It takes 5 minutes (+ putting the varnish and lacquer on) to make one of those cups on the lathe, they're worth 30-40 dollars tops, material and work, ask any woodworker who makes furniture and he will tell you that. Just saying, people think wood is much more expensive than it is, and think it's much harder to work with it than it actually is. In fact, nowadays if you have a CNC machine for wood (which every modern woodworker has) you can produce them like popcorn. It's an extremely simple and quick product to manufacture for anyone with semi-advanced woodworking skills and FAR easier than it is to produce furniture for instance. Just as an example, someone here thinks that paying 500 dollars for a pair of small ear cups is worth every penny and it's a work of art, but the same person wouldn't consider a piece of 500 dollar furniture to be work of art (even if it takes infinitely more skill, time, material, effort to build). Just saying, don't lose common sense like most audiophiles do when they start talking about audio products, just because this is an ear cup for a headphone, doesn't mean it's worth 200,300,400 or 500 dollars. If it was a...let's say a cup for serving food, or a plate (which are extremely similar in ways of production and material to an earcup) you wouldn't pay more than 20, 30 dollars for it, no matter how nicely it was finished. In fact, again, go to any woodworkers shop, and you'll find stuff like this that they make for fun out of scrap materials and then sell for cheap. And that's exactly what wooden ear cups for headphones are, they're that simple. The issue is most people think that with these wood headphone cups there's a lot of engineering going on...no there isn't. The only thing you play with is the shape and thickness of the wood, very simple, much, much simpler than making an earcup out of plastics. Takes 5 minutes to make a design in any CAD program and a few minutes to carve it out with a CNC machine. The rest of the process it takes to get it look pretty basically take minimal skill (relative to what woodworkers usually do), just time. Sorry to bust the myth of wooden ear cups and their extremely overblown prices, but as an engineer it kind of bothers me that people would think a piece of wood that just took some simple carving into a very simple and generic shape (it's a cup, not a violin) is worth far more than developing an ear cup out of an artificial material that was actually engineered and took hundreds or thousands of hours of work to perfect, and can be tuned to have EXACTLY those properties that engineers wanted. That's why for example in my mind the HD800 ear cups are worth far more than say any of the Audio Technica, Fostex or Denon woodies, because it took far more knowledge and skill to develop it. Sure, some wood has positive effects on the sound for some people, but that doesn't make it worth as much as people are paying.
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