  

10 On the Line

Once tooling is ready for the initial trials we go through a thoroughly designed series of “builds.” All the manufacturing procedures are used to create every single component of the headset where our team sits and evaluates every part. We sit next to the molding machines, we follow the PCBs down the SMT line, we sit with the skilled operators as cushions are assembled, asking questions and pushing the system to the limit. This hands-on approach gives us the ability to learn, adjust, and push and pull on every aspect of the component building processes. Hours and hours and hours of time was put into reviewing part samples, building headsets, reviewing test and inspection data, and working with everyone at all of our suppliers from the operators to the engineers to the quality teams to dial in every process. It is this hands-on approach at every step, no matter how small, that makes the difference in our products.  

11 China to Vietnam