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Originally Posted by Dept_of_Alchemy /img/forum/go_quote.gif
This thread just goes to show that the ultra-highend headphone market is under developed... if there are people paying $15K on amps, and there are practically no headphones above $1k. Compared with speakers, where the most expensive amp is only about twice that of the most expensive speakers, there should be a market for headphones costing in the $7000~$8000 range...
Anyone interested?
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Seems like this one is gettting a lot of responses. My take on it is that, yes, of course, headphone companies
could make more expensive headphones (even in the $7-8k range) in an aim to target the rare few who have $15k amps. But they don't need to!
The thing is, most people who have these expensive amps use multiple pairs of headphones,
each of which (at least in their view which is the one that matters since it's their ears doing the listening and their wallet doing the speanding)
improves dramatically with the luxury of having that one specific, custom tailored amp that best suits their musical tastes at their disposal.
Does that make sense? In other words, in my case, if I only had one amp and it was a $15k SDS-XLR (and although I do have one on order thankfully it didn't cost nearly that much), that would be roughly the same investment that I would have made in 20-odd pairs of headphones that I would use with it, each of which probably sounds better with the SDS-XLR than they do with any other dynamic headphone amp I've ever heard.
So this one amp, no matter how expensive it may be, can be
worth it from that important perspective. It improves a whole pile of $200 to $1k headphones! It also improves $2k headphones (such as the Qualia 010 or L3000) and it improves the $4k R10.
Moreover, the improvements are often so dramatic with this kind of amp that you can sell off any and all of your other amps to recoup a portion of the cost. In other words, at this level, you can pretty much count on this one big monster of an amp to wipe the floor with any other amps you may have at your disposal.
It's no longer a matter of choosing among "flavors" of amps, thinking that Amp A does well with Headphone B, but Amp C does better with Headphone D. Nope. Your mega amp, when custom designed with the right combination of parts that best suit your musical tastes, really should (and usually does) render the other amps in your 'inventory' obsolete.
What's more, there is tremendous value (to some people at least) in knowng that they've arrived at an "end of the road" solution and they will no longer need to concern themselves with upgraditus. This is true of amps, headphones, sources, cables, power conditioning, and any other aspect of the overall sonic equation. Again, I'm sure that seems silly to most observers, but it's quite a meaningful sense of satisfaction/relief to others.
But having said all of that, I do think it's absurd to pay $15k for one dynamic headphone amp. Maybe $10k, but not $15k. That way you can spend the other $5k on a top of the line electrostatic headphone amp!
Oh and the other thing... to sell headphones profitably you need to sell them in sufficient volume to achieve productive efficiency, and thus the late great K1000 are no longer being produced, not because people don't like them (they've won awards!) but because AKG couldn't sell enough of them to warrent any further investement in their continued production. On the other hand, for a boutique headphone amp maufacturer to be able to sell these mega headphone amps profitably, no matter how rare and exotic or one-off these ceations get, they need only to price them appropriately for each particular customer's specifications.
In other words, for the headphone amp builder it's a true "job order" costing system where each and every amp can add to the company's profitability if priced right, and the decisons to build or not to build can be made on a case by case basis. If the customer is willing to make it worth your while, then you agree to built him the dream amp he's described. Whereas with headphone manufacturers, it's a "process" costing system where there is a strong reliance of economies of scale, achieving productive efficiency, and ensuring that the company's marketing efforts lead to a sufficient annual sales volume for the individual products to continue to "make sense" in the overall product mix. If a $1k headphone that is as loved as the K1000 doesn't make sense to AKG from this persepective, it's highly unlikley that we'll see a bunch of $7-8k headphones hitting the marketplace any day soon.
