Edit: about the brand existence, there actually are some publications and audio show presences dating back to 2015 or so (on the web page), so at least this appears to be a legitimate attempt rather than a scam (my bad if this is just me not knowing a famous player in the high end speaker market!)
Edit 2:
@Jon L , thank you for the pic below, it is indeed a flat ribbon cable
Edit 3: the stereophile 2015 ssi show report posted on the publication page (
http://www.soltanusacoustics.com/publications/#group_964-5) mentions about Zoltan Mikovity, based of serbia, who started in by refurbishing some old quad estat units. The headphones appear to use the same dual driver ( low+high frequency ) design as used for the estat loudspeaker presented at the show.
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The website mentions about rigid copper wire mesh for the stator.
Maybe the product is well engineered and built but the following makes me a bit dubious (in no particular order):
- The claimed rigidity of a "rigid" copper wire mesh (even if segmented as it seems)
- The method used to ensure dust stays out of the capsule if the user truly can indeed replace the membrane himself
- The method used to tension the membrane (critical to control the free air resonance frequency and max displacement under load I think) if the user truly can indeed replace the membrane himself
- The mention itself about the user replacing the membrane easily: is this headphone or the step up transformer amp sold with prone to cause arcing? Or is it simply the same dreaded parasitic noise and imbalance issue of unsealed capsule?
- What seems like a large amount of acoustic damping used either sides of the driver (is that for acoustic purpose or just to make it look elegant or to hide the misery behind?)
- Along a similar line, the gorgeous pictures of the assembled product but absolutely nothing of the insides (is there something to hide?)
- No picture of cable but the plug would perhaps indicate a round cable without spacing between traces yet the capacitance (90pf) sounds very low
- The step up transfomer without any internal pics or details about how safe behavior is unsured (after all you are swinging hundreds of volts very nearby the skin...)
- The claim that the headphone are the heritage of other high quality speaker designs yet the brand itself seems like it just came out of the woods 3 days ago (makes it look like a cover-up attempt to hide a 1 man garage operation or worse yet a quick cash grab scheme based on vaporware)
I think there were a few more when I browsed through yesterday but probably sufficient to illustrate how skeptical I am at this early stage... Hopefully the manufacturer can step in and correct the above as, after all it’s nice to have an alternative to stax and especially coming at it from a fresh look without locking oneself into the same proved out designs (we don’t need a stax ersatz).
So, who is going to take one for the team
? On another site, I am sure some famous stat zealot is already planning to take this apart so maybe I do a google search next
.
