PIONEER Headphone Development- Your input welcome

Discussion in 'Headphones' started by musiqlovr, Feb 8, 2018.

  1. Renekton

    Renekton Acquaintance

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    AAAHA! I WIN! See guyz! See? Marvey only disliked the true noise post, not the ones where I kept it relevant! So why are you all disliking the ones where I am adding my personal experience to this open enquiery thread about what a good headphone should be? Try adding counter points so others can learn your positions. Variety and stuff. Like where exactly do our opinions differ? Otherwise no one learns anything.
     
  2. philipmorgan

    philipmorgan Member of the month

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    This is a not-snarky question: is this really how headphones are designed by the bigger players?

    I'm only familiar with "mood boards" from interior design, where they're used to present a palette of materials to a client for early approval of a design concept.

    Is this how mass market-ey headphones are designed too? Nail down the aesthetics first, then move on to making them sound a certain way?
     
  3. Elnrik

    Elnrik Super Friendly

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    No. You don't. It's not opinion competition time. Dislike earned for not getting it.
     
  4. musiqlovr

    musiqlovr Almost "Made"

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    Well you at least need a direction...I find that too Management usually needs something visual.

    I am in Japan right now, big meeting tomorrow. If I get approval, I will share direction tomorrow...at least a few sneak peeks...

    I can tell you in ear range is from $49-199, over ear is from $99-249 and then there is a very special made in Japan project that starts with one model but could grow to 3-4 models over 2 year period.

    More soon...

    Steve
     
  5. nraymond

    nraymond New

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    I realize I'm a bit late to this thread, but thought I'd throw a few thoughts out there at least for posterity. Things I value in headphones:

    - Treble extension that is not boosted too high (which can initially impress as 'detailed' but is not necessarily and is often fatiguing to listen to in extended listening). Ultrasonic ability (i.e. Hi-Res Audio) is fine but since there's no standardized testing for it either on the album side (to determine if a Hi-Res album has quality ultrasonic audio and mixing) or in headphone reviews (most reviews either discount it entirely or make vague, unscientific emotional claims about it), I can't imagine it would get much engineering attention but if you did find a way to work with quality recordings/mixes that contained ultrasonic sounds (such as what many classical instruments produce) and had a way to double-blind test for good reproduction of those recordings and tune a headphone for that, that would be swell.
    - Bass with good impact, flat or slightly boosted, and extended through the sub-bass region. Sub-bass extension is often overlooked or intentionally designed out of headphones (likely because good sub-bass response can cause physical distortion of the driver and I imagine it's easier to taper off the sub-bass - which a lot of audiophiles accept - than fix the distortion problems).
    - Timbre neutral. While headphones with funky timbre might excite some people for being the latest flavor of the month, non-neutral timbre will severely compromise the ability of a listener to experience believable and natural binarual or ambisonic recordings (those made with microphones in dummy heads, 3D mic arrays, multi-channel sound that has an HRTF applied to it (Dolby Headphone, DTS Headphone, Microsoft Spatial Audio, CMSS 3D, Blue Ripple Sound Rapture3D, the various VR and AR spatial audio solutions that also integrate head tracking, etc.) For music playback testing, you might consider using R.E.M.'s Automatic For The People 25th Anniversary Deluxe Edition (Mixed in Dolby Atmos) played back through a proper Blu-Ray playback chain with a Dolby Atmos for Headphones decoder, and then cross-check it against a proper Dolby Atmos speaker setup in an acoustically treated room.

    Technology like wireless Bluetooth I'm either indifferent to (I have a Bluetooth headphone amp I use if I want to make a pair of headphones portable) or negative about (I do not want to deal with a proprietary battery eventually getting worn out and needing to be replaced inside a headphone that I would either need to do surgery on, send in for service or throw out). If you must include Bluetooth for some reason make it a slick module that can be plugged/unplugged from the headphones and have it look integrated into the physical design when it's plugged in, that way only the module is the disposable bit and nothing is compromised and you could even sell the module separately so people buying the headphone who didn't want any wireless capability don't have to subsidize it. If doing such a module consider including in it the ability to have a user-configurable HRTF (since everyone's head and ears are slightly different) that could be applied at the press of a button as well as head tracking for convincing spatial sound reproduction (see Audeze Mobius).

    Out of my 50+ headphones, two of my favorites are from Pioneer already - the SE-MHR5 (this despite that I don't like on-ear headphones generally, which says something) and the HRM-6 (which I think have perhaps suffered in their sales because the say "Pioneer DJ" on the side yet are part of the Studio Monitor lineup, which is confusing).

    A quick word about materials: wood is fine, metal is nice, but please no painted metal. Hard anodizing is the way to go. Plastic is ok but no gloss, no metalized, and absolutely no soft-touch plastic. I have yet to encounter any soft-touch plastics which last >10 years without starting to decay, flake, ooze, or just turn to some sort of liquid. My preferred plastics are glass fiber reinforced polycarbonate resins, like what you find on high end camera SLR bodies and lenses, in either a matte or slightly patterned matte finish (doesn't pick up fingerprints, durable, light and sturdy).

    Last but not least earpads should be replaceable (I'm looking at you, Onkyo H900M!) and ideally be mounted to a polycarbonate ring or frame which bayonet twist locks onto the headphone so replacing the pad is a trivial matter of quarter turn twisting off the pad/ring combo then removing the pad from the ring and putting a new one on off the headphone. Would be great to have other pad shapes/material combinations either included or available for purchase from Pioneer, but if the pad mount is a common size, that's less important if there are already good aftermarket pads available (though I'm incredibly happy with the stock SE-MHR5 and HRM-6 pads, so I trust Pioneer would do an excellent job with their pads). And please for the love of all do not make the earpads circumaural but then make them slightly too small for someone with an XL head size (I'm looking at you again, Onkyo H900M!)
     
  6. 9suns

    9suns [insert unearned title here]

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    @musiqlovr How's everything going? Any updates?
     

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