New Kenwood flagship: KH-KZ3000

Housing is made of machined aluminum as well as fiberglass impregnated plastics which should be extremely rigid and durable. They do not appear to be marketing these outside of Japan. Street price seems to vary between $300 and $600 (after JPY conversion) depending on where you buy from. On first glance these appear to be a mostly consumer-oriented "fashion headphone" type model but internally they have a complex backwave dispersion array and some additional audio-quality oriented decisions which are admittedly not retarded.





The transducer is 40mm, with a triple-layer magnetic circuit and a diaphragm made of a much newer polymer, PEN (polyethylene naphthalate), which has considerably higher dimensional stability than the much more commonly used PET (polyethylene tetraphthalate).



Judging by the design of the acoustic chambers I'd venture a guess these aren't likely to compete with the top end proudcts but at least should match the likes of the AKG K545 and K550, which they share a lot of similarity with. Obviously little more than speculation can be made at this point until someone over here gets hands on with it... which may take a while unless you're hoping to pay on the higher end of the price spectrum.

Thoughts?

 

Some better pictures of these... the finishing looks really damn clean, not gonna lie.

 

Interesting detail for me, seems they put in extra work to make sure they are compatible with balanced cables? Which is very unique for headphones with connector only on one side, especially for something that isn't aimed at audiophiles.

 

I'm no authority on material sciences but have done some looking into various resins, lacquers, fibreglasses etc. cuz... fountain pen hobby, so that comes in handy, haha.

Glass-filled plastics aren't necessarily rare, just seldom advertised. Klipsch HP-3, Sony 10RNC, and even Senn HD600/650 use em last I checked without making a selling point of it, so... bit of a red flag? Unless it's a new type that's more effective in this use case than in the other headphones of course. I will say that based on messing around with em they do seem to dampen sound pretty well relative to cheaper plastics, but wouldn't trust a solid slab of the stuff immediately behind the driver like that. The diffuser doesn't look like it'd do a lot IMO, but that's swivel-chair quarterbacking. Maybe it's coupled to the cup in such a way as to kill off vibrations?

The anti-vibration SUS (???) and aluminum rings do look interesting though. Something to mass-load the baffle to reduce resonances? Wonder why aluminum and whatever SUS is specifically— maybe something about how the material's own resonances interact with one another's?

No friggin clue about magnet design or PEN (reading up on differences v. PET now), but damn if this doesn't look thoughtful