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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."
it's just that Sennheiser includes those quality control steps that the Chinese factories skimp on. They also take more than 0.85 seconds to solder the wires, and they use solder of reasonable quality.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
A few days ago, I bought the cheapest pair of computer speakers with subwoofers I could find in the neighborhood, $USD 15.
They were Chinese made. With a sticker - "QC PASS" [i.e. Quality Control pass]
LOL, the damn connectors right next to it didn't work properly and I had "bend" the connector ever so little to make it work again.
Yes, these were probably assembled by hand too. But, not in a factory originally named with coolest name I have heard in years "Laboratium Wennebostel".
I wonder if that was hand made too, the name.
There's a point well past the $100 mark - the question is is it worth the money, which depends on how much money you happen to have sitting around doing nothing as well as the relative objective quality of the product.
That said I'm not buying anything more expensive than the HD555 in the foreseeable future. In fact with digital room correction techniques I might not be spending anywhere near that much on headphones again, ever.
Also headphones are not just for the sound, they have to feel comfortable too. And personally I would not be happy to pay 1500 bucks for headphones that LOOK like the HD800s. :-P
If accuracy across the audio range is of primary importance, headphones will always severely pale compared with a set of reference monitors (a.k.a. speakers) due to their physical limitations. The most I've spent on headphones thus far has been around $300 - I've spent around $600-$700 for four different sets of cans - and I've yet to find headphones that aren't severely flawed. Headphones are a second-choice option, albeit one that comes up a lot in every day life.
Most people, though, don't want accuracy and just want something that sound pretty. You can get reasonably pretty sounding headphones for cheap, though the limited range will still show up in some fashion or another. I recently bought a copy of Closer by Plastikman, and even playing it at modest volumes results in the bass mangling the speakers.
I don't see how anyone could justify that expense for headphones. It's moronic.
I'm not convinced there's a point anyway. With headphones, you get so much difference in sound just from how little or how much the foam pads are compressed
Well.. No. No you don't. That's the thing -- one of the many differences between $5 headphones and $500 headphones.
I work with audio all the time (it's my job - I invent audio algorithms for broadcast, and related things), and I'm very happy with my HD650s. They were worth every dollar! However, if I get a chance to test the HD800s without having to buy them first, I certainly will. :)
Is there any reason in particular that headphones cannot accurately reproduce sound?
The only thing I can think of that a headphone would have trouble reproducing, is a deep, loud bass. That's only because it doesn't have the displacement to highly compress low frequency. Monitor speakers suffer the same problem though.
Still, because headphones sit right next to the ear, they're _much_ more efficient at delivering sound waves to the ear. This allows them to deliver sound at a comparable volume, with much less effort. As far as I can tell, there's no theoretical reason why a set of headphones can't match monitor speakers for accuracy.
These days, even Sennheiser's low end is "good enough" for the non-snob audiophile. I picked up a pair of HD202s and I'm thoroughly happy for now. (I don't bring my 555's to school.)
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
So, how do you have "laboratory levels of precision"? I mean how do you know that a speaker can reproduce sound within 0.1% of perfection if you don't have a microphone that can record it within 0.1%? And how would you know if the microphone was if you didn't have a speaker that could? Isn't that a catch-22?
...someone who listens to the stereo, not the music.
// Been said before. Will be said many times after this.
Go not unto/. for advice, for you will be told both yea and nay (but have nothing to do with the question)
So we have our hypothetical concert with ourselves seated in the 2nd row. We can get a dummy and shove two microphones into his dummy ears for recording the sound. Do you think a 2/4/8 speaker setup would be more "accurate" than headphones?
Do you already know that what you're describing is "binaural recording" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binaural_recording. When you listen to them with headphones, you get amazing position-awareness of the sounds. Some early binaural recordings were of story dramatazations - and you could hear the door creaking open "behind you".
Take for example an explosion. Then I guess the headphones loose out to the sub woofer.
You bring up an interesting idea... using headphones along with a subwoofer to get get the superior sound of headphones and the "feel" of the low-end.
As with anything, there's diminishing returns. The more you spend on audio, the better the sound gets (well, assuming you are buying real improvements and not snake oil like wires), but by less and less the more you spend.
For example the difference between $10 headphones and no headphones is, well, everything. It is the difference between sound and no sound. Even cheap is better than nothing. The difference between $50 and $10 headphones isn't everything, but it's still pretty large. It's the sort of thing you'll hear even if your hearing isn't great, even if you are listening on poor gear, in a noisy room and so on. The difference between $50 and $250 headphones is reasonable. You'll almost certainly hear an appreciable difference, but it is likely to require a better environment such as a quiet room and good source material. If you have a poor source (heavily compressed music, bad amp, etc) and background noise, they may not be that noticeably better than $50 phones. The difference between $250 and $1000 phones is pretty subtle. It's possible you won't really hear it at all if you hearing is poor, and even with good hearing, you'll need a good situation to appreciate it. Even then, it isn't going to be a major improvement, just some refinement.
Goes the same basic thing with anything sound wise. As you move up from the basic stuff you can get some fairly large improvements, but then it starts tapering off, while the amount required to see an improvement increases a lot.
However, that doesn't mean it isn't worth it to some people. If you really enjoy music, and have the money, it can be a worthwhile pursuit. Trying to get things as close to perfect as you can.