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How $1,500 Headphones Are Made
CNETNate writes "A tour of Sennheiser's Hanover factory reveals for the first time how its audiophile headphones are assembled by hand. The company recently announced its most expensive and innovative headphones to date, the HD 800, which discarded the conventional method of headphone driver design for a new 'donut-shaped' ring driver idea. Only 5,000 of these headphones can be made in a year, and this gallery offers a behind-the-scenes look at the construction process."
Unless you're looking for labratory levels of precision imho there's no point once you're above the HD-555 range.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
These headphones are not Sennheiser's most expensive headphones to date (not even close, in fact).
Enter the HE90 - also called the Orpheus. It is most likely the most expensive headphone ever produced. It had a very limited product run, and it sells these days for around $15, 000.
Just to give you an idea of what they're like, if I recall correctly the amp has it's own -ignition key- ;-)
While I could never justify paying $1500 for headphones, I have to say that I've been consistently impressed with the sound quality from Sennheiser 280-HD headphones. I'm sure there are better headphones to be had, but probably not for anywhere near $80.
Even people that believe in pre-destiny look both ways before crossing the street.
I was upset when these came out, my HD-650s aren't top of the line anymore.. That said, man are the 800s ugly.
My SR-80s are very good headphones for the money (~$100) and rival the HD650s. One of these day's I'm going to listen to a set of RS2is, one of their upper-mid level headphones.
I've owned a large number of Sennheisers.
And no, that's not because I collect them, it's because the damned connections keep failing, on everything from 212-pros up through a set of 595s.
I'm not ready to call Sennheiser reliable, even if they are more reliable than a lot of the low-end competition. Headphones could be a LOT more reliable if someone would take some damned time to find a more reliable way to deliver signal than a tiny wiggly wire and a bit of rigid solder.
I was fortunate enough to purchase a good set of HD600s and a headphone amp to go with it. I've used them as my primary computer sound system for over a decade now.
I'd describe the Sennheisers as very detailed and precise. I can hear things with them that I have a hard time picking out with my stereo and other cheaper headphones. In addition the soft donut pads make the headphones a joy to wear. I can wear them all day without my ears feeling sore or my head feeling fatigued.
Shameless plug for HeadRoom at www.headphone.com where I purchased my gear. These guys make headphone amps and also spend lots of time testing all sorts of headphones to go with them. They're a wealth of information for anything headphones.
Wow, way off. Mod parent down.
Speakers are themselves fundamentally flawed. Headphones can send sound to the exact location needed while speakers are "ballparking" where the listener will be.
Space limitations are null, audio positioning is null, and annoying your neighbors is null.
Furthermore, good headphones have the capacity to send much less-distorted, higher-quality sound than speakers.
Good headphones will always produce better sound than good speakers. If you don't believe me, ask your local audiophile/audio professional. I guarantee you, if he takes himself seriously, he'll agree.
Yes, there is a reason, which is that they would sound terrible if they had a flat frequency response and nobody would buy them.
So, why is that: well, the "natural" way we hear sounds isn't "accurate" in the sense that not all frequency transduce with the same efficiency. The sound is modified by the geometry of your head and ears, also called the "head related transfer function" or HRTF for short. The HRTF is direction-dependent, it is also person-dependent as no two people have exactly the same head. Your auditory system understands your HRTF at a subconscious level and "factors it out" in determining the direction of sound and so on (for example sounds at higher elevation tend to have a bias towards higher frequency content created by the ear pinnae).
Now, headphones include a filter that applies a "simulated HRTF" that places the sound approximately directly "in front" of the listener. If they didn't include this, the sound would be very strange.
The downside to this is that the headphones' HRTF isn't individualized to your own head, and it can't be changed, and its exact specification varies from one model to another quite a lot. Usually the companies don't say exactly how the filter is constructed, and it requires some very fancy equipment (like dummy-heads and so on) to measure the headphone response accurately enough to make an inverse filter. The Sennheisser HD580 is one model (no longer in production) that we have some fairly extensive data for, and that is why it is still the standard for most auditory psychophysics research.
Loudspeakers on the other hand (in particular, reference loudspeakers for mastering) are actually designed to have a flat frequency response. Getting a good listening room isn't easy either, but if you work with a measurement microphone it is possible to check the results pretty easily.
On the subject of bass response, the impedance of air in the ear canal when closed off by the headphone is much much lower than the impedance of the driver in open air, which is why phones can deliver a quite good bass response with a very small driver.
In audio equipment, reproduction accuracy is all there is.
You personally might be willing to accept distortions of various kinds (we all make our own tradeoffs), but the point in audio design is that the equipment attempts to recreate as faithfully as possible the original sound. The fact that people are willing to accept less than outstanding audio fidelity is analogous to people being willing to eat fast food. Most people being willing to eat fast food doesn't mean that a world-class chef using the finest ingredients doesn't create a fundamentally different gustatory and nutritional experience, or that there aren't people who can discern and appreciate the difference.
In this case, pushing transducer response farther and farther beyond the audible range of hearing improves the linearity of the response within the audible range. The same way that a 192k sampling rate doesn't mean people can hear up to 96kHz, it means that the filter response in the audio band is better, driver response down to 6Hz or up to 50k doesn't mean Sennheiser is suggesting people can hear down or up to those points, but that the response from 20-20k is better.
In the audio work I've done (music recording and film sound), we've worked very hard to achieve the most accurate reproduction possible...because we can hear it.
The best analogy for how that could even be possible is the way one's hearing adapts to quiet. At first, compared to normal environments, a 20dB room seems very quiet, even silent. But spend time in that 20dB room and then move to a 0dB anechoic chamber and that previously quiet 20dB can seem surprisingly noisy. Another visual analogy is the way that some people don't notice compression artifacts in images at first, but see them easily once they know what to look for.
I'm reminded of the early days of HDTV equipment manufacturers trying to convince us (where I was at the time) it was finally possible to use HD for feature film principal photography. Some manufacturer or other had brought in their latest and greatest camera demo reel, where they had shot footage on film and then at some secret point cut over to footage shot on HD. One of the people in the screening room wasn't really a technical person, and quietly asked us (quite reasonably) that if the quality of the images was really so hard to distinguish what they could look for to tell when the images switched from film to HD. Our (only half-joking) answer was "just look for when the film guys start vomiting." :-D
earbuds are crap, period.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap