Says who? You have no idea what their R&D and overhead costs are. You don’t work for them and you’re not an auditor.
Correct. Which is why I pointed exactly that out in my post.
All this cost speculation being pawned off as fact is getting ridiculous.
I agree. And claiming the price is purely the result of R&D is exactly that, and I've seen that twice now. I wanted to provide a counter point. The more willing we are to pay the ever increasing prices, the more price hikes we will see, in part because engineers will get lazy and not think of clever ways to keep the price down.
If you don’t want them, don’t buy them. If you think they’re too pricey, don’t buy them. But people need to stop acting like they have the first clue about their budget and expenses.
If they are indeed the best closed back headphones in the world, as Alex Grell says he believes, then being a bit more pricy than other contenders (e.g. Ether C Flow at $1800) is not completely unreasonable, especially taking into account that Sennheiser frequently does sales, while MrSpeakers never does.
That to me is a lot more plausible than the R&D for a headphone with an already existing driver cost as much or more than the R&D for the whole first headphone that had the driver. But sure, I could be wrong. Just like the other people speculating.
Good points. I think the inclusion of the balance cable is a key reason why the HD800S cost $300 more. It costs more than that if you buy that cable by itself.
Fair point, though they also save by not having to put it in it's own little box. And Focal somehow managed to include three different cables in the $1,500 Focal Clear package. Well, and Audio Technica in their $150 M50x. *shrug*
We still have a lot to learn about the HD820 including how it sounds. Hopefully it will be a pleasant surprise and make the cost easier to justify.
I'm definitely welcoming a market shakeup. They look great, and just the thought of an HD800's sound stage in a closed can is marvelous.
By the way I heard Hifiman's $6000 Susvara at RMAF 2017 and thought the $3000 HE1000 v2 sounded better with same amp same music.
I heard it briefly at the SF Head-Fi meetup hooked up to a DNA Stratus, I think, and it sounded fine, but not mindblowingly so, as I would have expected based on the price tag. That was the first day I heard anything more expensive than $1200, though, so that's by no means an informed review.
I heard the HD800S on their new Senn amp and it seemed at the same level as the HE1000 v2. I really see no justification for what Hifiman is charging for the Susvara. Senn is still keeping things reasonable by comparison.
Agreed. It's awesome for them to be able to increase the price more than (probably) necessary and still seem modest in comparison. They'd be stupid not to.
In this "some tuning" there is a world of engineering.
Certainly. As much as a brand new driver? That would be surprising, but who knows what unobtainium the absorption chambers are made of.
This really is a mute argument. I think that the closed version is always the most challenging to make. Closed design has to conquer far more unwanted physical side-effects.
Seems to me that Dan (Mrspeakers) created the closed versions first, did the big junk of "closed design problems R&D" prior to making an open version of the headphone. The only thing you prove here is that it's not too hard to make a good open headphone starting from a closed design. R&D for the closed design problems might have rendered a ton of useful data, plus there's far less physical limits to overcome. To keep the costs down, why not share more elements of the chassis, like bass ports that don't serve any purpose as you say (or might they?) - they also don't negatively affect the sound, so no harm in keeping designs more alike. Designing a cup that minimalises reflections is a hell of a task. Making an open version is quite a breath of fresh air: remove the cup and basically almost all your reflections are gone at once.
This tells nothing about a transition in the other direction. A design without bass ports suddenly needs those, suddenly there are those nasty reflections and resonances plaguing the sound... these challenges are still unsolved.
So I'm rather inclined to say:
Making an open headphone from a closed design is basically just removing the cup (yeah, over simplified: and compensating the lost seal hence bass,...): true.
Making a closed headphone from an open design is just putting a cup on it? Not in the least bit true.
True. It should still be easier than making an entire new headphone with a new driver, like they did with the much cheaper, and much older HD800. If that design had been so unsuitable for a closed can, the HD820 wouldn't have the same basic shape and driver. Otherwise that higher price would be way more understandeable, actually.
I'm not at all trying to say that it was trivial to pull this off, and that they didn't do this better than other manufacturers. I'm excited about it, and it's a continuation of their efforts with the IE800, which also has absorption chambers. Sennheiser isn't completely new to this.
I don't know if it has something to do with way planar magnetic drivers work vs electrodynamic drivers, but doesn't that seem to happen more often with planars than with dynamics? That differences between a closed and open variant are minimal because it's a little easier to tune the same driver for the differences between open and closed? I'm thinking in particular of the Fostex T20/T40/T50 RP series.
Quite possible, I have no idea.
