Hi Bob,
I'm really glad that you are replacing those darn fiddly proprietary connectors. When I went to use an aftermarket cable I was unpleasantly surprised. Unfortunately, I'm still unpleasantly surprised. Jumping from one proprietary standard to another proprietary standard is no way to behave--I really don't care for your it's better response. I understand that you are trying to lower your fail rates, but the answer to that is likely switching to higher quality components and OEMs, not switching to a second proprietary 'solution.' I have a firm dislike of the current Trinity connectors.
I know that there is variance on the pin size of 0.79mm pins and on their sockets, but every other manufacturer either deals with this, or deals with MMCX sockets. Both of these are fine solutions. Don't do the y-split, unless you just really want to piss off a good deal of your customers. Don't make your eco-system incompatible with all the other systems out there. Don't behave like Apple. I don't think you've built that kind of cult following yet.
I think what you need is to partner with better manufacturers, which will cost more money, but now that you've finalized the driver designs of your line-up, you should be able to accomplish this. I also think you need to take care of your BT cable customers. You missed a trick on the BT cable by having it be only with connectors that no other headphones are compatible with. Now because of constantly switching standards, you risk pissing off all your customers, not just the ones who have failed PM4s.
My PM4 sounds fine, but the build quality is not of a high enough standard. I recommend switching your shells to a stronger aluminum or steel. I think people will have threading problems. I recommend having all your IEMs have the same size filters so that there is no possibility of crossthreading. I recommend that if tunings are different for filters they have different colours. If the silver filters on the PM4 and Vyrus don't have the exact same acoustic effects, then they should be different colours. I recommend biting the bullet and switching to 2-pin or MMCX and making the best implementation of that you can. Man was that proprietary connector ill-advised. Now you will have a bunch of cables that won't be useful for any headphone but the Trinity headphones from a nine month period in 2016. I have found that MMCX connectors have tighter tolerances than 2-pin, so it's up to you to make sure the headphone side is durable. Whether the cable fails is less important, as the cables are designed to be replaceable, if a 2-pin socket is warped due to pin size variance, you can't really do anything about that. Most people won't be pulling out their cables constantly, so the failure rate you are talking about will be mitigated.
Best of luck, Bob!
Thanks for the feedback Micah, always appreciated.
However for what plans we have we won't be using the 2 pin or mmcx after we have finished the hunter and master 6 run.
MMCX is naff unless you add major bulk to strengthen it up, 2 pin is nice but again not perfect, in fact no solution is perfect, what we do know is this, with what we plan we will see tiny percentage failure rates, our new cables are much much tougher and if people want fancy cables instead, well they can opt for that at the time of order as we now have our own in-house cable maker guy.
Change will be hard for some to accept, but hey thats life, some won't like it, but when you see how simple it is and what benefits it brings, maybe you will change your mind.
Also there will be a 2 year unit warranty (currently 1yr) and a 3 year cable warranty.
We have tried to always listen on head-fi and we have tried to accommodate so much and cater for almost every option we have made it almost impossible for ourselves, so we had to draw a line in the sand and say we are going to do it how we think is best.
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