Quote:
It's disingenuous at best, misrepresentation at worst on Audeze's part to claim QC has improved over LCD-2 when cursory evidence suggests production issues
Holy cow, this thread has gone off the rails. Since no one posting in this thread is privy to the internal Audeze design specifications, quality procedures or key process indicators for the LCD-3 or the company at large, I don't think that any such claims like the above can be made. Who says that Audeze has
not met internal guidelines for improved quality? Maybe it was worse before? Do you have access to every pair of LCD-2 and -3 internal quality test results? I believe it is more likely that due to the nature of the product, Audeze may have quite a wide band of what is considered acceptable and that the shown performance of a majority of these units indeed fell within that acceptable band, thus the quality is significantly improved compared to the past.
Look, like it or not, these are bleeding edge products, made in very small batches and assembled with significant amount of human processing touches at multiple manufacturing steps. If there wasn't variation in these first lots, I would be beyond surprised, personally. I find it likely that Audeze and their suppliers were under tremendous pressure to get these products into the market as soon as the majority of processes and materials were close to, but not quite, perfected yet. This includes sourcing new materials/vendors that may not be consistent and hiring new personnel to build to build them, who may not yet have the expertise in all phases in order to have the robotic R&R needed for these plot to line up the way some of you seem to demand. As soon as the LCD-3 was announced, they were damned if the released too soon (for perceived "quality" issues) or damned if they didn't (for raising expectations and then delaying to market).
For these reasons and more, discussions of expected "quality" and six sigma for such a product at this point are ludicrous in my opinion. You may as well apply such principles to batches of single malt whiskey, which are
appreciated by the cognoscenti for their variations.
This is the price that you pay for being an early adopter: you get your hands on the product first but you also are more likely to see some/all the warts up close, before smoothing occurs in all manufacturing phases. If you want to complain about being an early adopter, don't be one. Really - if you're surprised or complaining about any of this, what did you expect?
Also, as noted, there is likely personal taste variations in the expectations of what the Audeze house sound exactly consists of for each individual.
Finally, I do appreciate the measurements that have been done, but since there is no common recognized calibration source, method or standard for the various groups presenting data, this too must be greeted with some skepticism, as has been ably pointed out by Tyll and MH.
My personal feeling is that this particular avenue of discussion has veered into post market surveillance for Audeze, as has been noted by others. Introducing objectivity into an inherently subjective experience will cause this unless all participants are equally well informed, equipped and experienced.
edit: In other words, my comment is: treat everything presented here with a huge "FOR REFERENCE ONLY" instead of treating it like a gospel for this product and a praise/condemnation of the company. At this price point, you should try before you buy.
