Yes, we have discontinued the Gun Metal Empyrean. We are not doing this because of the inconsistency issue. The whole story is, we have not only change the grill color of the Empyrean but changed the complete color scheme and metal finishing.
All three versions of Empyrean shared the same frame in terms of design, structure and materiel. The frame of the new Black Copper and Jet Black are identical, they are black in color, sand blasted and then anodized, They are different from the original Gun Metal frame which was gray color and with a different finishing.
The supply chain and production process of Empyrean is probably more difficult then most headphone users can anticipate. Some early users probably remember that when we debut the Empyrean at CanJam NYC 2018, the Empyrean was a limited production item. We solved a lot of problems to make it a "regular" product, but it is still the most difficult headphone to produce in our line up.
We have introduced the Black Copper version briefly last year, and we had a difficult time to keep two color schemes in production efficiently. We had to maintain two different production queues and dealers had to handle customer orders according to their preferred color separately. Inevitably this has slowed us down in production, increase the complexity of dealers' inventory and order assignment, and occasionally lead to unhappy customers. We have exhausted our options in 2019 and we still can't built enough Empyrean for our customers. We must improved our efficiency and therefore narrow down to a shared Empyrean frame across two different color options.
We have compared the Gun Metal, Black Copper and Jet black versions carefully and can confirmed that they sound, and measured, identically. Hopefully the new arrangement will solve some of our problem and shorten then waiting list in next few months.
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