I put your little typo in bold. :wink_face:
The Sennheiser Orpheus was released in 1991 at a retail price of $12,900. Factoring in inflation, that's $22,446 in today's dollars.
After the first 300 units of the system (with the HE 90 headphones and HEV 90 amplifier), a few hundred more of the headphones were produced alone.
I would imagine that the new and improved version would be able to be made and sold at a lower price, though, since technology is at a higher level of advancement.
I'm not sure of the highest price an Orpheus system has actually sold for. It has been listed for sale for up to $35K, but again, that's because it's such a rare and desirable collector's item, and I don't think it ever sold at that price.
In any case...I really want all these headphones!
Thanks for the typo pick, corrected.
As stated earlier, I do not have the actual 1994 (or 1991 if that matters) figure on-hand, I am only quoting the figure as suggested. While your calculation using inflation might suggest $22,446 as a good reference, there can be thousands of way to come out with a different figure, and Senn only need ONE formula to justify that, they can easily argue that inflation is irrelevant to their flagship product, or they think comparing the income of top 1% population over past 20 years will make more sense to them, who knows? I have no intention to defend the pricing strategy of Senn, I don't like that figure either, but lets wait and see if
(1) Senn really are selling Orpheus 2 at that price
(2) Whether the product will sell at their expected pace
If we end up with (2), who are we to say No? This is business after all. From what I see, the biggest problem is not whether Senn is asking for $20,000 or $50,000, the deal breaker is whether this is a shelf product or limited production, and at what volume. If they are making 300 units only, they are target at top 0.1% of the global headfi-ers only plus the big spenders who will mainly buy that for home display or collecting purpose, are you sure this is a outrageous figure to these target groups?
The original Orpheus was launched with the aim to show the world what Senn can do, so this is more a capability product rather then a practical product to start with. To me, this aim can be translated into another business objective: to show the investors how profitable Senn can be. I think the same statement will show up again when Orpheus 2 formally announced, and the alternative business objective will hold for the same reason.
Regarding your arguments that advancement and technology will drive cost down, sadly that only happens on some products such as consumer electronic or computer equipments. Whether Orpheus really belongs to these categories are debatable. Place take a look when exotic watch, automobile, fashion brands launch a new statement product of decade, do they really care about production efficiency due to technology and production advancement?
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