[Tyll Hertsens]

I think I ought to make clear right off the bat that most of the subjects brought up are things that we've thought about and either are in the loop to acted on or are on the back burner to be implemented someday. We are a small company and are limited in how much we can acomplish daily. So, in most cases I'm going to end up saying, "Yeah, that's a very good idea and we're working towards it." I know that's not going to be immediately gratifying, but you can rest asured that we're battling forward at a measure pace.

Also, it seems obvious to me that after rading these posts that I'm going to have to start a thread painting a larger, long term view of HeadRooms stratigy for growth. We can only finance our growth from sales, we do not have some big bank acount from which we can willy-nilly spend money to get things done. Money is tight, and we've got 20 people to pay and cover with medical insurance, amongst a million other things, so you'll have to be a little understanding when I say that we're ignoring some opportunity so that we can be strong enough to do it well once we get around to it.

None the less, many of your comments are right on, and I want to tell you what we intend to do about them:

Originally Posted by episiarch

Offer more headphone parts. Beyer pads, AKG pads, those little twist-on 1/8"-1/4" adaptors that come with many headphones and eventually get lost.

I've long held in mind that HeadRoom should SERVE the headphone enthusiast. I've long longed for a killer SERVICE CENTER function at HeadRoom. We are making internal structural changes in order to effect that function. On our internal organizational charts (I will try to publish some of these structures here soon) we have a function of service center, and we will be putting into place the accounting mechanisms to properly account for and determine the running costs of our budding service center. Mike Olsen will be leading the charge. Many of you have spokent to Mike over the years for returns and repairs issues. I expect that in the comming year or two you will see this effort appear. Currently we think we are going to call this activity "The HeadRoom Custom Shop." It is through this branch of headRoom that we will be able to provide not only spare parts for various models but also do recabling jobs on a wider variety of cans, and upgrade HeadRoom amps. We may also offer other manufacturers the opportunity of using this capability as an "Autherized Warrenty Service Center."

But we have to put into place all the things we need to make this activity efficient or we'll drown in orders that loose money at each transaction. When I decided that the Sennheiser HD201 was a great can for the money, we found we lost money at every sale because the cost of processing the order and shipping the product was more than the bucks we made on such a cheap can. We did it anyway because we felt that we would get people comming back for more after having a good experience with our low cost reccomendation (which does happen) but it was also very stressful to loose money at every sale and the sales were pretty good. We can only do so much of that, and stocking more of similarly unprofitable items would eventually hurt too much.

Originally Posted by episiarch

Carry Etymotic again. Or at least their parts and supplies, which I order routinely and would like to order from you.

We have been in touch with etymotic on numerous occasions about their cans and pricing. I can say that both Etymotic and HeadRoom want to get back together and sell these cans. But their distribution channels must allow us to make some reasonable margins before we can do so. At the moment we can't get the cans through distribution at a lower cost than you could buy them for Amazon. I suggest you all go out and buy some at Amazon so that they deplete their stock and maybe we can get some fresh product into the distribution channel that's got some better controls on margins. Untill then, we'll just have to wait it out.

But on the topic of Etymotic spares, I've got to believe we could make these available and still turn a buck. I will talk to Jamey about it, and let you guys know what we can do.

Originally Posted by episiarch

IMO you should have a whole hearing preservation department in your store: cheap disposables, ER-20's, right up through custom musician's earplugs.

This is a terribly important point. To date, we have focussed on ensuring that messages on hearing preservation are included in all our literature and manuels. I agree with you whole heartedly, that HeadRoom should be in the business of doing a lot of education with regard to hearing preservation. It should be the primary "cause" that Headroom lobbies for, and we have in the past looked at providing financial support for some hearing preservation charities. Suffice it to say this issue is something that HeadRoom will support as soon as we get beyond the need to support ourselves. We can't do much for those causes if we are too weak in our ability to keep the fires burning at home.

However, I will bring this issue up with Jamey when we talk about Etymotic spares. I think Etymotic has some great products in that catagory, and I will try to put those SKUs back on the site.

Originally Posted by episiarch

Take a stand on custom earmolds for universal-fit IEMs. Advantages and disadvantages of the various materials available; measured effect on sound quality and isolation. The information that's out there is pretty anecdotal right now, and you could provide some real visibility and education around these products.

Yeah, that's a great topic to do some work on. I think there's also an opportunity to talk about getting a propoer fit on the generic tips, and to provide some "generic tip packs" which give users on pair of each type of tip that fits a particular model of IEM. (Some tips are interchangeable with other manufacturers products.)

At the moment we're going to be re-writing a number of our "Buyers Guide" pages; the most critical of which is a much stronger guide on computer audio. But more information on IEM tips and fitting is on the list.

Originally Posted by episiarch

Be cautious in planning your product strategy around the idea that your customer will buy an all-HeadRoom system.

That's funny! And not for the reason you might expect. It's not really part of the plan to make our gear so integrated that it prevents folks from using a mix of makers gear.

You have to understand that when we design gear, we look at it strictly from our own viewpoint. I'm an innovative guy and what I do really comes from what I would like to see on my desk. Of course we think about what customers want, but the desires of consumers are always channed through the thought process of how we could solve the problems. From our point of vies, for example, putting the DAC in our gear permits the user a MUCH lower cost solution because they don't have to pay for the enclosure and power supply of an outboard DAC.

The second thing is you have to understand that we have these discussions in light of what we can manage to realistically accomplish given our limited resources. So the solutions we offer are allways a sub-set of what we'd really love to do. I can tell you that we will someday sell a stand alone "Headphone DAC" or "Personal Listening DAC" that includes DSP for Dolby Headphone, possible our own digitally implemented crossfeed, parametric equalizer, and headphone compensation curves. But we have to bring in microcontrollers to make our gear smart first.

Originally Posted by Elephas

Some of the switches in the back should be on the front panel.

See? Once we get microconroller in our gear and put a 21 century user interface and display in the box. Then we can get remote controls and the DAMN switches of the back of the gear. And MOST of all we can get the extra circuitry of the crossfeed out of the loop when people turn the crossfeed off. THAT'S the biggest issue for us. Our gear has DOUBLE the nuber of active circuit stages of other amps out there because of the crossfeed. We get a lot of people saying our gear doesn't quite meet the level of performance of other makers, and that's the reason why. The fact that we're competitive in the face of double the circuitry is a small miracle pulled off by Joe W., and I guaranty once we get microcontrollers and relay switching in the box we're going to have some incredable sounding amps. But I've long been a believer in crossfeed and feel that the benefits outweigh the disadvantages in the medium term. So we're comfortable taking the small performance hit when the crossfeed isn't engaged for the advantage of making what we believe is the best crossfeed in the business. (Active filters must be used in order to get the full time delay needed to model the acoustic paths of normal hearing. We have 400uSec delays, passive crossfeeds only get about 200uSec.)

Oh, back to line integration. So, we are developing product with high synergy at the moment because we believe that feature rich products that are highly integrated solutions is where we can make these products highly desireable for a fairly broad audience. Remember that Head-Fi members make up only about 5% of our business, so we have to make products that regular audiophiles feel great about when setting up a workstation or laptop protable rig. It's in that somewhat larger market where we'll find the dollars needed to go back and develope some more specialized gear for this croud.

In other words, we're going after some larger markets now so that we can finance more specialized but only incrementally important products later.

Speaking of which:

Originally Posted by n_maher

Get to work on the redux of the Wheatfield HA-2.

HA! I've finally got something to tell you Nate! We have recently ordered prototype boards for the new HA2! It is slated for introduction sometime next year, as money permits.

We've been working with Pete for a while now on this and are very exited. We believe HeadRoom will eventually be able to be broken down into three basic product categories: entry level gear (future incarnations of the BitHead and AirHead); performance products (Micro and Desktop feature rich gear); and audiophile purist gear (Desktop and Max enclosured gear designed with audio quality as the sole driver of developement). The new HA2 will be the first product in the latter category. (We have another in mind that hasn't officially made the schedule yet, but it's a descrete solid state ampthat will run about $5K in the Max enclosure, and it's based on a DIY amp that's floating around now. Intregued? Tough! I'm not saying any more. :veryevil: )

The new HA2 will be a two box solution in the Desktop enclosure. Pete has designed a switching power supply which will be in one box, and the traditional HA2 design (with minor updates from Pete) will be in the top box. There will be no crossfeed in the amp. I'll start a thread introducing the product as we get closer.

Originally Posted by episiarch

Oh, yeah, and would you mind carrying Oto-Ease? I'm always buying another bottle or two of that stuff.

What's wrong with spit? Or KY jelly ... a bit embarrassing I suppose. Just joking, I'll mention it to Jamey.

Originally Posted by granodemostasa

When you guys put out something... actually do it. I've been waiting for those speaker stands for some time... same with the dac...

Patience, grasshopper. We told you they were prototypes and it would be a while. But, OK, the new Micro production board builds are on order, and will be available sometime 3rd quarter. I will start a thread about them soon, maybe even this week, and will give everyone the full rundown.

The speaker stands and class-D amp are working thier way into the second prototype run and should be available very early next year. I'll also start a thread on those products soon as I'd like to publish the current drawings for you guys to have a look at and criticise. We've gotten the B&O ICEpower 50W/ch module and are very happy with it. The module is capable of running as a 2 ch single ended amp or as a single 120 Watt amp in balanced mode. So it's likely that you'll be able to get the amp as a single ended 2ch version or as a pair of monoblocks that run balanced. The 2 ch version will be forsit and the mono blocks will become available further in the future.

Originally Posted by a shovel

oh and keep up pressure on headroom.com domain name! YOU GUYS MUST GET IT ONE DAY

Please feel free to go beat up the guy that has it. AAaaaaarrrrgggghhh! Obviously, we're with you on that one.

Originally Posted by MD1032

I'd like to see more budget products. The airhead is a decent amp, but it's not that great (IMO).

We're working on it. But it's a multi-year kind of thing. Don't hold your breath. The most expensive and difficult products to develope are the cheap ones. We have designed a line of four products in that category, but to put them into production we'd need about 1/4 million bucks. We don't have it. We are currently just starting a dialog with a major audio company you'd all recognise to partner in developing them. We are hoping that they will produce a lower cost version than us using standard parts, and we would produce higher cost versions using expensive componants. Obviously, I can't say more, but we are working on it.

Originally Posted by mkozlows

Portable componentry (actually portable, not the Micro stuff (which is great, don't get me wrong; I've got a Micro Stack on my computer -- but it's not REALLY portable))

You'll notice we have recently lowered the prices on our AirHeads and BitHeads to bring them closer to the price points we think plastic amps should be in the long run. And you'll notice that the new Micro line does more to pack in features and performance in that small (but, yes, not really portable) enclosure. You'll also notice, if you look closely, that that does creat a price gap in between. It's slated to be filled sometime next year with a smaller aluminum enclosured product line. That's all you'll get for the moment.

Originally Posted by mkozlows

A portable "solution." You know the iMod? It seems ridiculously overpriced , but in concept take something like that, and integrate it with an amp custom-built for the purpose... you'd be taking on a huge development expense while being dependent on Apple not changing things up in two months, but attractive in principle.

See that bit about the new plastic line above. I doubt you'll see something special for the iPod in the initial offering, but I'll bet there will be things down the road. Additionally, the need to physically interface with Pods of various types may eventually go away as wireless standards get widely implemented. Soon, full bandwitdh, high resolution, digital audio may become available broadly over Bluetooth and wireless USB. We're thinking very hard about being there when it does. Once that happens the need for special physical docking connectors goes away. Heck, you'd be able to leave your cellphone and ipod in your briefcase and just use the HeadRoom Portable Wireless Personal Audio Center in your breast pocket. (All we have to do now is come up with a shorter name and $100,000 to put it into production. Ideas are easy; reality is a bugger.)

Originally Posted by mkozlows

I doubt this is feasible, either, but a custom DAP based on the Rockbox firmware and optimized for audio quality would be ultra-sweet.

We think that this is best left in the hands of folks that can afford to incredable amount of software needed to fully integrate media into peoples lives. We believe our job is to rescue the audio from poor D/A conversion and wimpy headphone amps. As I say, once you can get an uncompressed digital stream out of a player, an iPod would be better than anything we could build. Most people not only want a media player, thay also want a phone, camera, downloadable TV shows on the fly, etc. No, we're going to focus on personal aural display and switching and let other folks make the players.

Originally Posted by mkozlows

Be even more emphatic about headphones that you think either suck or aren't worth it.

This is a very tricky balancing act. If we were harder on stuff we didn't personally like we'd be saying things about Grado cans that would have many here up in arms. We have to be very careful to ensure that we understand that we are not the lone determiners of good taste, and have to be somewhat soft as we discuss the merits of cans. Frankly, I think we've done a prety good job on that front. The truth is we'd rather drop a product alltogether if we don't like it and save money on the inventory we carry. And we're slowly doing just that. We're likely to carry at most three products we like for every pricepoint/application area.

Thanks for your comment though, we do think that people like to hear honest review that point out both products strengths and weaknesses, and I'm glad you think so too.

Originally Posted by mkozlows

Carry computer speakers. Okay, yes, I know you're a headphone company, but with all the USB and digital stuff you've got, it's pretty clear that you're selling a lot of stuff to people who are hooking up to their computer.

We are going to do this; it will happen simultaniously with the introduction of the speaker stands and the class-D amp. We will be carrying the lowest cost Blue Sky self powered speakers, a couple of the Genelec self-powered models, and we'll carry the Amphion Ion and Harbeth HL-P3ES-2 mini-monitors. Our mesage will be, "Here's a few speaker options we like very much, but there are many more available. We feel very confident you'll enjoy the speakers you might get from us, but we suggest you consult your local audio store for your further explorations finding just the right speaker for you."

I'd also like to tell you that I've had the idea for speaker stand in the back of my head for at least ten years, and have had to have patience to wait for the right time to introduce them. I understand that everyone thinks of HeadRoom as a headphone company, but we are going to be positioning it over the next few years as more of a "high-end personal audio" company. Our product will get more and more speaker friendly over time; it's likely we will eventually change the name of the future products in the line of the current Desktop Amp to something like "HeadRoom Desktop Personal Audio Center" rather than defining it as a "headphone amp". It's really a more apropraite name for what the thing really does in a desktop computer environment.

Originally Posted by J-Pak

I would really love to see more tube designs from you guys

I've already mentioned the HA2 and the future "Audiophile Purist" product developement intentions, but I'll be happy to say explicitely that tubes are in our future. Beyond the HA2, expect to see a big 300B amp appear 2-4 years out. Pete is dragging me to Holland late this year to attend the European Triod Fest so that I can get some experience with the bleeding edge DIYers playing around with tubes. Something will come of that one of these days. Till then I'm perfectly content to watch Mikhail do what he does so well.

That's it for now, I'm already late getting into work.