@ jgray
Head-fi isn't letting me quote you for some reason, so I'll have to reference your post indirectly. Specifically your #7 point.
I think you don't see much trickle down in headphones for a number of reasons. Most of all because there really haven't been many innovations in the area of dynamic drivers which still make up the majority of the market. Um, there's biocellulose. That went from the R10 to cheaper headphones thanks to Sony and especially Fostex. The ring driver from Sennheiser is pretty new still on the other hand, and I imagine they hold lots of patents making it hard to duplicate. When it comes to dynamic drivers, I think the best "innovation" a company can do at this point is coming up with a decent way of minimizing ringing, and unfortunately it seems like a lot of companies aren't really interested in this for some reason. Like, you open up some high end dynamics and there's just no damping whatsoever.
I think there's a different kind of climate in the marketplace too. When it comes to lower-end headphones, most of the products are from larger companies or are OEMs of products from larger companies. These larger companies are more likely to focus on certain lifestyle segments, so for lower-end headphones you often get "4 da streetz" with tons of bass, decent-ish studio monitors recycled and repackaged, or products that are more about fashion and invest most of the small allocated budget on design. Meanwhile the more expensive stuff is the "audiophile" domain, and they want to keep prices high to foster the image of high quality. That's why all the best value "audiophile" stuff today was yesterday's TOTL stuff: the HD600, HD650, etc. Instead of updating those products, they're more likely to invest the R&D into making really expensive stuff. You wont see trickle down so much as today's expensive stuff will become tomorrow's "value audiophile" stuff. That's why the rising price is so dangerous in that particular segment, why I said it's the bigger companies that set the precedent for pricing. Kind of funny though, because in some cases the new TOTL stuff is not that much better than the old TOTL stuff. The Teslas versus the older Beyers are a perfect example to my mind.
It's easier for smaller companies to make better quality stuff in the IEM market. This relates to my #12 point I think. The whole "open source" thing. In the IEM market, it's a lot easier to find new audiophile grade IEMs coming out at lower prices. Some of it has to do with perception too, because a lot of people just naturally assume TOTL headphones should be four figures nowadays whereas IEMs still need to be in the lower three figures. That's changing more and more, but thankfully you also have a growing number of smaller companies putting out impressive lower cost stuff, and there's competition that just doesn't exist in the full-sized arena I think.
Another thing to consider is that planar magnetic headphones have only recently been "rediscovered." Audez'e and HiFiMan are still fairly young companies compared to the giants still putting out dynamic headphones. Honestly, the drivers these newcomers are making from scratch are still pretty crude compared to what Yamaha and Fostex are able to produce, so it'll take some time before we start to see worthwhile trickle down. That's why the Abyss has some orthophiles I know very excited. Even a new $5k ortho is still better than no new ortho in that sense.
one night with the big hi-fi, I'll likely skip listening to IEMs for a day, two or three.
I am interested in the Canalworks too, but need some fitears first.
