achmedisdead said:

Quote:

mosshorn said:

So, diary-fiers, why do you like/dislike earbuds?
 

Click to expand...

Quote:

jgray91 said:

 it hardly stays put.

Click to expand...

 
This, exactly......they won't stay where they belong.

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mrviolin said:

@mupp
 
LOL. Psychosexual desire to see it destroyed. 

Click to expand...

muppetface said:

 
I tend to have a rather psychoanalytic view of this hobby at times, unfortunately.
 
Too much Freud as a freshman, too much Lacan as a junior / senior, and too much Zizek in grad school.

Click to expand...

muppetface said:

The Abyss thread is just obnoxious. A few errant thoughts below. Warning: very rant-y and meandering and not particularly on-topic half the time or even particularly relevant to anyone or anything.
 
 

Spoiler: Warning%3A%20Spoiler!

 
1. The company president isn't doing himself any favors by posting, especially as his interpersonal skills could use work. He should really stay out of the mud slinging and just answer legitimate questions. Getting involved when head-fiers are clearly out for blood has never benefitted a manufacturer. 
 
2. Anytime an expensive headphone gets released that isn't Stax, it seems to trigger a borderline psychosexual desire among some people to see it destroyed. I love Stax. I love electrostatic headphones. Seeing comments like "an ortho could never justifiably cost more than electrostats" however is just stupid. Shhh, don't tell the statophiles, but there are some things other headphones do better than 'stats.
 
3. The headphones industry *is* in a rather sad place these days IMHO. Unlike in-ears, I think there's genuine stagnation with much more of an emphasis on marketing and appeals to lifestyle than actual innovative R&D taking place. More times than not it's larger companies that set industry trends however, and a lot of that stagnation is due to their direction I think. When Sennheiser invested heavily in R&D, they produced the ring driver of the HD800 which was quite an engineering accomplishment. In most cases tho, I get the sense that it's just stagnation with a lot of these big names: wrapping up the same---or even inferior---tech under a new veneer and ad campaign. It sells, and there's no incentive to do better on their part.
 
Take the ever-popular whipping boy AKG for instance. An ex-company engineer gave some figures for a new K1000 based on his own speculation, and he said he felt it could easily be improved with today's better materials, provided they invest enough in it initially. AKG however is more concerned with branding and marquee value, so they instead continue to rerelease the same headphones again and again. We keep seeing new K701 / 702s under different guises with new color schemes and new marketing behind them, only at double or even triple the price of what the original goes for these days. They do sound marginally better, but I believe this is due to better driver matching and a few other basic tweaks. For as much as the K3003 gets maligned in some circles, it probably has the most genuine effort behind it than anything AKG has released in a while. People keep bemoaning the loss of the K1000, but really the K3003 is the closest to a spiritual successor we've gotten, and in many ways it's better than the K1000 (like in tonal balance). It's also lead to a lot of good trickle down / copy-cat stuff. I get the sense their engineers were allowed to engineer with the K3003, and I think that genuine spirit comes through despite some folks not detecting it.
 
4. With smaller companies, I think there's more of a liberal atmosphere and willingness to risk-take, so you see a lot of good R&D work. Only it results in higher costs because they can't really offset it like larger companies. Companies like Audez'e seem to do things in a graduated manner, one step and a time, building up resources for the next step, so it's more likely you'll see more revisions along the way: LCD-2 rev. 1, LCD-2 rev. 2, LCD-3, LCD-4, etc. By comparison a company like Sennheiser will only release one HD800, and if there are changes they will be very subtle and not largely announced. It'll be years before we see an HD850 or HD900. The HD800 was a long time in the making, and they make damn well sure it was right before it was released. Sony used to be a major innovator when it came to materials (biocellulose, the Qualia drivers, etc.), but these days they seem to be falling into an ongoing state of blandness. That spark is missing more and more as time goes on, sadly.
 
5. Sony also used to be more artsy fartsy. Taking that tangent to its extreme, you have smaller companies that seem more interested in making artistic statements. Final Audio Design for instance. They sort of occupy their own niche within a niche, and I don't think they can be readily compared to other facets of the industry at large without doing them a disservice.
 
6. Not all small companies are out to make genuinely innovative products. It's not so cut and dry as big company = bad / small company = good. I think you see this a lot more in amplifiers and other speaker components, because headphones almost seem to force smaller companies to be somewhat creative, but in either case you get these salesmen who are all about a certain posture, coming across as innovators and doing cutting edge stuff when in reality they're just selling you a Cmoy or something. It's a case of how much can I get away with? I don't blame folks for thinking the Abyss is indicative of this spirit. People tend to view mega-buck cables with suspicion. Factor in the way their ads and press read, the attention from wealthy lifestyle blogs, the refusal to have demos outside of certain controlled environments... yeah. It's all a little hamfisted, because the Abyss actually has a lot of impressive R&D behind it as I've said countless times. In fact the Abyss seems to be taking ortho R&D further than any other small company has in quite a while.
 
7. To that end, I think a lot of head-fiers genuinely don't grasp how expensive R&D is or how much bulk materials cost. You see it when people compare commercial amps to DIY builds and chastise the manufacturer because they can't match the price. In the case of headphones like the Abyss, the R&D can actually be quite astronomical because they're using materials that have hitherto not been used in headphones. They're using surprisingly advanced processes to lay the traces on the drivers. Their magnets are custom made, proprietary, and the strongest used in headphones to date, and so they cost a lot of money. They've gone through numerous builds and tried tons of different combinations of materials and positioning, built and scrapped numerous mock ups. Orthos require a lot of fine tuning and a pretty keen understanding of certain material effects. I know some folks in the Abyss thread were skeptical about whether JPS really went through so many trials in the testing phase, and honestly I have no clue what extent they went to, but I know that even dedicated head-fiers who are modding their T50RPs can go through hundreds of different configurations of materials trying to get it just right. I know some modders who spent a lot of time, money, sweat and tears to this effect. One guy I know spent a thousand bucks just on pads. On pads! He spent over a month positioning them and trying different combos. There are so many variables to take into account when tuning this stuff. It's actually a little surprising just how little some larger companies seem to invest in this type of thing, and how some simple damping can improve their products. Of course, that's just a small fraction of the bigger picture. All the tuning in the world isn't going to help unless you've got a good driver and enclosure from the get-go, and these are costly to develop from scratch.
 
 
"But HiFiMan is able to release products that don't cost nearly as much."
 
I love HiFiMan, but HiFiman isn't doing R&D to the extent of Abyss sofarasIknow. Look at their drivers: they're actually quite primitive compared to orthos from the 70s. That's OK, because HiFiMan's focus is on making affordable large-sized orthos. Their R&D is directed largely at minimizing costs and streamlining production, and it's definitely a good angle to adopt in this hobby as it sets them apart. More companies should focus on this type of thing. Also I'm not excusing the price of the Abyss from a business standpoint. There are ways of offsetting costs and not passing them directly to the consumer. You can take a hit and recoup it in other ways potentially, or try the graduated method a la Audez'e. The Audez'e method is especially reasonable here because JPS is new at this. This is their first headphone, so people are rightfully viewing it with suspicion given the mega-bux price tag. Audez'e first introduced the LCD-1 at roughtly $400 or so, and it was largely an OEM product. It showed however that they could get certain things right, and it laid the foundation for their approach to the LCD-2 at $1k. By the time they doubled the price on the LCD-3, they had established enough of a fanbase.
 
8. JPS' attitude is their own worst enemy. They've done nothing to reach out to the head-fi community, so as I predicted people don't trust them. Trust is especially important when you're releasing a $5k product as an introduction to what you're all about. They needed to be more humble, send their prototypes on a listening tour. Show us that there's nothing up their sleeves. By not doing this, and instead allocating all their units to suppliers, it makes it seem as though they've really not put much into their product. Small companies who do this need only sell a few units to make up for the investment.
 
9. Even if they have put a lot into it, at the end of the day one can always ask is it worth it? Is the R&D that went into the Abyss really going to amount to anything? The proof will be in how it sounds I suppose. If after it's all said and done the sound of the thing is not much better than an HE-500, well, it becomes an exercise in futility and is consigned to the cabinet of curiosities. I think this is where point #2 rears its head again. People are assuming from the outset this thing isn't going to possibly compete on the level of the SR-009. It may very well not. Though someone I respect quite a bit actually prefers the Abyss to the SR-009. Srsly.
 
10. I think a lot of folks just like complaining about stuff. I mean, here I am complaining about their complaining. Complaining is fun. In this case, I think some folks who have no intention of buying summit-fi or aren't in the market for a new pair of headphones want to make it seem as though JPS is somehow personally slighting them by talking about the industry and general trends. Also some people are like pilot fish and just pop in to throw out some insults and feel included. Every page or so you'll see some random post to the effect of these cost a lot of money and are rip offs and are ugly and omg who would buy these lol m i rite guise?? Great, now turn around to receive your complimentary butt pat and go away.
 
11. I really do think uber-bux products and cheap 'n' cheerful products can coexist. Again, I'll point to the IEM market right now as a prime example. Of course this is idealistic, but if companies invest a lot in genuine R&D, there's a potential for it to make its way to less expensive models. I'd like to see some of the innovations in the Abyss find their way into cheaper orthos from folks like HiFiMan. Or even cheaper models from JPS. What some of my ortho-obsessed friends have expressed a desire for are cheaper, smaller orthos than can be powered from iPods. HiFiMan has the cheaper part down, though I still think there's room for improvement. Fang is also convinced smaller drivers are not the way to go; at least, this seems to be the case from some discussions those ortho-obsessed friends have had with him. This is actually one area where the Abyss' research might help, as they've managed to maintain a decent level of efficiency despite having a single-ended driver, and a single-ended driver would potentially minimize size and weight (though not in the Abyss since the magnet is huge).
 
12. Unfortunately, the full-sized headphone market seems like a radically different environment compared to the IEM landscape right now. The whole IEM climate just feels more... open source? Maybe it's because there are a lot of OEMs and Chinese companies working on cheaper versions of high end tech, whereas in the headphone arena the OEMs are mostly lower end models, and higher-end stuff is guarded more closely. Also manufacturers have to often invent their drivers from scratch when it comes to full-sized headphones, which increases production costs and makes each company its own island more or less. Even with speakers, it's way more "open source" as you can buy kits that contain generic drivers and basically build your own, and they'll perform really well and beat the pants off of a lot of similarly priced headphones.

 
 

 

Click to expand...

muppetface said:

Spoiler: Wall

The Abyss thread is just obnoxious. A few errant thoughts below. Warning: very rant-y and meandering and not particularly on-topic half the time or even particularly relevant to anyone or anything.


 


1. The company president isn't doing himself any favors by posting, especially as his interpersonal skills could use work. He should really stay out of the mud slinging and just answer legitimate questions. Getting involved when head-fiers are clearly out for blood has never benefitted a manufacturer. 


 


2. Anytime an expensive headphone gets released that isn't Stax, it seems to trigger a borderline psychosexual desire among some people to see it destroyed. I love Stax. I love electrostatic headphones. Seeing comments like "an ortho could never justifiably cost more than electrostats" however is just stupid. Shhh, don't tell the statophiles, but there are some things other headphones do better than 'stats.


 


3. The headphones industry *is* in a rather sad place these days IMHO. Unlike in-ears, I think there's genuine stagnation with much more of an emphasis on marketing and appeals to lifestyle than actual innovative R&D taking place. More times than not it's larger companies that set industry trends however, and a lot of that stagnation is due to their direction I think. When Sennheiser invested heavily in R&D, they produced the ring driver of the HD800 which was quite an engineering accomplishment. In most cases tho, I get the sense that it's just stagnation with a lot of these big names: wrapping up the same---or even inferior---tech under a new veneer and ad campaign. It sells, and there's no incentive to do better on their part.


 


Take the ever-popular whipping boy AKG for instance. An ex-company engineer gave some figures for a new K1000 based on his own speculation, and he said he felt it could easily be improved with today's better materials, provided they invest enough in it initially. AKG however is more concerned with branding and marquee value, so they instead continue to rerelease the same headphones again and again. We keep seeing new K701 / 702s under different guises with new color schemes and new marketing behind them, only at double or even triple the price of what the original goes for these days. They do sound marginally better, but I believe this is due to better driver matching and a few other basic tweaks. For as much as the K3003 gets maligned in some circles, it probably has the most genuine effort behind it than anything AKG has released in a while. People keep bemoaning the loss of the K1000, but really the K3003 is the closest to a spiritual successor we've gotten, and in many ways it's better than the K1000 (like in tonal balance). It's also lead to a lot of good trickle down / copy-cat stuff. I get the sense their engineers were allowed to engineer with the K3003, and I think that genuine spirit comes through despite some folks not detecting it.


 


4. With smaller companies, I think there's more of a liberal atmosphere and willingness to risk-take, so you see a lot of good R&D work. Only it results in higher costs because they can't really offset it like larger companies. Companies like Audez'e seem to do things in a graduated manner, one step and a time, building up resources for the next step, so it's more likely you'll see more revisions along the way: LCD-2 rev. 1, LCD-2 rev. 2, LCD-3, LCD-4, etc. By comparison a company like Sennheiser will only release one HD800, and if there are changes they will be very subtle and not largely announced. It'll be years before we see an HD850 or HD900. The HD800 was a long time in the making, and they make damn well sure it was right before it was released. Sony used to be a major innovator when it came to materials (biocellulose, the Qualia drivers, etc.), but these days they seem to be falling into an ongoing state of blandness. That spark is missing more and more as time goes on, sadly.


 


5. Sony also used to be more artsy fartsy. Taking that tangent to its extreme, you have smaller companies that seem more interested in making artistic statements. Final Audio Design for instance. They sort of occupy their own niche within a niche, and I don't think they can be readily compared to other facets of the industry at large without doing them a disservice.


 


6. Not all small companies are out to make genuinely innovative products. It's not so cut and dry as big company = bad / small company = good. I think you see this a lot more in amplifiers and other speaker components, because headphones almost seem to force smaller companies to be somewhat creative, but in either case you get these salesmen who are all about a certain posture, coming across as innovators and doing cutting edge stuff when in reality they're just selling you a Cmoy or something. It's a case of how much can I get away with? I don't blame folks for thinking the Abyss is indicative of this spirit. People tend to view mega-buck cables with suspicion. Factor in the way their ads and press read, the attention from wealthy lifestyle blogs, the refusal to have demos outside of certain controlled environments... yeah. It's all a little hamfisted, because the Abyss actually has a lot of impressive R&D behind it as I've said countless times. In fact the Abyss seems to be taking ortho R&D further than any other small company has in quite a while.


 


7. To that end, I think a lot of head-fiers genuinely don't grasp how expensive R&D is or how much bulk materials cost. You see it when people compare commercial amps to DIY builds and chastise the manufacturer because they can't match the price. In the case of headphones like the Abyss, the R&D can actually be quite astronomical because they're using materials that have hitherto not been used in headphones. They're using surprisingly advanced processes to lay the traces on the drivers. Their magnets are custom made, proprietary, and the strongest used in headphones to date, and so they cost a lot of money. They've gone through numerous builds and tried tons of different combinations of materials and positioning, built and scrapped numerous mock ups. Orthos require a lot of fine tuning and a pretty keen understanding of certain material effects. I know some folks in the Abyss thread were skeptical about whether JPS really went through so many trials in the testing phase, and honestly I have no clue what extent they went to, but I know that even dedicated head-fiers who are modding their T50RPs can go through hundreds of different configurations of materials trying to get it just right. I know some modders who spent a lot of time, money, sweat and tears to this effect. One guy I know spent a thousand bucks just on pads. On pads! He spent over a month positioning them and trying different combos. There are so many variables to take into account when tuning this stuff. It's actually a little surprising just how little some larger companies seem to invest in this type of thing, and how some simple damping can improve their products. Of course, that's just a small fraction of the bigger picture. All the tuning in the world isn't going to help unless you've got a good driver and enclosure from the get-go, and these are costly to develop from scratch.


 


 



"But HiFiMan is able to release products that don't cost nearly as much."


 


I love HiFiMan, but HiFiman isn't doing R&D to the extent of Abyss sofarasIknow. Look at their drivers: they're actually quite primitive compared to orthos from the 70s. That's OK, because HiFiMan's focus is on making affordable large-sized orthos. Their R&D is directed largely at minimizing costs and streamlining production, and it's definitely a good angle to adopt in this hobby as it sets them apart. More companies should focus on this type of thing. Also I'm not excusing the price of the Abyss from a business standpoint. There are ways of offsetting costs and not passing them directly to the consumer. You can take a hit and recoup it in other ways potentially, or try the graduated method a la Audez'e. The Audez'e method is especially reasonable here because JPS is new at this. This is their first headphone, so people are rightfully viewing it with suspicion given the mega-bux price tag. Audez'e first introduced the LCD-1 at roughtly $400 or so, and it was largely an OEM product. It showed however that they could get certain things right, and it laid the foundation for their approach to the LCD-2 at $1k. By the time they doubled the price on the LCD-3, they had established enough of a fanbase.


 


8. JPS' attitude is their own worst enemy. They've done nothing to reach out to the head-fi community, so as I predicted people don't trust them. Trust is especially important when you're releasing a $5k product as an introduction to what you're all about. They needed to be more humble, send their prototypes on a listening tour. Show us that there's nothing up their sleeves. By not doing this, and instead allocating all their units to suppliers, it makes it seem as though they've really not put much into their product. Small companies who do this need only sell a few units to make up for the investment.


 


9. Even if they have put a lot into it, at the end of the day one can always ask is it worth it? Is the R&D that went into the Abyss really going to amount to anything? The proof will be in how it sounds I suppose. If after it's all said and done the sound of the thing is not much better than an HE-500, well, it becomes an exercise in futility and is consigned to the cabinet of curiosities. I think this is where point #2 rears its head again. People are assuming from the outset this thing isn't going to possibly compete on the level of the SR-009. It may very well not. Though someone I respect quite a bit actually prefers the Abyss to the SR-009. Srsly.


 


10. I think a lot of folks just like complaining about stuff. I mean, here I am complaining about their complaining. Complaining is fun. In this case, I think some folks who have no intention of buying summit-fi or aren't in the market for a new pair of headphones want to make it seem as though JPS is somehow personally slighting them by talking about the industry and general trends. Also some people are like pilot fish and just pop in to throw out some insults and feel included. Every page or so you'll see some random post to the effect of these cost a lot of money and are rip offs and are ugly and omg who would buy these lol m i rite guise?? Great, now turn around to receive your complimentary butt pat and go away.


 


11. I really do think uber-bux products and cheap 'n' cheerful products can coexist. Again, I'll point to the IEM market right now as a prime example. Of course this is idealistic, but if companies invest a lot in genuine R&D, there's a potential for it to make its way to less expensive models. I'd like to see some of the innovations in the Abyss find their way into cheaper orthos from folks like HiFiMan. Or even cheaper models from JPS. What some of my ortho-obsessed friends have expressed a desire for are cheaper, smaller orthos than can be powered from iPods. HiFiMan has the cheaper part down, though I still think there's room for improvement. Fang is also convinced smaller drivers are not the way to go; at least, this seems to be the case from some discussions those ortho-obsessed friends have had with him. This is actually one area where the Abyss' research might help, as they've managed to maintain a decent level of efficiency despite having a single-ended driver, and a single-ended driver would potentially minimize size and weight (though not in the Abyss since the magnet is huge).


 


12. Unfortunately, the full-sized headphone market seems like a radically different environment compared to the IEM landscape right now. The whole IEM climate just feels more... open source? Maybe it's because there are a lot of OEMs and Chinese companies working on cheaper versions of high end tech, whereas in the headphone arena the OEMs are mostly lower end models, and higher-end stuff is guarded more closely. Also manufacturers have to often invent their drivers from scratch when it comes to full-sized headphones, which increases production costs and makes each company its own island more or less. Even with speakers, it's way more "open source" as you can buy kits that contain generic drivers and basically build your own, and they'll perform really well and beat the pants off of a lot of similarly priced headphones.



 

Click to expand...

mrviolin said:

:0 are you a psychiatrist? I took it this year :> learned that Freud came up with the term libido and a bunch of other neat things. Goes hand-in-hand w/ health and biology quite nicely. 

Click to expand...

muppetface said:

 
Okay, so here's my college career in a nutshell.
 
At first I was going to study history and sociology, but then I decided to go into psychology after my first semester. Mostly focused on psychometrics, test construction, and experimental design. Then came a period in my life where I kind of lost my mind (like, literally) and went to LA and had a nervous break down, and after that, for some reason, I thought I wanted to do clinical psychology. Specifically psychoanalysis because psychoanalysis is viewed with suspicion in mainstream US academia nowadays, and I'm a difficult person and like to say "oooo look I'm being different." So I read a lot of Lacan while slowly going through this major period of despair in my life.
 
When I got to grad school I realized that was definitely not for me. I went back to history, only now with a focus on philosophy, literature, and religion. Still found Lacan to be incredibly fascinating however, especially as there are very different lines of interpretation (clinical versus philosophical). Focusing on the later, I read a lot of Zizek. Especially Zizek on matters like belief and religion. It actually explains a lot of what goes on in head-fi quite well LOL.

Click to expand...

muppetface said:

 
Okay, so here's my college career in a nutshell.
 
At first I was going to study history and sociology, but then I decided to go into psychology after my first semester. Mostly focused on psychometrics, test construction, and experimental design. Then came a period in my life where I kind of lost my mind (like, literally) and went to LA and had a nervous break down, and after that, for some reason, I thought I wanted to do clinical psychology. Specifically psychoanalysis because psychoanalysis is viewed with suspicion in mainstream US academia nowadays, and I'm a difficult person and like to say "oooo look I'm being different." So I read a lot of Lacan while slowly going through this major period of despair in my life.
 
When I got to grad school I realized that was definitely not for me. I went back to history, only now with a focus on philosophy, literature, and religion. Still found Lacan to be incredibly fascinating however, especially as there are very different lines of interpretation (clinical versus philosophical). Focusing on the later, I read a lot of Zizek. Especially Zizek on matters like belief and religion. It actually explains a lot of what goes on in head-fi quite well LOL.

Click to expand...

muppetface said:

The Abyss thread is just obnoxious. A few errant thoughts below. Warning: very rant-y and meandering and not particularly on-topic half the time or even particularly relevant to anyone or anything.
 
1. The company president isn't doing himself any favors by posting, especially as his interpersonal skills could use work. He should really stay out of the mud slinging and just answer legitimate questions. Getting involved when head-fiers are clearly out for blood has never benefitted a manufacturer. 
 
2. Anytime an expensive headphone gets released that isn't Stax, it seems to trigger a borderline psychosexual desire among some people to see it destroyed. I love Stax. I love electrostatic headphones. Seeing comments like "an ortho could never justifiably cost more than electrostats" however is just stupid. Shhh, don't tell the statophiles, but there are some things other headphones do better than 'stats.
 
3. The headphones industry *is* in a rather sad place these days IMHO. Unlike in-ears, I think there's genuine stagnation with much more of an emphasis on marketing and appeals to lifestyle than actual innovative R&D taking place. More times than not it's larger companies that set industry trends however, and a lot of that stagnation is due to their direction I think. When Sennheiser invested heavily in R&D, they produced the ring driver of the HD800 which was quite an engineering accomplishment. In most cases tho, I get the sense that it's just stagnation with a lot of these big names: wrapping up the same---or even inferior---tech under a new veneer and ad campaign. It sells, and there's no incentive to do better on their part.
 
Take the ever-popular whipping boy AKG for instance. An ex-company engineer gave some figures for a new K1000 based on his own speculation, and he said he felt it could easily be improved with today's better materials, provided they invest enough in it initially. AKG however is more concerned with branding and marquee value, so they instead continue to rerelease the same headphones again and again. We keep seeing new K701 / 702s under different guises with new color schemes and new marketing behind them, only at double or even triple the price of what the original goes for these days. They do sound marginally better, but I believe this is due to better driver matching and a few other basic tweaks. For as much as the K3003 gets maligned in some circles, it probably has the most genuine effort behind it than anything AKG has released in a while. People keep bemoaning the loss of the K1000, but really the K3003 is the closest to a spiritual successor we've gotten, and in many ways it's better than the K1000 (like in tonal balance). It's also lead to a lot of good trickle down / copy-cat stuff. I get the sense their engineers were allowed to engineer with the K3003, and I think that genuine spirit comes through despite some folks not detecting it.
 
4. With smaller companies, I think there's more of a liberal atmosphere and willingness to risk-take, so you see a lot of good R&D work. Only it results in higher costs because they can't really offset it like larger companies. Companies like Audez'e seem to do things in a graduated manner, one step and a time, building up resources for the next step, so it's more likely you'll see more revisions along the way: LCD-2 rev. 1, LCD-2 rev. 2, LCD-3, LCD-4, etc. By comparison a company like Sennheiser will only release one HD800, and if there are changes they will be very subtle and not largely announced. It'll be years before we see an HD850 or HD900. The HD800 was a long time in the making, and they make damn well sure it was right before it was released. Sony used to be a major innovator when it came to materials (biocellulose, the Qualia drivers, etc.), but these days they seem to be falling into an ongoing state of blandness. That spark is missing more and more as time goes on, sadly.
 
5. Sony also used to be more artsy fartsy. Taking that tangent to its extreme, you have smaller companies that seem more interested in making artistic statements. Final Audio Design for instance. They sort of occupy their own niche within a niche, and I don't think they can be readily compared to other facets of the industry at large without doing them a disservice.
 
6. Not all small companies are out to make genuinely innovative products. It's not so cut and dry as big company = bad / small company = good. I think you see this a lot more in amplifiers and other speaker components, because headphones almost seem to force smaller companies to be somewhat creative, but in either case you get these salesmen who are all about a certain posture, coming across as innovators and doing cutting edge stuff when in reality they're just selling you a Cmoy or something. It's a case of how much can I get away with? I don't blame folks for thinking the Abyss is indicative of this spirit. People tend to view mega-buck cables with suspicion. Factor in the way their ads and press read, the attention from wealthy lifestyle blogs, the refusal to have demos outside of certain controlled environments... yeah. It's all a little hamfisted, because the Abyss actually has a lot of impressive R&D behind it as I've said countless times. In fact the Abyss seems to be taking ortho R&D further than any other small company has in quite a while.
 
7. To that end, I think a lot of head-fiers genuinely don't grasp how expensive R&D is or how much bulk materials cost. You see it when people compare commercial amps to DIY builds and chastise the manufacturer because they can't match the price. In the case of headphones like the Abyss, the R&D can actually be quite astronomical because they're using materials that have hitherto not been used in headphones. They're using surprisingly advanced processes to lay the traces on the drivers. Their magnets are custom made, proprietary, and the strongest used in headphones to date, and so they cost a lot of money. They've gone through numerous builds and tried tons of different combinations of materials and positioning, built and scrapped numerous mock ups. Orthos require a lot of fine tuning and a pretty keen understanding of certain material effects. I know some folks in the Abyss thread were skeptical about whether JPS really went through so many trials in the testing phase, and honestly I have no clue what extent they went to, but I know that even dedicated head-fiers who are modding their T50RPs can go through hundreds of different configurations of materials trying to get it just right. I know some modders who spent a lot of time, money, sweat and tears to this effect. One guy I know spent a thousand bucks just on pads. On pads! He spent over a month positioning them and trying different combos. There are so many variables to take into account when tuning this stuff. It's actually a little surprising just how little some larger companies seem to invest in this type of thing, and how some simple damping can improve their products. Of course, that's just a small fraction of the bigger picture. All the tuning in the world isn't going to help unless you've got a good driver and enclosure from the get-go, and these are costly to develop from scratch.
 
"But HiFiMan is able to release products that don't cost nearly as much."
 
I love HiFiMan, but HiFiman isn't doing R&D to the extent of Abyss sofarasIknow. Look at their drivers: they're actually quite primitive compared to orthos from the 70s. That's OK, because HiFiMan's focus is on making affordable large-sized orthos. Their R&D is directed largely at minimizing costs and streamlining production, and it's definitely a good angle to adopt in this hobby as it sets them apart. More companies should focus on this type of thing. Also I'm not excusing the price of the Abyss from a business standpoint. There are ways of offsetting costs and not passing them directly to the consumer. You can take a hit and recoup it in other ways potentially, or try the graduated method a la Audez'e. The Audez'e method is especially reasonable here because JPS is new at this. This is their first headphone, so people are rightfully viewing it with suspicion given the mega-bux price tag. Audez'e first introduced the LCD-1 at roughtly $400 or so, and it was largely an OEM product. It showed however that they could get certain things right, and it laid the foundation for their approach to the LCD-2 at $1k. By the time they doubled the price on the LCD-3, they had established enough of a fanbase.
 
8. JPS' attitude is their own worst enemy. They've done nothing to reach out to the head-fi community, so as I predicted people don't trust them. Trust is especially important when you're releasing a $5k product as an introduction to what you're all about. They needed to be more humble, send their prototypes on a listening tour. Show us that there's nothing up their sleeves. By not doing this, and instead allocating all their units to suppliers, it makes it seem as though they've really not put much into their product. Small companies who do this need only sell a few units to make up for the investment.
 
9. Even if they have put a lot into it, at the end of the day one can always ask is it worth it? Is the R&D that went into the Abyss really going to amount to anything? The proof will be in how it sounds I suppose. If after it's all said and done the sound of the thing is not much better than an HE-500, well, it becomes an exercise in futility and is consigned to the cabinet of curiosities. I think this is where point #2 rears its head again. People are assuming from the outset this thing isn't going to possibly compete on the level of the SR-009. It may very well not. Though someone I respect quite a bit actually prefers the Abyss to the SR-009. Srsly.
 
10. I think a lot of folks just like complaining about stuff. I mean, here I am complaining about their complaining. Complaining is fun. In this case, I think some folks who have no intention of buying summit-fi or aren't in the market for a new pair of headphones want to make it seem as though JPS is somehow personally slighting them by talking about the industry and general trends. Also some people are like pilot fish and just pop in to throw out some insults and feel included. Every page or so you'll see some random post to the effect of these cost a lot of money and are rip offs and are ugly and omg who would buy these lol m i rite guise?? Great, now turn around to receive your complimentary butt pat and go away.
 
11. I really do think uber-bux products and cheap 'n' cheerful products can coexist. Again, I'll point to the IEM market right now as a prime example. Of course this is idealistic, but if companies invest a lot in genuine R&D, there's a potential for it to make its way to less expensive models. I'd like to see some of the innovations in the Abyss find their way into cheaper orthos from folks like HiFiMan. Or even cheaper models from JPS. What some of my ortho-obsessed friends have expressed a desire for are cheaper, smaller orthos than can be powered from iPods. HiFiMan has the cheaper part down, though I still think there's room for improvement. Fang is also convinced smaller drivers are not the way to go; at least, this seems to be the case from some discussions those ortho-obsessed friends have had with him. This is actually one area where the Abyss' research might help, as they've managed to maintain a decent level of efficiency despite having a single-ended driver, and a single-ended driver would potentially minimize size and weight (though not in the Abyss since the magnet is huge).
 
12. Unfortunately, the full-sized headphone market seems like a radically different environment compared to the IEM landscape right now. The whole IEM climate just feels more... open source? Maybe it's because there are a lot of OEMs and Chinese companies working on cheaper versions of high end tech, whereas in the headphone arena the OEMs are mostly lower end models, and higher-end stuff is guarded more closely. Also manufacturers have to often invent their drivers from scratch when it comes to full-sized headphones, which increases production costs and makes each company its own island more or less. Even with speakers, it's way more "open source" as you can buy kits that contain generic drivers and basically build your own, and they'll perform really well and beat the pants off of a lot of similarly priced headphones.

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mrviolin said:

 
LOL. Psychosexual desire to see it destroyed. 

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muppetface said:

Then came a period in my life where I kind of lost my mind (like, literally) and went to LA and had a nervous break down, and after that, for some reason, I thought I wanted to do clinical psychology.

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eke2k6 said:

Welp, no ASG-2 today. USPS can go kick rocks.
 
On the plus side, I have the Flat-4. I'm not sure I like what I'm hearing. Excuse me while I go play with tips.

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warrenpchi said:

 
So maybe it's not that L.A. has something inherently wrong with it, but just that there's a bad association with it?

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muppetface said:

Quote:

warrenpchi said:

So maybe it's not that L.A. has something inherently wrong with it, but just that there's a bad association with it?

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Yeah, a bad association primarily. Same with a lot of the music I was listening to at the time: I can't really listen to it anymore because of the negative memories it conjures.
 
Though I will say there are some aspects of LA that are not good for someone in that kind of mindset, and it can definitely enhance it. 

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