[chaos215bar2]

Jesus...this is spot on. Best post candidate?

Bias is certainly a problem wih audiophiles. Much like trading stocks, thy biggest enemy is thyself.

And the amount of random noises and hyperboles are off-the-chart. Headphone manufacturers hide behind R&D to justify their crazy prices. And people back them up of course to get into the money wagon. The only thing inflating is their wallets. That's why we get $300 worth of headphone selling for $3000 nowadays.

Now overpriced is different from expensive. I got no problem whatsoever with Stax, for example. Some manufacturers earned this high prices. There is a real pedigree to owning Stax or the Orpheus.

Interesting that you end by justifying Stax or Orpheus’s pricing by “pedigree”. I’m certainly not saying you’re wrong, but this has no more effect on performance or sound quality than any of the intangibles you’re worried about audiophiles using to justify their purchases.

 

[omniweltall]

Interesting that you end by justifying Stax or Orpheus’s pricing by “pedigree”. I’m certainly not saying you’re wrong, but this has no more effect on performance or sound quality than any of the intangibles you’re worried about audiophiles using to justify their purchases.

There are headphones that I just fail to see where the justifications are for the price they ask. Basically, in general, headphone prices have gone through the roof.

I have a lot of respect of Stax, even though I'm not into stats. They have been around for a while. And I heard their R&D and cost-to-manufacture is high. And for their SR007 and SR009 lineups, you can see that they are well-designed beautiful products.

 

[Lulu800]

Because people are willing to pay it, that's why. If fewer consumers were willing to pay these absurd prices, these flagships would ultimately be less expensive.

I made this mini rant about the Westone W80's in the OT, that I think is also somewhat pertinent to headphone flagships too.




I find the above especially appeals to some recent Audeze trends and releases as well. The quality control, comfort and reliability of some of their recent flagships is honestly utterly bewildering, verging on pathetic, especially given the prices being charged. I'm also still surprised they're still sticking to the same overall physical design too. You'd think after all their success, they could have come up with a more ergonomic and lightweight design for the newer releases.

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The isine line up needs a EQ cable to shine, so non-EQ'd they sound bad. The westones are charging for 2 to 4 drivers more when they W40 + EQ beats them, same with SE535 with EQ. So yeah your mostly just paying for something that just has slightly better tuning which like i said can be done with W40's with some EQ tweaks. Heck even the ER4 line up kinda questions why multi-BA when it was EQ'd it, it sounded better than my SE425/W40. That only a single BA set up.