yeah thats great. i am referring to the fact that the drivers are kind of a consumable. not interested in a product which needs to replace a part regularly. even if they survive 2k hours of movie action through the smyth research realiser. after the 5 years of warranty there are periodic costs and who can ensure that i am able to buy a new set of ribbons in... lets say 10 years?
I totally understand your concerns and I think the same way.
I'll explain my view on this.
It is not a fact that the ribbons are more consumable than anything else that vibrates all the time. The fact is that nothing that vibrates lasts forever, though.
Like any diaphragm that moves, the point is not to go over a certain excursion (where elastic deformation becomes plastic deformation). Until that point you can have billions of cycles, but you can stretch it in an instant if you overdrive it.
Follow the recommended power (100W@8Ohm amp) and excursion will remain below that point.
I have a few ribbons that were working for 1k hrs and still remain like new. I also have a few that are totally sagging after I have severely ovedriven them during testing phases of development. They tend to make popping sounds only on loud bass-effect in movies, so I just reduce the volume and continue...It's not like they became unusable all of a sudden. In any case, my normal pair proved to be less consumable than my Audezes that developed buzzing noises really quickly and I can't do anything to fix them.
Anyhow, we've had wonderful experiences with reliability of our tweeters and we have the best customer care ever in the industry:
For 4+ years now, we send free replacement ribbons to RAAL tweeter owners, no questions asked. With more that 12k tweeters out there, we don't send out more than 7-8 pairs per year. The cost of doing that means nothing to us at such insignificant failure rate.
I did the best I could in trying to engineer the same reliability. We will do the same kind of customer care policy if the reliability proves to be similar. Or if failure rates become significant, we could make them cheap enough that replacement after a few years is a non-issue.
That is only related to the manufacturing volume. As we get faster and more skilled in manufacturing of the ribbon cartridges, we will reflect that into customer care. We just want to see how it goes and after a while we'll act accordingly, but we sure won't leave you hanging.
As with ribbon tweeters, we will become the most serious players in headphone industry, as well. We did some outrageous things in the past and we'll do it again.
Even at our start, we are the only ones that make repairable headphones. Not because we expect them to fail, but because I like things that are repairable. This is a dying feature for any product nowadays and I hate that, so I'm fighting it. I like good tools and I like to have the full control over things I use. My Weller soldering stations are not user repairable because they're bad, but because they're good tools and I can't remember when we replaced a heater on one of those. I especially don't like that companies that make things I use have the control over my time. I hate sending things back and waiting to get it repaired as it always takes more than necessary amount of time.
Ribbon headphones are my baby, my life's work. I certainly wont let them become a flop because of reliability issues, if any. The thing is out and there's no turning back now. They must give you a feeling of a good tool. We'll simply do what it takes to make these a legendary product and customer satisfaction is a major ingredient to make it such.
I could go on and on about this, but don't want to choke you to death...
