Hear Hear Vintage and Hear Hear Modern do the same thing — guests pick up a vintage handset, leave a voice message, and you keep the recording forever. But under the hood, the two products work in entirely different ways. Here's where we are with each.
Hear Hear Vintage: A Phone Company in a Box
The Vintage works by emulating old-school copper phone lines. Any standard analog phone — rotary, touchtone, desk phone, wall phone — can be plugged directly into the box and used immediately. Our hardware handles everything you'd expect a phone company to handle: ringing the bell, detecting when the handset is lifted, listening for button presses or rotary dial sounds, and capturing the recording.
That flexibility is the whole point. If you have a phone with sentimental value — your grandmother's rotary, a colored touchtone from the seventies — you can bring it and plug it straight in. Two phones work simultaneously through the dual jacks built into the box. No splitter, no extra hardware.
We've prototyped the system and the core concept is proven. The hard part — making the box behave like a real phone line — is done. What's still ahead: designing the enclosure and validating battery life under real-world conditions. Neither of those is a small task, but they're engineering and testing work rather than open questions about whether the thing actually works.
Hear Hear Modern: A Vintage Phone, Rebuilt from the Inside
The Modern takes a different approach entirely. Rather than emulating a phone line, we take a vintage-style handset and replace everything inside it with modern electronics. That means swapping out the original microphone and speaker in the handset, stripping the phone down to its plastic shell so it can be sanded and refinished, and removing most of the original internal components to make room for the new hardware.
The result is a device that looks like a vintage phone, feels like a vintage phone, but runs on a modern chip with clean digital audio and a rechargeable battery. No cables. No power outlet. No WiFi. Just place it on a table and it's ready.
We're still in the midst of prototyping this one. It's more involved than the Vintage because we're modifying the phone itself rather than building an external box. We expect to have a prototype device ready for hands-on testing within the next six weeks or so.
Where Things Stand
Both products are on track for the June 1 launch window. The Vintage is closer — the remaining work is finishing and validation rather than fundamental development. The Modern has a few more steps before we're happy with it, but the approach is clear and the timeline is realistic.
We'll share more as the prototypes come together.