I had a meet up with the current director of BLOX last week (Woo, yes... He's now the man running everything behind the scenes with his few employees).
He's a great chap to talk to - Very knowledgeable, open to opinions and likewise open to delivering opinions, transparent about his tastes and his ideology behind what he does, and also, looks very young, walks very fast.
From my limited few hours of conversation with I think I am allowed to say this much:
1) BLOX indeed do tune and assemble the drivers themselves. From winding of the voice coil, to the diaphragm thickness, to selection of magnets... etc. These are not off the shelf drivers, but made by himself and BLOX employees.
2) Each earbud takes BLOX up to 1 1/2 hours to complete.
3) The reason why earbuds come and go with BLOX is because:
a. Woo is always trying new things, developing new earbuds, and whenever he comes across a tuning which he believes could be accepted by the mass market, he will then release it.
b. Limited manpower - If BLOX starts production of a new earbud, the assembly line could likely only produce 10~15 earbuds in a day, hence requiring them to focus on a single or few models at a time.
4) The reason why BLOX do not do casing printout or identifications to a particular model.... Woo did admit it is cheap to order casings with prints. However, the MOQ tends to be of the thousands (5000 onwards), and with how BLOX shifts between models this could introduce tons of wastage which he wants to prevent. He is however, looking into getting his own printing machine some time in the future.......
Those were a great few hours with Woo, tried out an upcoming BE flagship (not sure when will he release that though), had a great time with him.
