Hmm... That's going to be polarising - looks like it's trying way too hard - disparate styling ideas all trying to say 'I am a high quality product'. The wood doesn't add anything - except to highlight how awkward the screen looks set into it (especially the smaller one) - black leather was better at helping it integrate & maintained the 'hip-flask idea. That huge full-length logo is really crude too.
When will marketing teams outside of A***e realise that sometimes less really is more?
All that said, it's still one of the things I'm especially interested to see (& hopefully hear) 'in the flesh' at CANJAM UK.
Well, if you want to talk shop...
Apple does their design the way they do because they are catering to a specific market that is absolutely enormous. Their minimalist design allows them to appeal to a broader range of people, while still allowing room to make their product look hip and chique. It's the "popular" look.
But not everyone was a popular kid in high school
All metaphors aside, the real audio enthusiast market is a lot more specific than Apple's target customer, which is basically 1 in 4 people in the world.
Echobox doesn't care about selling to 1 in 4 people, because we know we can't. I mean don't get me wrong, if I thought I could sell as many Explorers as Apple has sold iPhones, I'd probably take a few more of their styling cues. And I recognize that we will lose a sale here and there because of the design. But we know our market
and if you look through the responses, most people in this thread are pretty stoked about the wood and overall design. It probably looks like it's "trying too hard" to you because it's just not your taste, and that's fine! To me, products that look like that hyper-minimalist Apple style are the ones that look like they're trying too hard - to me it reeks of the kind of pretension that has rich snobs matching their silk undies with monogrammed pocket squares
But to each their own!
Obviously I'd love it if you bought an Explorer anyways
and I will tell you we're working on a more minimalist, albeit still unqiue, alternative design, but really, the Explorer is a player that's designed for a more specific type of person than an iPhone - people who want a distinctive high end device that very clearly doesn't skimp on materials or build quality, while still delivering the performance that an audiophile using $200-$1000 headphones or earphones can hear when they compare it to a smartphone or iPod. We don't want to just make another slab or metal box - that's what everyone else is doing, with some minor variations at the very top-end. We think that audiophilia is a unique hobby, and that the devices should be just as unique as the hobby itself - I mean *** look at the HD800! It looks like it sat on an alien's lab desk until some dude who got abducted for an anal probing swiped it while the aliens were out to lunch
And we all know that not everyone would wear a pair of Mad Dogs or EL8s out in public, but those of us who do wear them proudly!
Point is, we're not Apple, and we're not trying to be, either. The Explorer isn't about looking super cool or impressing your friends or making your desk into a physical representation of how much you have your **** together. It's about being a damn good player at an affordable price that is interesting, the kind of thing that you would see someone with out on the street and, if you're that curious type of person, ask them what the hell it is, get curious, wind up trying some headphones that ACTUALLY sound good, and maybe six months later wind up on Head-Fi looking for a used pair of HD650s or a UERM for reshell in the classifieds.
Because that's our real mission - we want to bring hifi to people who have never heard of it, or can't afford the super shiny Apple-ready gear that looks like it came out the ass end of a perfection-calculating robot. And not just the people who want to fit in and be "cool" by having something others don't, but the people who have their own sense of style, who recognize something cool and unique when they see it. Personally, I feel like the Explorer is the kind of gadget people will keep for years and years, and show off to their kids some day when all portable tech is integrated into a holograph-projecting contact lens that is controlled by brain impulses communicated through a neural implant, and say, "Man, look at this...we used to have these cool gadgets with interesting designs - now it's all in your head!"
