Why do TOTL headphones cost the same as TOTL speakers?

The headphone price insanity drove me to develop my own planar driver and all other associated headphone parts. The multimillion dollar laboratory grade production facility required (because I had no interest in going to China) to do things right ended my ambition to bitchslap headphone makers.

Manufacturers who already own such facilities via other ventures (Focal speakers) are price gouging.

There certainly isn't a $5800 per unit difference in BOM, manufacturing or, R&D between a Sus and HE400.

None of this will change as long as half the H-F crowd gets a boner and starts selling crack in order to finance the latest multi-kilobuck headphone.

 

Another headphone centric phenomena. I believe borne out of all headphones being a so flawed at all price points. This one sounds open and airy, but this one has slamming bass, and this one is thick and gooey but lacks on technicals etc.

It is, and I think it skews younger. If someone starts in headphones they probably don't even have a point of reference for what good sound is. So what they aspire to is vague, distorted, and meandering.

If you look at internal photos of speakers at scaling price points from the same manufactuer you'll see there isn't much. Bigger or stronger type of magnet (maybe), more expensive cone or dome materials (maybe), and better bracing. With floor standers at least there's actually more and/or larger drivers. The rest for the most part a nice external finish, unless they get funky with the cabinet design.

Knowing how things could look, and their associated challenges, serves as an important point of reference for what our expectations as consumers should be.

However if you have a lot more to say in depth please start a thread focused on headphone technology, I would follow it in perpetuity. It could become one of the more important threads here. Covering things like multi driver, advancements in graphene production, possibilities for larger dynamic drivers, and anything else with the potential to move headphones forward.

What diaphragm material within headphone constraints could withstand that level of magnetic force without causing breakup and distortion?

Good sound above and beyond all else. The concierge type services you propose I expect would be an absolute time sink and unsustainable as a business grows. Particularly trying to tune something to one individuals preference, especially if they haven't a clue what they're talking about, it could become an endless endevour.

 

Are they, though? Because the only people I see looking at these ultra-expensive headphones are the people who are deep into headphones as a hobby. Randos buy $200-300 headphones one time and then never think about it again.

I think there are two ways of looking at expensive headphones from the consumer side:

1. There are a certain number of people who are into audiophile stuff as a hobby, and they have such-and-such an amount of money to spend without feeling guilty about it. Whether they spend it on speakers or headphones is kind of just a detail (and tbh, headphones might be easier due to needing less family negotiation stuff, as they don't have the same impact on a room). So once you get into the hobby market, speakers and headphones will settle out at about the same price. For these people, the budget is the constraint, and they want the best whatever-it-is within their budget constraint.

2. There are a certain number of people who want The Best(tm) of anything, and will pay whatever to get it, and if that means $100K speakers and $5K headphones, they're fine with it. If you look at things this way, you'd expect mass-market "good" headphones to be cheaper than mass-market "good" speakers, and mass-market TOTL headphones cheaper than mass-market TOTL speakers, which seems true.

I think both of these perspectives are partly true -- and importantly, they both push toward high-end headphones getting more and more expensive up to a certain point. (Beyond a certain point, the first one stops being relevant as it's above most people's audiophile hobby budget, but the second stays a factor in pushing prices up.)

(It's still somewhat bemusing to me, because when I got into headphones, the most expensive ones you could buy were the $300 HD-600 headphones, and that seemed almost obscene to most people. I used to have to spend a lot of time arguing that actually they were a steal compared to speakers that sounded not-as-good at 5x the price.)

 

It's not just TOTL speakers. The Omega full rangers I have will take a steaming dump over any headphone at all in all aspects of sound repro above 60hz, and they're $600. Add a fast sub (Rythmik, Omega, REL) and you're in a totally different world for less than $1500. It's just not even comparable, I don't see the value proposition in headphones at all. Only pair I use now is a Senny HD25 for out and about.

 

The problem is it's a shared market. You have rich people determining the price standards for products poor people buy. Yes, you can buy a $200 pair of headphones, but if you want something that is going to bring the most out of your favorite recordings (something everyone should be able to experience), you are at the mercy of a guy who is in a different tax bracket than you, because he can spend whatever the manufacturer wants to swindle out of him. So if rich guy Dave and poor guy Steve both want a Utopia, Steve is at the mercy of Dave's influence.

The housing market is more fair. Materials cost what they cost, so if poor guy Steve wants a house, he is going to have to settle for a small shack with subpar amenities. Rich guy Dave pays more, but he is literally getting MORE. More square footage, (literally) better materials, better amenities, better/more scenic location, etc.

With the headphone market you are not getting MORE, as much as you are getting DIFFERENT. There is a glass ceiling with this stuff, as performance thresholds are real, and a Utopia is not $3.5k better than an HD650 in the sense that you are still just sticking a small thing on your head and listening to sound. Unlike a house, nothing gets bigger or more convenient the higher up you go. It just gets maybe more nuanced if you are nitpicking. And an HD650 on a TOTL amp probably outperforms a Utopia on a mid-fi amp! So ultimately how is the $4K being justified? And I don't care about some carbon fiber blah blah whatever on headphones, as it doesn't translate to performance increases like on sports cars.

It comes down to the whole "I want four cars in my driveway instead of two" approach to life, where corporations must continue to grow as part of some shareholder agreement. Like a black hole just sucking everything in for no rhyme or reason.

I think it's going to come down to this stuff being continually called out and put on blast by online communities. We have a lot of power now. And then garage operations like ZMF, ETA, Schiit, etc. replacing the big, bloated mega corps and their "muh capitalism" approach to everything (I'm a fan of capitalism btw, just not the kind that involves using cheat codes). Kind of how youtube is slowly becoming the defacto choice for alot of people's entertainment needs, pushing out the Hollywood middle man. I'm still not a fan of $2K headphones, but I understand why Zach/ZMF does it.

The used market is a god send, since money stays within the community, rather than going into the pockets of manufacturers to continually justify their price gouging.

 

See, that's the thing. No driver under the sun is going to cost more than a couple hundred dollars per unit to make after R&D and that's an extremely high and generous estimate, in most cases probably an order of magnitude less. A plastic enclosure that's well designed can sound just as good as one made with exotic materials, and maybe even be more durable in several cases. From a sound quality and utility standpoint I don't think any headphone ever needs to have more than a $1k pricetag if you're willing to compromise on the jewelry. But the jewelry overtakes the utility rapidly in this industry. People listen and buy with their eyes and not their ears.

Edit - if sitting on a headphone is going to break the headband regardless of whether it's made of exotic materials or plastic, but the exotic one is going to cost you $2000 to replace and the plastic one is going to cost $10 to replace, the exotic materials are really just a liability at that point...

 

Well I don't think the price of headphones are a match with floor standing speakers.

But I think the reason is mainly because of the requirements of room and environment to play with speakers. Without proper environment, it's hard for speakers to give sound positioning. And for people living in places with insane house prices, speaker is almost impossible to use, so headphones have their own competition too.

 

I made a couple pictures that sum up how things are between the speaker and headphone markets

 

This is a pretty complicated discussion. It simply doesn't come down to "what can I get" for anything we sell. There's complicated equations that have a TON more to do than just "this is what it costs to make" and "this is how greedy I'd like to be."

Not only do you have to calculate all the basic information around financials, but you have to estimate and hopefully end up in the ballpark of what your company is going to look like in 6 months, a year, two years, five years, ten years and so on and what that means financially. Add on top of that that you might have success and need to hire a staff, pay them a living wage for your area, give them great benefits etc etc, and then factor in inflation and suddenly it's not so easy anymore.

While I often wish I was by myself, or with one or two other people working on headphones still, the growth of ZMF has allowed me to try things I never would have tried if I didn't have the resources that I do now. It REALLY is a double edged sword, because I could have stayed microscopic, not hired anyone, and taken the lonely path, and kept our headphones below 1000 dollars. But then I wouldn't have been able to scale with demand, and work less than 100 hours a week while still being able to develop new headphones and such. I've always wanted ZMFs to be a career, and not a hobby, and I have to price the headphones to allow for that. BTW I combat prices being too high by only having dealer margins, and no margins for distributors.

Maybe some of you will find offense to this, but I am tired of this "Elephant in the room" discussion I've seen come up over and over. Us business owners all run our companies very differently, and often what is public knowledge is either being made up by another company for their own benefit or by someone looking for attention. At the end of the day are there companies trying to "get what they can?" Probably, but at the same time each company has extremely different circumstance, country of origin, cost and employee structure among other logistics.

Discussion over whether X headphone is a value or not to the market is worthy, but please let's not go on a hunt to figure out which companies are "morally acceptable," as the true answers are not going to found here.

@E_Schaaf I've heard that your headphones are turning out really well, and that's awesome! Congrats and I wish you continued success. I do think it's best you focus on what you're doing, and not others, as if you continue to do great things you're going to have to eat your words.

 

@zach915m just to clarify, I wasn't accusing you of price gouging. I understand your methods, I read it on a different thread a while back, and it makes sense. I still personally don't like the $2K headphone market even if it is logical for certain outfits to do that. That's not me saying you suck, because you don't suck. I lump you in with Schiit, ETA, etc. as one of the good guys.

It's a relevant conversation, and unfortunately we have to speak in generalities because we don't know the ins and outs of every outfit, but that also doesn't mean there isn't an elephant somewhere in the room that needs to addressed.

 

A big reason why I decided to stop at HD 6xx isn’t because I haven’t heard better, but because I’d rather devote my audiophile funds towards speakers.

Maybe the only headphones that make sense to me past $1000 are STAX and the RAAL headphones. A pair of RAAL tweeters are $2k so if the headphones are anywhere close to what their tweeters can do, the price seems sensible especially since it’s a small batch process.

Manufacturing e-stats doesn’t seem the same as planar magnetics. However I also have a feeling the price is inflated due to STAX essentially being the only game in town.

 

Thanks! And I agree - it's worth addressing for sure, but it's a complicated conversation. For small companies like us, reputation is everything, whether it comes from facts or conjecture doesn't matter if the general audience believes it.

And I should clarify - I would never make an argument "why" someone needs to pay X price for any headphone or whether ZMF headphones are even worth it or not. That's a decision that each and every buyer has to decide for themselves. I do believe though, that trying to figure out if the price tag each company places on their products is morally defensible is a much harder one to have without factual information, which varies by outfit.

 

I think you make a lot of good points. From someone who's cycled through a lot of gear, including many flagships. I definitely do think that pricing for some gear can be excessive, especially considering the amount of performance you can squeeze out from some lower priced gems (HD6X0 series, Elex, ect).

While I agree that moving up the chain for the most part is more "different" than "better". I do also think that in a few cases, you do also get "more" and "better" albeit not without trade-offs. At least with the brands I have the most familiarity with (Senn, ZMF, and Focal). Within their own line, I do feel that their TOTL offerings give you a noticeable jump in transient speed and resolution given you have a system that pairs well with them.

As much I love my HD650\580 and as much as they scale insanely well with better gear. Even with the best gear I've tried they've never been able to match an HD800 in terms of those two criteria. This has also been the case with the Utopia, Verite, and ADX5000 within their respective line. IMO, the gap actually gets bigger as you scale up gear. Do I think that makes them more enjoyable overall? Depends on what you're after, but when I owned one, I reached for the HD650 almost every time. Just like I'd rather watch a movie on a well calibrated 1080p plasma vs a decently calibrated 4k OLED. That being said, I generally think you do get better "technical performance" with certain flagships compared to more budget offerings...but these may not be important and certainly don't always make things more enjoyable.

However, I do think the price\performance issue makes even less sense between some flagships. For instance, despite their being a 2k difference between the ADX5000 and Utopia, with the right gear, the performance differences are negligible, and don't always favor the Utopia... IME of course.

 

@zach915m Thank you for speaking up. It's this kind of insight that is most valuable.

I should have clarified, and I think this goes for the others too, that these comments were primarily for manufacturers on the larger end of the scale. Particularly Sennheiser and Focal. Where Audeze and Hifiman are on the scale I'm less certain. I don't expect boutique makers to compete on price, especially in the case of ZMF where you have labour and skill intensive wooden cups.

But you raise something important in that ZMFs pricing is set by being direct-to-customer.

All this being said it is hard to understand from a laymen's perspective the large pricing differences between seemingly similar looking headphones where the primary difference is diaphragm material and sometimes magnet strength.

Of course there are hidden costs we will be completely unaware of also. More so for small manufacturing quantities I expect. For example you once explained how you have to buy a huge amount of Beryllium just to make a small quantity of diaphragms, though I cannot recall what the issue was.

 

@E_Schaaf As much as I want to hear your thoughts on things, I second this, vehemently. At least in public settings.

 

I totally get that it's easier to go after the big guys, but at the same time they employ a lot more people than us and can work in a different way because of the QTY for each run that you mention. I'm sure there's an equation out there that someone could answer who is smarter than me that equates company size, employee size, margin, growth rate with consumer satisfaction per dollar spent. But it's so much easier for me as a continuously headphone buying audiophile to look at each product and consider the value it imposes on me personally.

For example I've always wanted an LCD 4 - and now that they are a bit less because of LCD 5 - I'm on the hunt! But that's my own personal value equation I guess, which will differ for us all.

 

I'm glad you've found speakers that impress you that much, but my experience has been pretty much the opposite of that -- great headphones do things that I just basically don't get in any of the speakers that I could possibly afford. Maybe I just never heard the right speaker, but I've heard a bunch of speakers, so idk.

Now that I'm up in the Verite Closed price range, they're no longer a stone cold bargain in the way they were when I was paying $300 for headphones, but I'd still rather listen to those headphones than any $2K speaker.

 

The funny thing about the elephant in the room framing is that, at least from a consumer perspective, once you know to look past it, it really isn't there. At least it's not there if you know how to find products that are good, priced well, or hopefully both. Once you know that something's overpriced, you can just pretend it doesn't exist, because for you it shouldn't.

Yeah, I just don't think headphones and speakers are the same thing. Sure they both play music, but I want them for different reasons - speakers are for listening to stuff with other people, headphones are for listening to stuff by myself, while blocking out noise (somewhat) and not bothering other people too much.

Even the spatial presentation is more different than it is worse. At its best it's less "realistic room" and more "geometric mapping around the shape of your head", but something about that works for me.

Really, between speakers, open headphones, and closed headphones, the open headphones are the weird ones to me. But that's another topic.

 

Innovation beyond the incremental. While Head Fi gives the impression that products are improving every month, the puzzling reality is that I can plug in my 1911 antique headphones and have an experience that is only slightly worse than using a 2022 model. The pace of innovation in headphones is among the slowest of any item of consumer technology.

What would be real innovation? An example would be sensors that monitor actual audio output and tune aspects of the headphone accordingly. This has been done for noise cancelling and based on hearing tests, but should be done for high-frequency SQ. Implementation might be sensors that monitor the actual position of the diaphram, and very smart algorithms to tune accordingly.

 

Well, it's marketing economy so price isn't necessarily related with cost, in this case performance is the determining factor.

Same thing comes with the paper/fabric speaker units which are not necessarily cheaper than ceramic/diamond/beryllium ones.