[estreeter]

I'm still stunned by the fact that Koss seem to have very few serious cans other than the Portapro and these 'stats, and both are vintage designs. Shades of the Bose 901, without the hassles around amping and placement. Refreshingly, I haven't seen a single report claiming that the ESP-950 is overhyped - the same cant be said of the vintage Bose design. 

 

[kevin gilmore]

The fact that koss is still in business given the embezzlement from the former CEO
is astounding.  It will probably take a few more years for them to be strong enough
to come up with new product.
 
OK, VP of finance.  I was too lazy to look it up.

 

[milosz]

Quote:

The fact that koss is still in business given the embezzlement from the former CEO
is astounding.  It will probably take a few more years for them to be strong enough
to come up with new product.

Actually it wasn't the CEO; it was the V.P. of Finance.  She's in jail now.  She embezzled $34 million.  Pretty incredible. All that cash, and she didn't even have a DIY-T2.  
 
Here's a news story about the matter http://www.jsonline.com/business/108706789.html
 
It's really a shame that this happened. You'd think someone - like her boss Michael Koss  - would have noticed $34,000,000 missing.....  
 
I worked for Koss for a while in the '70s. They are a decent company, treat their employees pretty well, do good things for the Milwaukee community and so on.  

 

[milosz]

In the article on the sentencing of the Koss embezzler, one finds the following item:
 
(Judge) Adelman ordered Sachdeva to make restitution of the $34 million, at a rate of $500 per month.
 
It will take her 5,667 years to pay the money back. 

 

[Chodi]

I find it impossible to believe that one employee acting along in a company of that size could steal 34 million dollars unnoticed. Koss is not Apple or Google or any other multi-billion dollar company. A loss of that size, especially 5 million in 3 months, should have been obvious unless the company management are completely out to lunch. This report is truly amazing incompetence on the part of management.

 

[obobskivich]

I find it impossible to believe that one employee acting along in a company of that size could steal 34 million dollars unnoticed. Koss is not Apple or Google or any other multi-billion dollar company. A loss of that size, especially 5 million in 3 months, should have been obvious unless the company management are completely out to lunch. This report is truly amazing incompetence on the part of management.

She was their finance controller - she handled all of the numbers at the end of the day (remember that Koss is fairly small, like 200 employees or thereabouts, so it's conceivable she was in a department of maybe a few people, and she was the boss). I'm not saying that makes it okay, but it's not that much of a stretch if you think about it. And she didn't steal 34 million dollars unnoticed - she went to jail for it.

Regarding a new Koss product - I'm not sure. I agree with Kevin that if they wanted to do something today, they'd have to wait a while (then again, they have just released a few new products, like the Striva), but given that the ESP/950 survived the 1990s and 2000s unchanged, I'm not sure they are even in the "wanted to do something" phase. Either that, or they've cooked up something really insane, and they're just biding their time and plotting. :tongue_smile:

Unrelated to that:

The ESP/950 are a great thing to wake up with. We need a 950 smiley.

 

[singh]

its really surprising , inspite of all this they dont have the mindset of a small company, they have superb customer care and Lifetime warranty.
 
when i got the ESP950, it had the problem of squealing noise in both channels, i emailed them regarding it and how to proceed. Got a reply next day that i will have to send it to them by FedEx, and they will cover the shipping both ways ( mind that i am from india , fedex shipping costs around 200 one way ). I have never had this type of service with my other gear, most only cover return shipping.
 
As for me sending the Headphone, i have postponed it, as the squealing noise went down and vanished with time. It keeps sometimes, but if with use this does not die down, ill send them to Koss.

 

[obobskivich]

its really surprising , inspite of all this they dont have the mindset of a small company, they have superb customer care and Lifetime warranty.

when i got the ESP950, it had the problem of squealing noise from both channels , i emailed them regarding it and how to proceed. Got a reply next day that i will have to send it to them by FedEx, and they will cover the shipping both ways ( mind that i am from india , fedex shipping costs around 200 one way ). I have never had this type of service with my other gear, most only cover return shipping.

As for me sending the Headphone, i have postponed it, as the squealing noise , went down and vanished with time. It keeps returning sometimes , but if with use this does not die down ill send them to koss.

WOW. That's absolutely impeccable service right there!

I mean, I've always been treated right by Koss, but that's just another level of service! :eek:

 

[estreeter]

Quote:

its really surprising , inspite of all this they dont have the mindset of a small company, they have superb customer care and Lifetime warranty.
 
when i got the ESP950, it had the problem of squealing noise in both channels, i emailed them regarding it and how to proceed. Got a reply next day that i will have to send it to them by FedEx, and they will cover the shipping both ways ( mind that i am from india , fedex shipping costs around 200 one way ). I have never had this type of service with my other gear, most only cover return shipping.
 
As for me sending the Headphone, i have postponed it, as the squealing noise went down and vanished with time. It keeps sometimes, but if with use this does not die down, ill send them to Koss.

 
The Amazon page for the 950 has several accounts like yours - given that its a low volume product (and their flagship to boot), I have to ask whether they would better served by improving quality control than leaving it to their exemplary customer service. Even on a thousand dollar headphone (ok, system), I cant see how it makes financial sense for Koss to absorb those Fedex costs (they would presumably have a corporate account, but it would still be expensive). 
 
Just sayin'. 

 

[obobskivich]

The Amazon page for the 950 has several accounts like yours - given that its a low volume product (and their flagship to boot), I have to ask whether they would better served by improving quality control than leaving it to their exemplary customer service. Even on a thousand dollar headphone (ok, system), I cant see how it makes financial sense for Koss to absorb those Fedex costs (they would presumably have a corporate account, but it would still be expensive). 

Just sayin'. 

I don't think it's a QC issue (in other words I don't think they send out knowingly defective drivers), I think it's a longevity issue related to dust/debris uptake. Kind of like how Grado headphones can get "Grattle" - the drivers on the factory floor are 100% AOK, but after usage they may acquire problems that require replacement. I'm not sure if Koss is able to fix this or not. Based on the S/N on my units, I think it's fair to say there are at least 100,000 pairs of ESP/950 and at least 1,000 pairs of ESP/10 in the world (assuming the S/N are sequential), and I've only ever heard of maybe 100 different complaints of squeal on the 950. If you could look at the Koss internal data my guess is that it's probably only a few % that acquire the problem, but for whatever reason the "typical Koss ESP owner" doesn't seem to correlate very well with the "typical Head-Fi member."

Now, OTOH, if all 100,000 pairs eventually are going back and being replaced - that's a little insane.

 

[milosz]

Quote:

I find it impossible to believe that one employee acting along in a company of that size could steal 34 million dollars unnoticed. Koss is not Apple or Google or any other multi-billion dollar company. A loss of that size, especially 5 million in 3 months, should have been obvious unless the company management are completely out to lunch. This report is truly amazing incompetence on the part of management.

They do a total of about $39 million a year, so, yeah, for someone to steal $34 million over a few years un-noticed it certainly seems that all the executives were out to lunch. The geniuses in the executive suite (Chief Financial Officer and the CEO) only learned of this problem when American Express pointed it out to them.  Koss' shareholders are suing the executive management, accusing  them  of being incompetent.
 
A manager of McDonald's would be fired if someone under him stole $100 and he didn't find out about it, but here we have a CEO with a published salary of $550,000 who 'didn't notice' that someone stole $34 million from a company with a total market capitalization of $35 million. Where can I get a job like that?
 
The whole situation is sad. The V.P. of finance who went to jail has serious problems with alcohol and shopping addiction, and now she will sit in jail for about 6 year if she gets paroled. Regardless of issues of her 'responsibility' for the whole mess, it's a sad way for a person to end up. She destroyed a good part of her own life, not to mention that the money she took cheated many people including hard working employees and shareholders. It's also bad for the local Milwaukee community, Koss supports a lot of stuff like the Milwaukee Symphony and I'm sure that has been cut back. It sure seems to me that if the people in charge had been paying attention that this thing could have been stopped before it went so far.
 
Well, even though all this happened, Koss still makes a good product in the ESP-950.  And it does seem like Koss is picking up and moving on, they don't seem to be contemplating going out of business or anything like that.

 

[estreeter]

Quote:

They do a total of about $39 million a year, so, yeah, for someone to steal $34 million over a few years un-noticed it certainly seems that all the executives were out to lunch. The geniuses in the executive suite (Chief Financial Officer and the CEO) only learned of this problem when American Express pointed it out to them.  Koss' shareholders are suing the executive management, accusing  them  of being incompetent.
 
A manager of McDonald's would be fired if someone under him stole $100 and he didn't find out about it, but here we have a CEO with a published salary of $550,000 who 'didn't notice' that someone stole $34 million from a company with a total market capitalization of $35 million. Where can I get a job like that?
 
The whole situation is sad. The V.P. of finance who went to jail has serious problems with alcohol and shopping addiction, and now she will sit in jail for about 6 year if she gets paroled. Regardless of issues of her 'responsibility' for the whole mess, it's a sad way for a person to end up. She destroyed a good part of her own life, not to mention that the money she took cheated many people including hard working employees and shareholders. It's also bad for the local Milwaukee community, Koss supports a lot of stuff like the Milwaukee Symphony and I'm sure that has been cut back. It sure seems to me that if the people in charge had been paying attention that this thing could have been stopped before it went so far.
 

 
Gotta disagree on the 6-year sentence - she got off lightly given that she was literally shopping with people's livelihoods. As anyone who watches a redundancy coming while the execs shuffle deckchairs on the Titanic, its not hard to see how some people lose it when they get fired from a company like that. 
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Madoff
 
Madoff was the darling of Wall St, and authorities ignored the man who tried to expose his Ponzi scheme 10 years before he was eventually bought down. 
 
Concerns about Madoff's business surfaced as early as 1999, when financial analyst Harry Markopolos informed the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that he believed it was legally and mathematically impossible to achieve the gains Madoff claimed to deliver. According to Markopolos, he knew within five minutes that Madoff's numbers didn't add up, and it took four hours of failed attempts to replicate them to conclude Madoff was a fraud.^[58] He was ignored by the Boston SEC in 2000 and 2001, as well as by Meaghan Cheung at the New York SEC in 2005 and 2007 when he presented further evidence. He has since published a book, No One Would Listen, about the frustrating efforts he and his team made over a ten-year period to alert the government, the industry, and the press about the Madoff fraud.
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lehman_Brothers
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bear_Stearns
 
 
 
It's not over - not by a long shot:
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldman-Sachs

 

[SteveM324]

Gotta disagree on the 6-year sentence - she got off lightly given that she was literally shopping with people's livelihoods.

Actually she got an 11 year sentence per the article.

 

[estreeter]

My mistake - men have gotten less for killing their wives here in Oz, sadly. 

 

[Chodi]

How the heck does somebody spend $34 million dollars shopping? I actually don't think I could do that if I tried. Let's see...how many Stax 009's would that be? I actually think someone above her level not only knew but was probably in this with her and she took the fall alone. Yes, I know that is just rampant speculation since I have no special knowledge but I ran a company nearly that size for many years and I can tell you that if even $5 million went missing there would have been red lights flashing all over the building. Unless the CEO is a complete idiot, he knew. Just my opinion.