The origin story — a CD player taped to a bike frame

Stellar didn't start in a lab. It started with bad earbuds, a broken commute, and a question that turned out to have a good answer.

The thing that started it

In 2019, our founder Matteo was commuting by bike in Milan. He had a portable CD player in his jacket pocket — not ironically, actually — and a pair of €12 earbuds from a petrol station.

The earbuds broke halfway through the commute. Left channel went. He finished the ride in mono and could not stop thinking about how wrong it sounded. Not just the earbuds. The whole equation. €12 for something this central.

The first version

The first version of what became STELLAR FlyPods was a driver salvaged from a broken pair of over-ears, mounted in a 3D-printed housing, connected to a Bluetooth receiver from AliExpress. It worked. It sounded better than most things in its price range.

Matteo taped it to his bike frame to test it in real conditions. The tape held for one ride.

The actual insight

What changed everything wasn't the hardware. It was realising that most cheap earbuds sound bad not because of their drivers but because of their EQ tuning. The default curve is set for the average ear in the average room. It's wrong for everyone.

If you could fix the EQ — properly, per-track, without making the user do anything — you'd have a significantly better product without a significantly more expensive bill of materials. That's the insight that became STELLARvibe.

Where we are

We're a small team. The hardware is made in partnership with a factory in Shenzhen we've worked with since 2021. The software is built in-house.

We're not trying to compete with Sony or Bose on brand. We're trying to make the best sound per euro that exists. So far, we think we're doing that.