While I'm waiting for my Trinity Air & Hunters to arrive I was web searching headphone reviews (as we do) & came across a new US start-up called www.periodicaudio.com
Can't seem to find anything about them on here, but read an interesting post (on a site called audiosciencereview) from one of the owners, Dan Wiggins, which I found very informational. Sounds like he knows his stuff! Here it is:-
"Well, after the Beats explosion (I did some consulting for a big name at that time), nearly every factory in China became "a headphone factory". And suddenly you had dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of brands popping up, selling off-the-shelf product from China.
The big German brands - Sennheiser and AKG - kept plugging along. Bose kept going with ANC specific units. And everyone else tried to focus on consumer products. Everyone wanted to be the next Beats (and truthfully, no one will be. Beats was a unique combination of the re-emergence of the sports-star/music-star glamour with the ubiquity of portable music players/phones to carry decent amounts of music. It was a generational shift in consumer behavior and Beats captured the essence of the behavior).
Now, it's all about marketing - how do you pitch what you have, how to do you tweak an off-the-shelf design. No slam, but a lot of the current darling of high-end over-the-ear headphones started by taking off-the-shelf Foster units and changing out earpads, or headbands, or maybe rear cups. Some move up to doing more - like walking the sample rooms at Foster (which are impressive, especially the Panyu, Guangzhou, China facility to which I've been way too many times), choose a stock transducer, and go for a new industrial design.
And as more and more 2nd and 3rd tier companies are making product in China, they will cover your costs on mechanical design, they will do prototypes for you for free, and lower MOQs to hundreds. So suddenly if you fancy yourself a "headphone designer", you can get into the business for $10,000 and some effort and have a stock of units. And probably - like 99% of those in the market - end up selling dozens a year (or less). So you get a proliferation of brands big (remember SOL Republic?) and small (look at dozens that come and go from one show to the next).
It's really a super-low barrier-to-entry to the market, but to build staying power, to actually succeed long-term, takes more than just a slick marketing gimmick and cheap product (and trust me - you can get off-the-shelf product for really cheap - like planar magnetic headphones for under $40/pr, decent 40mm diameter over-the-ear units for under $20, and OK sounding IEMs for under $5/pair). It's why you can find $4.99 earbuds at your local 7-11 store, and also see $50,000 new units. Heck, even big universities are getting into it, like the Warwick Audio 'stats that many are starting to roll (essentially rebranding an off-the-shelf design from a design team from the University of Warwick) for $5,000 a set. Change the cosmetics, give it a unique name - and presto, you're a headphone/IEM brand!
But as all things acoustical, the biggest effects are in the transducers. You can tweak earpads and headbands and rear cups, but you get relatively small changes in performance. Doing a unique driver - something fresh from the ground up - is where big gains are made. Rolling your own transducer takes real engineering chops, some advanced modeling, and lots of sweat. Not many people do this - really, it's AKG (Harman), Sennheiser, Bose (a little), Foster (who designs/builds for LOTS of big names), and then a handful of independent designers/engineers (such as myself). Many of those smaller Chinese factories will "design" their own transducers, but it's usually just taking a well-reviewed product, taking it apart, and cloning the insides as best they can.
I've spent a few decades designing transducers for nearly everyone in the business (I can guarantee my work has been heard, at this time, by everyone in the world - either directly with products like SONOS and Beats and Final, or indirectly via pro work like KRK and Mackie and Event or consumer products by Dell, HP, Apple, or generics from Flextronics and others) and worked with my Periodic partners to do something special. TO do what we have done for dozens of other companies in the past. We wanted to step forward and see if we could do what our clients have done.
Rolling a product from the ground up means more time and effort and more cash, but the results are better. So we started with a clean sheet and went full-focus on the product. Three products, the best we can realize as a platform, and just do sonic changes with the materials chosen. Nothing else. It took us 4 months to realize, but after the time and effort and tooling (which we did not have to remake/redo - we got it right the first time), we came out with something we believe is unique, in terms of performance, price, and positioning. We didn't do the "in thing" which is handfuls of balanced armatures jammed together in a too-small housing, with too-complicated networks. We did what we thought was right - and I think it's going to pay off. The results at least seem to be drawing lots of attraction!"
Dan
Be really interested in anyone's views, maybe by PM preferably, as I don't want to go off Trinity message any more than I just have.
The guy who has his mouth open and screaming is probably who wrote it. Hahaha He looks like he would have bad English.
