Why do TOTL headphones cost the same as TOTL speakers?

OK, yes, sure. I guess I read mainstream in the sense of mass-market, and you meant it in the sense of widely available. That probably negates my previous post

 

This is a bit of a tangent and there's no real point here, but I had a sobering conversation just now with a dude I went to school with years ago.

This guy owns a pair of HD6xx that he saved up for. He's a mid-30s working class dude. The headphones took a tumble and he was asking me how he could know if they're damaged beyond visual inspection, concerned that he'd no longer have a reliable tool for his freelance editing gigs and for recreational listening. He said 'I wouldn't be concerned if they weren't so expensive'. I'm sitting here surrounded by stacks of custom parts, tube amps and vintage DACs that go unused most of the time.

The amount of value this guy puts into his headphones, and the sense of loss he would feel to lose them, the amount of enjoyment (or at least basic utility) he gets from listening to and working with them from his laptop... I dunno, makes me think about how there's a lot that's easy to take for granted, especially over time as the rabbit hole gets deeper and the investment gets larger.

Edit - to bring it back to the topic at hand... This guy won't be owning speakers for the foreseeable future (no space), and as no plans or nervosa to upgrade his headphones or electronics either. The 6xx is his totl. I respect that simplicity, even if those choices weren't made with luxury or 'ultimate performance' in mind.

 

It's not really a tangent. 200-250 is a lot of money, a good chunk of what most people make in a week. You can get dinner, drinks, tickets to something fun, and bring a friend for that much money.

Like, a decadeish ago the Focal Spirit One was expensive at something like that price (new anyway, it quickly dropped to like a third of that used. An OK deal if you didn't get one of the defective ones and could deal with it not being shaped for human heads). The difference is that I think most people understood that this was a lot of money for a headphone, and certainly a portable headphone made for portable music players and phones. The jump from there to the HD 6XX at a similar price being considered cheap by some people (even to the point of borderline disrespect occasionally) is definitely notable.

Just because some of us are willing to spend several times that 200 or 250, that doesn't mean it's not a lot of money.

 

My take on this is that back in the mid 2000s, you had TOTL headphones that cost between $300-500. The AKG 701, Senn HD650 and Beyer DT880 were well engineered headphones that ended up not being that different from the Harman curve we know of today. Most people were pretty happy with these options, and hifi headphonery was still a niche for enthusiasts compared to the vast world of speaker enclosures.

Then, for better or worse, hifi headphonery exploded over the next few years. We were told the $700 Denon Floppydong5000 and $1000 Denon Limpshlong7000 were only slightly less amazing than the $1200 JVC Dollyparton1000, and soon after that the fever for the HD800 and T1 (which may of well have been named Orcrist and Glamdring, respectively) reached deeper into our pockets with their bright, shiny talons, ripping out $1500 a pop (if memory serves me right). Interestingly enough, they sounded NOTHING like the last gen of alleged boner inducing TOTLs, and nothing like the spate of Japanese woodcupped R10 wannabees that dominated the enthusiastic recommendation of headfi's NASA based shill chief.

Soon, big name manufacturers realized they were missing out on selling headphones not to genuine hifi enthusiasts with critical ears, but to soccer players, anti-trust lawyers and guys who made their money from buying and selling small countries. And independent workshops realized that they could position themselves not as huge brands that sold overpriced headphones to reinsurance company CEOs, but as dedicated carpenters/material scientists/computer scientists that gave every possible shit about gifting the world the most exquisitely crafted, most verifiably accurate headphones and putting them into the hands of eager listeners willing to spend an extra 2K for sham-wowwing whatever local neighborhood of the audible frequency spectrum they claimed was the absolute key to getting the most out of your aural experience.

Meanwhile, we still have sub $500 gems like the HD650, Beyer DT880, various Sony headphones aimed for studio use, and a bunch of others that, with a little eq in some cases, equal or exceed what we had to chose from back in the mid 2000s. There are few new headphones that I like to f**k with at present, like the Focal Clear MG, but for the most part I think the vast majority of >$1000 headphones out there suffer from just as many faults as well designed <$1000 headphones.

Oh, and don't forget. Both beryllium and unicorn horn dust are toxic so they have to pay the Keebler elves hazard pay, which obviously drives up the price, but not (always) the resonance peak.

 

I think this is a great point to bring up. As much as I just don't think totl HP are "more expensive" than totl 2ch systems, it's important to realize that we here are basicaly just all broken when it comes to value. Even "entry level" chains are $500+++. That's more than the average household savings in the US. Meanwhile "mid-fi" often breaks well into the 4 figure range with "TOTL" chains well into the 5 figures used value if not each individual piece over that mark. No matter if you think hd600 are expensive or throw away cheap, I think all of us here are still broken