Having looked into the Shure SE846 a bit more, I can say I'm genuinely excited about it now.
I know a lot of folks aren't going to be down with it because of the price, and that's certainly fair, but using it as an avatar for
everything wrong in the IEM market today is a bit misguided. In fact I'd go so far as to say it's indicative of
much of what's right in the IEM market today.
This is fast becoming a mantra of mine these days it seems, but once again I'll point out that the IEM market sees quite a bit of innovation from one year to the next. The price of universal flagship models does indeed climb higher and higher, and while the returns in that sense might be strained more and more, I also think we see a genuine trickle down of R&D from them. As a result better sounding IEMs are also getting
less expensive: $100 these days will get you a whole lot more compared to a few years ago.
It's artwork inside a little capsule you stick in your ears.
I love this stuff.
Okay, incoming rant. Going off on a tangent here....
The headphone market on the other hand is a sadder place IMHO.
While genuine innovation still takes place from time to time (the TakeT's Heil-type piezo and the HD800's ring drivers for instance), by and large it seems to be a static field. Even a fixture as venerated as Stax is essentially doing what they've done for decades already, though in that case one can seriously argue for an "ain't broke, don't fix it" attitude. They've basically refined the process into an art itself: they produce the wagyu beef of the headphone world, the components massaged for days at a time in hermetically sealed environments by trembling hands.
For as lambasted as the Abyss is, its doing some genuinely novel stuff. Really the planar magnetic segment as a whole is in an interesting place right now. If you want an example of stagnation and the relative lack of progression among headphones today compared to their counterparts of yesteryear, look no further. The Fostex and Yamaha drivers found in older orthos are really spectacular in their own right, something that has continued up through to the Fostex T50RP of today. For $120 or so you can get a driver that is actually more sophisticated than those found in HiFiMan's orthos. No, for real. Their drivers are downright primitive in comparison. A lot of these older headphones are limited by materials of the time however, in some cases using magnets that are no better than fridge magnets. That's why they respond so well to modding. The T50RP for instance is basically in an unfinished state, so you're going to see quite a big upswing in scale after investing enough time in "completing" it. So when I hear the Paradox as sounding just as good as---if not better than---the HE-500, I'm not too terribly surprised.
I'm not dissing HiFiMan by any means. I'm quite fond of their orthos, having still held on to my HE-400 (the older, darker version) and HE-6. I think they've done a lot of legitimate R&D and have kept their prices down, offering some of the better values in the full-sized headphone market. While comparatively crude, they still manage to compete on the same footing as their rivals because they know exactly where to focus their attention. There's not an ounce of "fat" on these models. I think Fang might be gearing up to show just what he can do with this next flagship tho, and perhaps we'll see him pull out all the stops. Same with the Jade II whenever it gets released in Far Flung Future World. Audez'e has also done a lot of R&D and put a lot of effort into their drivers. They're more impressive than HiFiMan's in that respect, at least to some of the ortho-philes I know. It seems the LCD-4 is getting quite a lot of attention, and I get the sense the LCD-3 was a stopgap of sorts while they work on it. The LCD-3... talk about a sad example of a smaller company's growing pains.
So yeah, I think we're going to see something of an "ortho war" over the next few years. LCD-4 versus HE-7 versus Abyss perhaps? The benefit of this is the potential for better, cheaper orthos. It's something of a dream for a friend of mine to see more sub-$500 orthos that can be driven from iPods and can be used readily as portables. In other words: cheaper, smaller, and more efficient. Sort of the direction orthos were headed in the 80s before they went out of style. It's just a shame these smaller companies are more focused on larger drivers. EIther way however, cheaper orthos are a good thing, so hopefully we'll see that on the horizon. There are new stats rumored to be coming out in the next few years as well. We're already seeing the King Sound Emperor. That product is very exciting. A new stat... that costs $500, not $5000!
The IEM market benefits from many, many more smaller companies versus full-sized headphones. Plus these companies all have access to the same pool of drivers. It's much harder to try to craft your driver from scratch like Audez'e did on the LCD-2 (their LCD-1 was OEM I believe). It's also harder to tune full-sized headphones, as you can only do so much with that one driver and ringing / damping plays a bigger role AFAIK.
