the process of doing that research, he became more cynical about Hybra’s claims that it had created a new, groundbreaking technology, and whether it ever intended to produce and ship the Sound Band to Kickstarter backers. In the comments on Kickstarter, he repeatedly accused Thiel of malfeasance and demanded a refund. He says he eventually filed complaints with both the Michigan Attorney General and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which oversees Internet commerce. The Attorney General’s office sent a letter back, saying it was unable to reach Hybra at its former office in Traverse City, MI, and therefore couldn’t verify that the complaint applied to a legitimate, Michigan-based company. He says he received a “standard boilerplate response” from the FTC. Other backers, he says, have done the same with similar results. [Paragraph changed to correct the name of the federal agency that handles consumer complaints.]
He also tried and failed to get Kickstarter involved. (I contacted Kickstarter to ask what it does when a project doesn’t deliver what’s promised to backers. Julie Wood, who works in the company’s communications office, responded by e-mail: “While Kickstarter’s not a store, after five years and 190,000 projects, creators on Kickstarter have an incredible track record bringing new and untested ideas to life. There’s risk inherent in creating anything new, but the system overall works remarkably well.” The company did not respond to follow-up questions.)
One issue that stood out to Blumenthal is what he describes as an unsolvable physics and engineering problem: Because the Sound Band essentially turns listeners’ ears into speakers, it would also turn the ear into a gramophone (or phonograph), causing it to broadcast the music playing over the Sound Band to anybody within earshot, like a record player (more on this later).
Even more worrisome to Blumenthal is what he sees as Hybra’s refusal to offer refunds or engage meaningfully with angry backers. Sure, the company posts updates, he points out, but they’re often so dense with technical jargon and specs that it’s hard for a layperson to parse their meaning.
“I want to send a strong message to Joe that if he’s committed fraud, I want to see him in prison,” he says. “It’s not about the money, in this case. I was told I’d see the product by Christmas, and that has come and gone twice. I know the product isn’t coming, and if it does arrive, I’m sending it back unopened. It baffles me why U.S.-based backers aren’t walking into a police station and charging him with fraud.”
Armed with the new concerns of Blumenthal and others, I reached out to Joe Thiel for a response. He immediately made himself available and arranged for me to meet with his lead engineer, who wants to remain anonymous because he fears harassment from disgruntled backers. “Call me Bob,” he joked, so I will.
Bob and I met at the headquarters of Central Transport in Warren, MI, one freezing day in January. Central Transport, where Hybra now has its offices, is the company owned by Manuel “Matty” Moroun, a controversial local billionaire who owns the Ambassador Bridge connecting Detroit to Windsor, Ontario. (Thiel’s other company, Hybra Energy, is responsible for all of the LED lights on the Ambassador Bridge.)
Bob unpacked a plastic box full of components and circuit boards, and then proceeded to give me a nearly three-hour explanation of what was wrong with the Sound Band’s original design, his process to re-engineer it, and what he eventually hit on as a solution.
“It became evident that things on the original design needed to be cleaned up,” Bob says. “As a designer, I decided to treat it as I would any project from a straightforward engineering perspective. I went from square one and starting testing everything, and I uncovered numerous issues. I love solving puzzles. It’s not magic; it’s actually fairly pedantic.”
Bob pointed to a “shocking” lack of basic testing done by the original designers of the Sound Band that would have revealed design flaws before the company went on Kickstarter claiming that the Sound Band was ready for manufacturing.
The first thing he did was redesign the controller card to make it work reliably. “My three rules for any new design is to first make it work, then make it work with improved performance, and then to make it work inexpensively,” he says. “Folks get into trouble when they try to do all three things at once.” He also re-engineered the Bluetooth audio block to fix problems and tinkered with the power supply block to correct an audio playback stuttering issue.
The Sound Band’s entire original design, Bob says, was “riddled with rookie mistakes.” (A word about Bob’s background: He’s a lifelong engineer who has worked for successful startups and who has extensive experience designing products for the military. He spent part of his career in New York before moving to Ann Arbor 35 years ago to pursue a romance. He says his deep roots in Southeast Michigan and local business relationships were key to getting design and production issues solved.)
Complicating the situation was the fact that the Sound Band, unlike other Bluetooth headsets, uses a piezo transducer—a ceramic component that produces sound without the use of an electromagnetic voice coil, as is the case with traditional headphones. The ceramic piezo transducer is over-molded (or encapsulated) in a polycarbonate compound that needs to have the right blend of rigidity and flexibility for the Sound Band to work properly. The over-molding material also needs to be non-toxic, since it’s in direct contact with the user’s skin. Getting a functional, over-molded piezo transducer was by far the Sound Band’s biggest design problem, Bob says, and the one he’s spent the most time working to correct.
Bob met with the original piezo transducer overmold supplier, as well as experts in both hard and soft tooling. After lots of trial and error, Bob finally realized the issue: The over-molding process was changing the way the transducer was working. He discovered the major problem was heat-based. The temperature needed to do the tooling was de-polarizing and delaminating the transducer, which caused the piezo material to weaken and separate.
“I was ecstatic,” Bob says. “I finally knew what the problem was.”
The next task was to come up with a method of tooling that didn’t kill the transducer. He leaned on his relationships with a number of local suppliers, and one in particular made trips to his lab to help him solve the problem. “That costs money and is typically expensive in time and goodwill,” he says. “It’s really important to point out how leveraging my Michigan contacts in technology and manufacturing was critical at this stage. That Midwestern friendliness doesn’t exist in other parts of the country.” (He declines to publicize the local supplier that helped him sort out the overmold issue because he fears harassment from angry backers, but I can confirm that it’s a well-known, reputable company.)
With the supplier’s help, Bob found a piezo already coated in a polycarbonate material that was also compatible with the existing audio driver circuitry. “The new piezo is far more robust and not as delicate,” he says. And the “ear as gramophone” effect that many Kickstarter commenters fretted over? Bob admits that’s an issue he’s still playing with. “The physics are unavoidable,” he explains. “When you vibrate the cartilage of the ear, it’s effectively turned into a speaker and is mostly perceived by the listener, but some small percentage of the sound is going to be radiated outward.” However, Bob compares the sound leakage to sitting next to someone who has their iPod turned up too high, as opposed to listening to a full-on speaker.
Hybra now feels it has solved its engineering problems sufficiently enough to send out
