Portable music is about to get a whole lot better, thanks to two former Adelaide DJs. They’ve created a tiny amplifier that’s small enough to fit into the coin pocket of your jeans yet delivers hi-fi quality sound from your smartphone, tablet, laptop or MP3 player.
Bart Kowalski and Joe Chehade came up with idea for UAMP, then fine-tuned it with input from a global audience. When they launched a crowd-funding campaign on Kickstarter, fans of the idea started making suggestions for improvements and personal requests. More importantly, 3600 of them pledged nearly $300,000 to bring the project to life. With pre-orders of around $2000 within a week of being offered, the partners and long-time friends expect to have UAMP on the market at a retail price of around US$65 by the end of July.
Measuring just 4.5 centimetres x 4.5 centimetres x 0.9 centimetres, UAMP (as in “you amplify”) fits in between your music source and your headphones.
“When most people think about amplifiers they think of making music louder but there is much more going under the hood than that,” Kowalski said.
“Your phone doesn’t have a very good quality amplifier inside, so if you plug in different quality headphones the quality of the music changes because the phone is struggling to power the headphones. We put this device, which is specifically built for driving headphones and is more powerful, in between the phone and your headphones. It means that your phone can work at its best and the UAMP does all the hard work to drive your headphones.”
The partners say the feedback received through Kickstarter was more valuable than a conventional market survey because supporters already had a financial stake in the product through the crowd-funding campaign. They offered a variety of packages to investors, ranging from a standard device to coloured versions and a laser engraved “special edition”. With an eye to future marketing, they also offered “resellers packages” of multiple UAMP units for people who might ultimately retail the product.
“More and more people started getting involved in the Kickstarter campaign and so we listened to our customers. You can’t just innovate for the sake of innovation, you have to deliver what your customers want,” Chehade said.
“At one point we made an assumption about a particular feature that we were going to put into the design and every single person who responded on Kickstarter said ‘No’. So, we said ‘no problem, that’s good feedback’,” he said.
Find out more on the UAMP website.