@zach915m : Thank you for the kind words and support! Obviously the end result would not have been as good without your pads as well!
@Hifiearspeakers : The sensitivity is low because the gold we're using for the traces is very thin (and gold is naturally less conductive than silver for example). If we had made the impedance low, similar to LCD-5 or DCA Expanse, the sensitivity would be similar to those. However, because of how we're doing the traces we can't use gold that would be thick enough to get that low in impedance. If we used some thicker silver (as we have in earlier prototypes), the impedance would be in that ballpark (say 20-30 ohms), but based on my experience and feedback we got earlier, the gold traces sound significantly better than silver. For example the prototypes I took to NYC earlier this year were identical other than one being 180 ohm gold and the other being about 25 ohm silver....The silver got very mixed reactions while the gold got praised heavily. Considering how thin the metal is I never would have expected such a significant difference in subjective sound quality between them, but there was. So we decided to pursue the highest sound quality possible at the expense of sensitivity. So that is a long winded way of saying, yes...if we changed the design to lower the impedance significantly it would degrade the sound quality in my opinion. This does certainly limit the use case and market for them, but thankfully there are also several affordable amps that can power them, and cheap amps seem to be getting more powerful all the time.
