I don’t mean to be presumptuous. I know next to nothing about design, even less about engineering (which is to say nothing), and I have no experience in running a company.
My limited understanding, from talking to people and doing lots of reading, is that Raal Requisite has established for itself a stellar reputation for making exceptionally strong, high-quality products even as it has also brought to market one of the most revolutionary headphones of the past few years (and perhaps even in the last generation or two), thanks to the innovation of combining ribbon drivers with the SR1a’s open-baffle earspeakers.
The SR1a is a relatively expensive item, to be sure. But it seems to warrant its price not only in terms of build quality but also in terms of sound quality. It’s also worth noting that many of the replacement parts are affordable (like the ribbons themselves) and apparently easy to install (unlike, say, the headband or drivers for the Focal headphones, for instance). One also assumes the price of the earspeakers reflects a considerable investment in research and development, especially for a company that may not have quite the resources of Sennheiser, much less of Sony. And it’s worth noting that with further, ongoing innovation we now have more affordable devices with which to drive the SR1a (and the new circum-aural headphones).
I’d love to see new iterations of Raal Requisite’s technology - and the company’s approach to music reproduction - being brought to a wider audience. The $2.5K USD price point does this. It also has the opportunity to be disruptive to the market, which, alas, has in recent years seemed to follow a trend of rising prices in line with what the market will bear. (It’s preposterous that we now have IEMs, for instance, that cost not just $3K but also beyond even $6K).
I understand the argument that the cost of headphones can be dictated by the market, or that it’s fine for people with the means to buy extraordinarily expensive items. Sure. I myself spent the extra to buy a pair of the limited edition African Blackwood ZMF Vérité because they’re gorgeous, I adore the sound of those headphones, and they’ll last me a lifetime. But there are two dimensions to the luxury market that is high-end audio: the image over substance segment, encapsulated potentially by
these headphones (I've not heard them), certainly
these ones, or even
these (lol), and the segment that provides truly valuable products (and I mean valuable in both senses of the word - as “worth a great deal of money” and also as “extremely important”). Raal Requisite already has a solid reputation for making truly valuable products, and I look forward to auditioning the new circum-aural headphone and being able to afford it.
...and why?its easy in 2022
Simplicity not
