About
Our story
It started with the volume all the way down.
In 2015, Tim Murphy — founder of Airdrop Gaming, and a former Navy radar technician — played a round of Call of Duty in silence.
It was disorienting. Footsteps, reloads, someone moving up behind him: all of it simply gone. What the silence made obvious was how much of a game lives in its audio — and how much Deaf and hard-of-hearing players were being asked to play without.
The idea arrived before the technology did. Most shooters back then output 2.1 or 5.1 — not enough directional information to work with. By 2019, 7.1 surround had become standard, and the concept finally had something to read.
The goal was easy to say and hard to build: show a player where a sound is coming from, in real time, without touching the game. Several years of development and months of testing later, Audio Radar shipped.
Who we are
A small team, building with the people it’s for.
Airdrop Gaming is a small team in West Michigan. We build hardware for gamers who can’t rely on sound — and we build it alongside them.
Our Discord community plays every beta build, and their feedback decides what ships next. Features that started as a message from a Deaf player are in the product today.
Join our Discord
Our why
Directional sound decides fights. Not everyone gets to hear it.
Around 38 million gamers worldwide are Deaf or hard-of-hearing. In the games where audio decides outcomes — who hears the flank, who hears the reload — that information simply isn’t available to them.
Audio Radar puts it back, as light.
What surprised us is who else wanted it. Hearing players use it for the same reason: a second channel for sound, without cranking the volume or cluttering the screen. Designing for Deaf players first made a better product for everyone.
Milestones
How we got here.
2012 — Tim Murphy founds Airdrop Gaming, after his previous gaming accessory, HipShotDot, reached 7,000+ retail stores.
2015 — The idea: a round of Call of Duty played in silence.
January 2024 — Audio Radar debuts at CES. PCWorld calls it “an inspiring new gaming product.”
December 2024 — Selected by Logitech G as the first partner in its Start-Up for Good initiative.
May 2025 — Surround Vision Technology™ is awarded U.S. Patent 12,300,093 B2.
Today — 3,000+ units in players’ setups, 4.7★ average.
See the sound.
Everything is better when everyone can play. Two ways in: Audio Radar 2.0, purpose-built for PC — or the original Audio Radar, the flagship for console and PC with larger light bars.