Mr. Speakers ETHER Flow Headphone(?) Upgrade(?)

I get where you're coming from, but maybe I can get you to see it from my point of view. Where I see the issue is that Dan has a history of pumping out revisions to products sometimes just a couple months after release and usually charges at least some money for them. The Mad Dog in particular went through many revisions very quickly. He has more or less continued that trend in some form or fashion with every other product.

Consider that the Ether C has been on the market less than a year. And I remember when the Ether was announced, the Alpha Prime still seemed like fresh news. Now we have the "Flow" version of the headphones and a group of individuals touting them as a noticeable upgrade.

The difference is that companies like Schiit and Sennheiser, especially with flagship products, aren't commonly seen pumping out revisions and upgrades on a yearly basis, nor do they have a tendency to announce a revision you have to pay for if you want it, however cheap, 2-6 months after launch. I'm not saying it never happens, but it's a rare event when it does and usually seen more as a flub than "progress." Taking Dan's approach can be incredibly tiring for consumers. It's a BIG problem in the gaming industry (unfinished games being launched too early, needing fixed later, etc.), and while humans have an amazing tolerance for it for surprising stretches of time, and, yes, it is better to eventually release something and tweak it than never launch it, the trend here is, "Why not just give it a few more months of intensive R&D bake time?" If you've shown you have historically not released the best version of your product consistently, every time, with every product, should that not give you pause that maybe you are moving too quickly? Slowly but surely, you erode your the confidence of your customers.

(Let's not forget how many years went between the HD800 and HD800S, and how we still don't have a true HD650 successor. Or how long the Yggdrasil took to polish and release. Or how long it took multibit to trickle to the lower-end DACs.)

Did Jude publish PMx2 measurements? All I did was take Jude's Flow measurements and compare them to whatever other measurements I could find that he made.

 

Yeah, I'm speaking from experience, having been involved in T50RP mods since before he went commercial! I just remember using the same lines of argument you did, and eventually I got a bit worn down and had that, "Wait a second..." moment.

I too am enjoying the Ether C, now that it is configured correctly and uses additional damping to my tastes. Very frustrating that it came to me the wrong way out of the box, and while it would have been almost weird if someone had the foresight for this, didn't have a note explaining how the stock configuration for v1.1 looked like. I think the price is a bit too high, but I'm also stingy. Not enough to say someone got a poor deal, though.

 

Well, props to MrSpeakers/Dan for being honest and reconsidering the patent. I was worried there might be more, eh, malicious activities going on? Probably not the best word...maybe call it "strong business tactics." Seems they were simply unaware.

Ether Flow brighter than original? That might be a problem. IME, if you have to add more and more front damping to a headphone to tone it down, usually that means something isn't ideal with your enclosure and/or internal damping methods. Sometimes front damping works out really well, but more often it's a sub-optimal solution. Those "dots" always concerned me, even though they did work to an extent (i.e. not without trade offs).

 

Kudos to Dan though for his version of the Fazor.

Saying that these are more resolving than the standard Ethers doesn't mean anything. The regular Ether had great separation and transient response, but its ability to reproduce low level information such as ambient cues and tail ends of decay was extremely lacking (just try the live Eagles Hotel CA recording and compare to HD6X0).

Stillhard's report of brightness and the provision of tuning dots, dog treats, etc. is concerning. Might it be the bump at 7kHz?

That's just bullshit audiophoolistry. None of Dan's previous claims on his accordion diaphragms could be verified by me. I'm not going to believe anything this time around. Ultimately fazor, damping dots, accordion diaphragms, funnels, waveguides, etc. They are just means to and end. It's the end that matters most: how does it sound.

$1850 is actually not bad. Think of the people who bought HE1000s for $4k, and now the street price is $2.2K. Suckers.

 

Many wished the HD700 was just that, but Sennheiser decided to take a page from the Grado or Beyer playbook instead. Since the HD700, Sennheiser has evidently been wasting their engineering talent on stupid shit like the $55,000 Orpheus 2 with marble chassis and knobs that go in and out with a servomotor.