28 August 2014
Wales based GX Group has helped enhance festival goer’s music experience by harnessing technology to develop a unique wireless headphone designed for use at a silent disco.
Working with the leading silent disco provider Silent Arena, who are headquartered in Cardiff, GX Group has designed from concept to production coloured light emitting headphones that indicate to fellow dancers which DJ and which music they are dancing to. They also create a dynamic light show on the dance floor.
Silent discos are a new and revolutionary concept where people can choose what music to listen pumped out by competing DJ’s via their wireless headphones. SilentArena wanted to develop this concept and encourage people to flick between up to three channels.
They approached the GX Group for their help to develop a set of headphones that visually showed which channel someone was listening to. Since silent discos have become a staple of many international and national festivals SilentArena also needed GX Group to consider a cost effective way of mass producing headphones.
The team at GX Group worked closely with SilentArena to design and engineer an optical band to change colour according to the choice of music, as well as reducing manufacturing costs. GX produced a number of prototype designs to establish the optimum optical performance using a minimum number of LEDs, encased in a design with a low tooling and manufacture cost. The selection of plastic for the light emitting headband was a particular challenge due to the restrictions on manufacturing costs; the team needed to find something that combined optimum optical with a high degree of multiple flexures in service that would not break or craze. To ensure the product design was easy to use and well received members of the GX Group team even attended events trialling the prototype prior to final launch at the Reading Festival last week.
“My disco days might be behind me,” noted managing director Mark Helmich, “thankfully several of our younger design engineers revelled in this challenge and enjoyed developing a sturdy, state of the art wireless headphone that festival goers could use. Apparently it was quite something to see over 3000 different coloured headsets lighting up the Red Camp at ReadingFestival!
www.walesonline.co.uk/business/business-news/festival-goers-dancing-beat-technology-7690414