It's a mixture. Production machinery can eliminate a lot of the variances making thousands of a certain thing. But it takes skilled people to operate the machinery or complete tasks that machines simply cannot do due to physics and geometry. The Ireland plant gives you the best of both. Man vs machine: a classic love story!
Even my HD 800’s drivers were fabricated at the Tullamore facility… still love it after almost 7 years
3 years ago there was a strategy of specialization of the plants, ie. intensive manual labor in Romania, high-end products in Germany and automated manufacturing in Ireland. Since then a lot has happened and the two divisions of Sennheiser, consumer and professional, will act independently of one another, mostly because business requirements are completely different for wireless stage microphones and premium headphones. This also means that we won't share manufacturing plants, ie. build both audiophile and professional products at the same location. The professional division will use the Romania and Germany plants going forward, while all transducer manufacturing for consumer headphone models as well as assembly for the audiophile models will be done by the Ireland team.
It's both correct in a sense. Historically, Ireland has always laminated the transducer foils for the HD 800 S. The magic in most of our headphones comes from our patented Duofol-technology, which combines properties of a stiff plastic for brilliance with a polyurethane that provides compliance and dampens unwanted resonances. The Irish team has peerless experience with this process.
The 600 and 650 were the jumpoff point for so many of us here (and continues to be!)
This is great news. I live just down the road from you, but didn't realise the importance of the Tullamore site to your global strategy.
I just got an hd 6xx a week ago and it said "made in ireland" on the box but not on the headband. Why is this?
The quart bulb is the casing of the vacuum tube; quartz is a better substance than glass for applications where the temperatures are going to fluctuate wildly. The density of quartz plays a lesser role, too, reducing microphonics borne from noise in the same acoustic environment. In short, mitigating unwanted vibration of the tubes prevents unwanted artifacts from appearing in your signal chain.
Great question. The 6xx was indeed completed in Ireland, by a person (and production machinery) in Ireland using acoustics made in Ireland. The origin marking may change location (or size or font or color,etc) for a myriad of reasons, but it's almost always because there is a more efficient way to satisfy the requirement of disclosure.
Thanks, that clears a lot up. I was really confused about where mine were made because I didn't even know sennheiser moved the production back to Ireland since it still says romania on drop's website, and I thought all the Irish made sennheisers (at least in the hd 600 line) had the marking on the headphones themselves. I'm just curious, why didn't mine get the marking when past and future (as stated by Evshrug) Irish made 6xx's would?
We updated the tooling for the 600 family during the time it was transferred to Romania. We reused the space reserved for "Made in ..." for necessary regulatory markings like CE. Since we continue to use the same tooling, the new Irish made HD 600, HD 650 and HD 660S won't have the mark, but we'll explore ways to bring it back (eg. one side regulatory marking and the other one "Made in Ireland").
