Sennheiser HD 800 - price control?

It's very simple. The stores have instructions to sell them for $1399 if not, sennheiser stops providing them with products.

There are a few retailers that will offer a modest discount, but you'd have to talk to them.

Basically the truth, if they advetise tham for less....exactly, again a modest discount can be had if you talk to the retailer

I sense a mild conspiracy on price-fixing

Sennheiser is just keeping a strict lock on prices. It's a fairly common business practice. They are able to do this because there are few competitors at that level.

man that's the BOSE (TM) way of selling products...

Actually, Boes is much worse, the bose contract reads you must sell the product at the retail price, unless bose is having the 10 percnet off sale, then you as a retailer also can sell at 10 percent off, furthemore, the bose site and stroes offer deals that the retailer can't. The HD800 price will be lower at some point, first, you get everyone that is willing to shell out close to 1400 dollars to buy them when sales slow, the price will lower, In the high end, that's just the nature of the beast. In reality, I see it as price fixing, but not according to the law, and compared to high end thirty years ago, it's no where near as bad as today. It used to be much worse in the high end.
And at least price wise, The HD800's fir the high end label (have not heard them) but I will my next trip to NYC, if available to hear.

Try Australia. There are non for sale still .

That's why I don't buy Senns new. Save yourself a headache. Buy used.

I assure you if senn found out about this they would be pissed and that retailer might lose the product line, it's happened before.

Don't ask, don't tell. Just like the US military.

When I finally saw the HD800 in person at J&R, to tell you the truth, they looked and felt even cheaper than the photos (the Leona plastic feeling far less inert than ABS plastic or bakelite). I don't care if they sound like manna from heaven (does manna have a sound?), I wouldn't pay more the $600 for these headphones.

I can't imagine how much different your senses are then mine, or many of us for that matter. The HD800 are some of the best built phones out there. They feel solid and well-engineered. The R10s, on the other hand are flimsy in comparison.

You have to see it in a historic context. Sennheiser was once a manufacturer of high-quality consumer-products sold by many dealers. About 20 years ago, those dealers died and were replaced by a few hugh electronic-stores (in Germany it's the Metro with it's Saturn and Media-Markt brand, in the States it's propably Best Buy or Wal-Mart). They don't have skilled sales-personal which are able to communicate the differences between Sennheiser and cheaper brands and they have ridiciculous contracts. They order thousands of headphones, send most of them back after a few months (which weren't sold), pay about 10% less every year...
That's when Sennheiser decided to cut costs and quality, outsourcing production to Ireland and now China offering headphones from 3-300$ with high margins.
The HD800 is the first "professional" product in the headphone line-up in years and uses the very same production technology/standards as their professional microphones (which aren't sold in electronic-stores). But to protect themselves from a dangerous cost-cutting they had to make tight contracts with the dealers, otherwise you could propably order HD800 from Amazon for 10-20% discount already. That's lowering the value of the investment of previous HD800-buyers and would make the HD800 just another piece of electronic-junk.
Rebates are drugs: first you enjoy them, then you become addictive (you don't accept any retail price anymore) and then they destroy you.
It's impossible to offer high-quality products this way.

They're made of plastic which has a much lower E-modulus ("stiffness") than regular metal. But as a mechanical engineer I can assure you that despite design/silver-look they're definitely on the upper end of mechanical quality - very tight tolerances and assembly. The plastic parts are most likely manufactured by top-notch suppliers from the German automotive industry with high-end molds and tightly controlled injection processes - something that you won't find with Grado or Chinese OEMs...