Is the general high price of headphones justified?
Apr 1, 2015 at 8:01 PM Post #62 of 72
vid said:
   
Only the drivers. Pads are the first to go, and quite quickly, then the frame or cable. Replacements are priced high, of course, if available at all.
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It's the frame that's the problem.
 
Pads are widely available when it comes to buying replacements. Cables too on most headphones can be replaced. But the frame - not so much.
 
Apr 2, 2015 at 1:21 AM Post #63 of 72
Ironically the drivers are the one area you would think needed replacement after the hundreds or thousands of hours of usage. They never seem to fail on my Sennheisers, earpads do compress which is unfortunate as they are part of the design and therefore need to be replaced if the headphones are to give the maximum sound quality they are capable of. There the manufacturers can charge what they like because they created the acoustic design which the earpads are part of. Third party replacements may alter detrimentally the sound characteristics. I suppose earpads are a bit like the tyres on a car, not a good idea to buy a part worn or cheap remoulds.
 
Apr 2, 2015 at 6:31 AM Post #65 of 72
sefelt103 said:
Ironically the drivers are the one area you would think needed replacement after the hundreds or thousands of hours of usage. They never seem to fail on my Sennheisers, earpads do compress which is unfortunate as they are part of the design and therefore need to be replaced if the headphones are to give the maximum sound quality they are capable of. There the manufacturers can charge what they like because they created the acoustic design which the earpads are part of. Third party replacements may alter detrimentally the sound characteristics. I suppose earpads are a bit like the tyres on a car, not a good idea to buy a part worn or cheap remoulds.
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The notion of there being an inherent sound quality to a pair of headphones is a fallacy, though. Look through the scientific literature on measured variation in the head-related transfer function. What you do have is sound quality at the interface of headphone and ear, but here, a pair of mass-produced pads can't be designed to give you in particular a quality of sound. In other words, your physical ear 'alters the sound detrimentally' no matter what, and third-party pads can improve the sound in terms of getting it closer to sennheiser's target curve than what the official pads could. Of course, even if all this weren't true, the manufacturer wouldn't really be justified in hiking prices just because they had a monopoly on spare parts.
 
Apr 2, 2015 at 10:12 AM Post #66 of 72
vid said:
The notion of there being an inherent sound quality to a pair of headphones is a fallacy, though.
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I am confused by this statement, surely Sennheiser's HD800 headphones have an inherently greater sound quality than their HD201 model. Surely third party manufacturers are struggling to make identical earpads to Sennheiser's and would not know what Sennheiser's target curve was, let alone be able to improve on it.
 
Apr 2, 2015 at 11:06 AM Post #67 of 72
Don't be confused, look up hrtf and for studies on variation in it - somewhat common and accessible knowledge. Or, if it's more convenient, take my word that sound quality varies due to physical factors inherent in the listener, and that those physical factors vary big time from one listener to another, for which reason headphones don't have sound quality - as judged by a listener - independent of that listener's unique physical factors. So, headphones have no inherent sound quality except in very broad strokes that exceed the large variation in the hrtf, and a pair of headphones for which sennheiser didn't come around your house to measure your ear for won't achieve quite the sound quality that sennheiser intended, rather more or less deviating from it, and up to by quite a lot.
 
As far as whether this or that headphone has a sound quality better than something else - not really the topic, but the question to ask is which real-world phenomenon does the percept of sound quality derive from, and explore it from there.
 
Apr 2, 2015 at 3:06 PM Post #69 of 72
No, all companies are competing in a race to the top.  How many brands have headphones over £500, quite a few now as opposed to 10yrs ago. The market is is ripe for us snake oil lovers.
 
Apr 2, 2015 at 6:31 PM Post #70 of 72
I don't see a race here, though. Most of the frequency range was conquered in the 70s and 80s. Modern incarnations have better bass extension, but I'm not sure that there's much more to it. You could of course race to passive, adaptive eq, ie. the best implementation of automatically sensing the hrtf and letting the user choose from a range of responses. Haven't seen that yet.
 
Apr 2, 2015 at 6:53 PM Post #71 of 72
Well we're all in it for the money, unless we're monks of course. Everyone's already said it before me, R&D, material cost, cost of labor, and then on top of that you need to make enough money to perpetuate your company. I'd say that the rate of return, percentage wise falls pretty steeply after about $200-500. I haven't done any real research, so it'd be cool if we got all the numbers and rated headphones based on their cost to make related to their sound ratio, but I'm gonna guess it'd be a pretty hated and disputed graph, made up almost entirely of personal opinion. Are 1K and above headphones worth it? If you're willing to spend the money, yup, and in comparison to audiophile speakers, absolutely. 
 
Apr 2, 2015 at 7:44 PM Post #72 of 72
Actually, I think that there is no fixed price for the good headphones at a certain level. We buy it cause we love the voice and can't buy this voice from any other products. So we spent our money. In another way of thinking, good headphones can't be sold much, so the products are only for a relatively few people. So the price should be high to keep the company's business.
 
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