For the love of listening

Lift the veil

As we age, our ears can become less sensitive to the higher frequencies that give music its presence and fine detail — even while everyday conversation still sounds clear. The change can be so gradual that we never notice the veil settling over familiar music. Elephant Ears is designed to lift that veil.

For the best listening experience, use headphones or high-quality speakers.

Elephant Ears is a desktop app for Mac, Windows, and Linux and is currently in private beta. Try the demo and decide whether Elephant Ears makes a difference for you. If it does, register to be a beta tester or to be notified when Elephant Ears is in production.

About the betaNotify me at launch

Reviews

“Thanx for the invitation. It was a „unglaubliche" experience. I love it and I´m on my way to buy new headphones...”
Lucie L. Cologne, Germany
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App Tour

Elephant Ears desktop app home screenAbout the beta
Hearing Profile
Select from saved hearing profiles or select a preset.
Headphone Tuning
Find your headphone in the library to tune it to the optimal sound.
Equalizer Presets
Choose an equalizer preset that fits your music to your preferences.
Listening Check
Use the guided listening check to create a profile based on your own hearing.
Import Headphone Profile
Import your headphone from the thousands available.
New Equalizer Profile
Shape the sound yourself, then save your adjustments as a personal preset.
About the beta
Edward's story

Why I built it.

In October 1989 I walked into a new high-end audio shop in Berkeley and discovered, for the first time, just how spacious and alive recorded music could sound and how visceral the sense of location of each instrument could be. Then and there I became an audiophile. Fast forward to Berlin, 2021. I had Genelec studio monitors and a good desktop DAC but I was missing something... I thought a higher-resolution DAC and much better headphones would give me the listening experience that I could still hear, in my head, from my days in Berkeley. On my birthday that year, I visited Hifi im Hinterhof in Berlin and came home with new gear. The difference was not what I had hoped. Within a couple of days, I wondered whether the missing piece was my own hearing. I took an online listening check and, that same day, used the results to adjust an equalizer. Details and a sense of spaciousness came back. I was delighted. But my joy was short-lived: after around five minutes, I started to feel a sense of fatigue. The sound that at first sounded great revealed a harshness I hadn't noticed at first. I dialed the adjustments back, and that helped, but it still wasn't right. But even if the sound was not perfect, this first experience convinced me that somewhere there was a solution that would remove the veil from my music.
Read more
In the following years, while I was still working full-time as a software engineer, I experimented with hardware and software-based DSP solutions to provide programmable equalization, but none of those approaches gave me the sound I wanted. Researching the causes for the harshness I experienced finally helped me understand why: quiet detail and louder passages needed different handling. An equalizer alone couldn't do the job. In June 2025, I stopped my full-time job and I decided to build a product around what I'd learned. But I still needed a solution that was not harsh at all, and that revealed the qualities in the music that I knew were there. More false starts followed until I finally came upon the solution that I was looking for: dynamic range compression, a technique recording engineers use to control the balance between quieter and louder sounds. The approach that finally worked did this across separate frequency bands. By May 2026, I had gone through many iterations of both the DSP backend as well as the user interface and I finally had a solution I could stand behind: detail and inner subtlety for soft passages, with louder passages that stayed comfortable for me but kept the punch and rhythm of the music intact. And most importantly, the sense of the space that the music lives within expanded in a way that was beyond my expectation. That was and is magic! That technique became the foundation of Elephant Ears. Now I'd like you to hear it for yourself.

Edward Archibald, Founder, Elephant Audio

Elephant Ears is built and maintained by one person — me — along with an expanding team of AI agents.

Private beta

Help me finish Elephant Ears.

Elephant Ears is in private beta.  I'm looking for a small group of people who love music and will tell me honestly what they hear, including when it doesn't work for them.

Elephant Ears is a desktop app for Mac, Windows, and Linux.

What you get

  • The full desktop app for Mac, Windows, or Linux.  Free during the beta.
  • A free lifetime license if you complete the beta commitments below.
  • A direct line to me.  I read every report.

What I ask

You must do all of the following to qualify for the free license.

  • A short survey every few weeks.  Five minutes, never more.  You must complete all of the surveys.
  • Report any and all issues and requests for help using the facilities provided in the app.
  • Stay in until launch.

Who it's for: You listen to music on your computer often.  You're picky about sound—and you chose your headphones, speakers, or DAC with that in mind.

Apply for the betaNotify me at launch

35+  Places are limited.  I read every application.  Planned launch price: €99 one-time, €29/year optional updates.

Prefer to wait for launch?

Leave your email and I'll let you know when Elephant Ears is available.

A confirmation now, then news of the production launch. No beta application required.