I’m a contractor for Sennheiser (check my sponsor tags), and when I talk to internal employees they are elated by this turn of events, especially with another audio company like Sonova that respects and wants to preserve what Sennheiser has done, and wants their consumer presence to grow.
The IE 900 has been in the works for a few years, but that should demonstrate that they’re very much participating in the high end market, and confident that they can take on the cost and responsibilities of launching a new flagship product.
As far as marketing goes, I’m here to interact and provide a connection with company and community, product managers and engineers with the audio enthusiast. I’ve been on Head-Fi for a long time, and I do my own independent stuff too, but since September I’ve been given more resources, and even more recently now I also get to work with
@ericpalonen, who is a returning veteran from the HD 800 launch days (I still see tons of people with HD 800 Avatar pictures! I’m trying to get the graphic designers to make more avatar images for the new products).
I’ve always appreciated the Sennheiser honesty and more... quiet confidence in the products sound speaking for itself, you could say. Makes it easy to feel good about working with them! That part of Sennheiser’s DNA won’t change, but I have always felt there was an opportunity to share more about how innovations directly lead to the advanced sound of Sennheiser, and who is behind the creation of these headphones. I get to talk to Jermo Koehnke and other people in the company, and they’re teaching me stuff all the time about Helmholtz resonators (there’s 3 of them precision milled into the enclosure of the IE 900, and there’s even a cool interactive on the product page where you can see how each one affects the frequency response), IFL (In Front Localization), the differences between diffuse field targets and studio field targets (Harmon targets), etc... but also stories about how they often find highly skilled headphone assemblers in women who were previously hair dressers, with amazing manual dexterity. Stories like that, I believe people would enjoy reading them! Good news is that Sennheiser has continued marching to the beat of their own drums, but here on Head-Fi you may have noticed that we’re starting to do live streams, sharing music, and increasing the content we bring to you
Hope to see people at CanJam SoCal this year!