1:00 - Jude just said the technologies are "very innovative". That doesn't mean anything to me.
12:00 - Dan said the machinery they developed only does tensioning. That doesn't mean they developed the film, just a machine that will tension it when they install it into the driver frame. Something that stretches material isn't a huge technological feat.
Going by that logic a new technology that can improve solar panel energy yield by some significant amount would also be unimpressive to you?
"Something that stretches material" is a unreasonable simplification of the process and technology.
Going by that logic a new technology that can improve solar panel energy yield by some significant amount would also be unimpressive to you?
"Something that stretches material" is a unreasonable simplification of the process and technology.
I don't think you understood what I said. I can't make sense of how you jumped to that conclusion.
I don't think that what I said was an "unreasonable simplification". It's literally what they said.
If that technology holds a significant advantage over the competition, of course it's a huge technological feat.
I don't know the specifics of what the new tensioning mechanism is and what the advantages are, but as long as it is a significant enough improvement over existing technology it will be an impressive feat.
Is that the case here? I don't know.
But the argument that new technology can't be impressive, because the oversimplified description of it doesn't sound impressive is just nonsense.
"If that technology holds a significant advantage over the competition, of course it's a huge technological feat."
I don't think it's been proven to yet. Reviews seem pretty mixed. Also the film they use isn't very thin compared to some competitors like Stax.
"I don't know the specifics of what the new tensioning mechanism is and what the advantages are, but as long as it is a significant enough improvement over existing technology it will be an impressive feat."
Yeah, we don't know that yet, but it seems unlikely.
"But the argument that new technology can't be impressive, because the oversimplified description of it doesn't sound impressive is just nonsense."
Not at all. DCA has every interest in making the most mundane things sound ridiculously impressive and cutting-edge in order to hype up and sell a $4000 headphone, like they did with the film.
"The polymer is produced with bespoke sequential biaxial lengthening technology, a process that involves stretching the polymer in transverse directions at elevated temperatures to improve structural performance."
It's a very common film processing technique with many existing off the shelf materials available, such as BOPET, BOPP, etc.
It's heated up and stretched in two directions while being formed.
To call it "Bespoke Sequential Biaxial Lengthening Technology" is just ridiculous and demonstrates my point.
1:00 - Jude just said the technologies are "very innovative". That doesn't mean anything to me.
12:00 - Dan said the machinery they developed only does tensioning. That doesn't mean they developed the film, just a machine that will tension it when they install it into the driver frame. Something that stretches material isn't a huge technological feat.
The level of technological achievement is relative and rather irrelevant. Significant investments were made in R&D for the inserts and other areas, as well as for new production machinery. These have to be factored into the price of the headphone. Whether the price is justified is ultimately for the market to decide.
The level of technological achievement is relative and rather irrelevant. Significant investments were made in R&D for the inserts and other areas, as well as for new production machinery. These have to be factored into the price of the headphone. Whether the price is justified is ultimately for the market to decide.
At this point I don't think there is any real interest in having a meaningful discussion so I'll stop arguing about this topic.
It makes me quite sad to see unreasonable criticism being directed at a manufacturer who seems to genuinely care about clean engineering and innovation, but I guess there will always be some in a big enough crowd...
How would I know how much they invested? And why does it matter, exactly? The inserts apparently took four years of experimentation to develop, not to mention the driver uses different technology than their previous models. This is a fairly radical departure from previous DCA headphones, so I'm not sure why you say they "look mostly the same". Given their technical performance and the current price of other flagship headphones, $4k (or $3.4k with discount) doesn't seem outlandish to me at all. OTOH, I haven't heard them yet. I'll know whether the price seems justified to me after I attend CanJam in two weeks.
Seems like some don't take into account time=$ it takes to “tune” headphones, especially closed back design.
Even an open back design. Case in point. A “new” HD8XX” by Drop. It appears that they worked for many, many months to come up with what they thought would be an appropriate “tunning”. Sent out number of prototypes to various beta-testers/reviewers and yet, still managed to screw it up.
It sounds easy when you criticize something from behind a keyboard. In real life, it's “slightely” more difficult to make something well and please, very opinionated hashtag “gurus”.
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