Are Custom Earphones really all that fragile?

[music_4321]

Quote:

Haters gotta hate.

And are any of the earphones you brought up customs ?

 
Since you've gone back and edited your post adding the question (which wasn't there) "And are any of the earphones you brought up customs ?", I'll now respond:

Westone, a pretty reputable company, uses a Pilican case with their customs (their ES5 flagship costing $950). The case is actually quite cheap and can easily be purchased on the Internet for about $25. Other companies use the same type of case, only smaller (and cheaper) for customs that cost $300/ $400. These are the best cases for touring musicians.

As someone else pointed out, the metal case JH Audio uses has nothing to do with the item being customs, much like Shure uses an impressive & stylish, yet useless metal case that houses all the contents of the SE530s & SE535s (IEMs & accessories). By contrast, the expensive SM3, UM3X, W3, W4, CK100 use fairly minimalistic & cheap (in price) cardboard packaging.

From a marketing standpoint the SE530 & SE535 consumer will feel they've bought an incredible product (not my view, BTW), whereas the Earsonics, Westone & Audio-Technica consumer may feel somewhat short-changed having spent so much. A LOT of JH Audio users have reported really liking the metal case provided but ultimately got something else because at the end of the day a Pelican case is much better, and not just for so-called audiophiles but for touring musicians. Pelican cases, amongst other things, are water-proof.

I personally never used the original ES3X Westone Pelican case provided, and bought another smaller Pelican case for $12.00 or so for travelling. Later, I bought the UE metal case that comes with the TF10 which only cost me £11.00, and that's the one I've been using for the last 9 months.

 

[chaosfayt]

Alright so i guess from the responses here we somewhat have a conclusion. Verdict on customs - Very Durable, No need for extra care?

oh and i myself use a pelican case

 

[JackKontney]

I think that's a fair assessment, chaosfayt.
 
Plus we got some bonus drama...
 
Oh and BTW, all Sensaphonics IEMs ship with a Pelican case. Because that's what our customers overwhelmingly prefer. We also supply a small vinyl zipper pouch for those who don't want to drag a bulky case around.

 

[music_4321]

^^  Drama always being the best part, of course. 

 

[chaosfayt]

hah drama is abundant on internet forums

Also jack, since you seem to be pretty knowledgeble about earphones, tell me, does playing straight low bass tones damage earphone drivers? I've read that they have the capacity to destroy subwoofers, how about drivers then?

 

[JackKontney]

Not AFAIK; I've never heard of a failure attributed to "too much low bass." BA drivers are rated down to 20Hz, but I don't claim any special knowledge on this particular question.

 

[Uruha]

I have a reshelled SF5Pro by InEarZ and i took them to see if i could run with them(no). When I was leaving the track, I had the IEM off the cable for whatever reason and I accidentally dropped it on the concrete. I was like OOOOOOH SSADCEFDGT. Well it has no cracks, scratches or anything wrong with the internals. I want to say I got lucky. But from that they seem durable enough.

 

[chaosfayt]

Well apparently playing sine waves/ test tones can damage your speakers , so i figured the same thing might apply to earphones

An example of such tones include frequency sweeps for burn in etc, even the *bleep* censor sound is a 1khz test tone. I've heard that they stress the drivers or something , not too sure
 

 

[JackKontney]

Don't know where you heard this stuff, but it's not a great source of knowledge.
 
A 1kHz sine wave is about the easiest, most innocuous thing you can ask a speaker to reproduce.

 

[Xymordos]

I guess you didn't read that I dropped one of my acrylic shells on a hard uncarpeted floor and it DIDN'T CRACK. Guess I just have a lucky magical acrylic shell, huh? LOL.

Heh what I meant was like a hammer/nail/drill

 

[ericp10]

lol @ hammar/nail/drill... Haven't got to testing them out like that buddy. Doubt that I will..lol

 

[chaosfayt]

haha... i wonder how they take apart the shell when they remould it?

 

 

[melomaniac]

Quote:

Don't know where you heard this stuff, but it's not a great source of knowledge.
 
A 1kHz sine wave is about the easiest, most innocuous thing you can ask a speaker to reproduce.

 
yup, easy on the tech - but hard on the ears. which, by the way, is why it still astonishes me when engineers proudly quote claude shannon and other bell labs people, along the lines of "semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant". well, no - as long as you have humans in the loop, you'll have to contend with the fact that a 1kHz sine wave is an empty signal, no information there as long as it stays uninterrupted, but to human ears it can come to mean alert, warning, test. every message presupposes the unpredictable mutability of its physical channel, whether it is electricity, air, or whatever: this minimal variability allows the channel to carry information by dint of signal modulation. so, any steady, uninterrupted, monotonous sound carries little or no information beyond the fact that there is a source emitting a sine wave – but if it is interrupted, that already allows for encoded messages according to the scheme, for instance, or morse code. predicated on an inventory of signs, a communications process has a finite duration T and bandwidth B, which means that although it may appear to a recipient as a continuous signal, it can be transmitted as a finite sequence of discrete values, K=2BT. and as resolution increases, it is an inherent limit in channel capacity that it carries a certain amount of noise; nyquist found that noise gains energy the more bandwidth it has.
 
okay, so far so good: but how is this heard? what fascinates me about noise music and glitch electronica, for instance, is that they manage with minimal sleight of hand to turn what ought to be mere distortion, static, and other byproducts of digital culture into music. it's so close to tinnitus, and so close to the kind of noise floor that we try to tweak our sound reproduction systems away from - yet so clearly and unequivocally musical. anyway, back on topic for this thread: if it were true that there are such test sounds that "stress" speakers (or IEMs), then they'd be permanently off limits for musical expression, pure noise - yet there isn't really such a thing anymore. an orchestra tuning - noise or musical signal? an audience clapping: noise or musical signal? a computer emitting clicks and bleeps: noise or musical signal? as long as we have humans in the loop, there will be ways to recuperate even the most noisy channel for aesthetic communication. guess if worst comes to worst and you do in fact damage a transducer with excessive clipping or blown fuses or whatever the situation, you can turn it into a creative tool for generating some of your own dance-floor compatible tunes!

 

[chaosfayt]

Well then how about extremely loud blasts of sound through them? does that do much damage?

 

 

[JackKontney]

Why would anyone put "extremely loud blasts of sound" through any audio system?