I can already hear the disappointed screams of 300 people when they first hear the pathetic tinny sound of the Tembo Trunks drowned out by the crackling of the campfire.

Ingenuity at its finest. Elegant, functional, extremely durable and they even look neat! I wonder how well they work with non-Apple earbud styles, though?

While these cones/horns impedance-convert the sound waves for far field listening, they can not change the fact that the original speaker diaphragms are tiny. As such, bass response will be terrible.

Still, better than nothing I guess.

I agree. I have 2 sets of small portable speakers I use at different times for my iPod. My thought is these are for "extreme" times when battery life or the weight of batteries would be an issue...which begs the question how are you powering the iPod?

I still like the idea and would consider buying them if I could see how they work in person.

I'd be curious to see how they modeled that. It looks like a very small horn with a large phase plug, but if you look at the cutaways you can see it's really a sort of tweeter horn sitting inside another horn (which won't have much effect).

It's probably never going to sound good, but they might manage something listenable if they modeled it as a regular exponential horn.

Are you guys around here? How did you come up with that shape?

When I saw kickstarter as the link I was excited for earbuds (those that can fit on the EARS) being able to "switch" somehow to external and still sound decent.

These are just stylized portable speakers..

At first I thought you were supposed to wear these on your ears as some sort of joke.

Yeah I think I'll just stick with portable speakers, I doubt the sound from them would be too great. They didn't even give a decent demo in the video.

On another note, when did Kickstarter stop being US only?

This sounds like an interesting idea, but I'd have to hear a good recording of them before buying them. Also the needless attachment to iPod/iPhone? Surely they are compatible with any headphones...

Certainly looks better than Dixie / styrofoam cups. I wonder how the performance compares.

Am I the only one who got confused by the "Amplifies to 80dB", which I read as "Amplifies by 80dB" and went crazy trying to figure out what was going on..

Since dB is, by definition, a relative term it's no surprise you were confused since there is not anything for it to relate to. The best I can guess is that they mean to say 80dB(A) which relates the sound to a certain air pressure. The value is then weighted to approximate how an ear would respond. 80dB(A) has been likened to standing around 26ft from busy traffic or being 2 feet away from an alarm clock (bell or buzzer not specified).

The following two statements do not jive

1) "Tembo Trunks don’t use batteries"

2) "Tembo Trunks amplify the music from your iPod’s earbuds to 80dB of clarity-enhanced Stereo Sound (3x the sound)"

Powerless sound amplification!

Additionally, "clarity-enhanced"? Fur realz? Lets hook N of these bad boys up in series and get N times the clarity!

These look amazing, but they're just parabolic plastic, with presumably less-than-nice sound quality.

Yeah, what are the resonant properties of silicone?

This looks really intresting and the design is nice!

Doubt that I will buy these but hopefully they will improve the "amplifying". Im quite anal about my sound quality :)

Project is located in Sydney, Australia but they do free shipping within the USA only... I guess they're having it manufactured there?

Yes, they mentioned that was the best centralized place to do it from.

At that size you can just transport your real portable speakers....

Looks fantastic. Only problem I can see - how portable are these things?