first up a gave a quick search, and couldnt find any info on it.
?e??????SHURE???????SHURE???????? - YouTube
so from what i can gather, it is a three way ear bud (with 2 bass drivers so all up thats 4 drivers) it apears to use a band pass design enclosure type thing to extend bass response and filter off mids and highs without adding electronic cross overs. it apears to have some kind of electronic cross over for the highs.
it also has many other features such as a physical treble gain and cut filter that sits inside the ear bud, kevlar cable, detatchable cable etc and a $1000 price tag
but what im interested in is what you guys have heard about this tech savy ear bud? does it look to you to be a band pass enclosure inside it? what are your thoughts?
looks really cool!
cheers
?e??????SHURE???????SHURE???????? - YouTube
so from what i can gather, it is a three way ear bud (with 2 bass drivers so all up thats 4 drivers) it apears to use a band pass design enclosure type thing to extend bass response and filter off mids and highs without adding electronic cross overs. it apears to have some kind of electronic cross over for the highs.
it also has many other features such as a physical treble gain and cut filter that sits inside the ear bud, kevlar cable, detatchable cable etc and a $1000 price tag
but what im interested in is what you guys have heard about this tech savy ear bud? does it look to you to be a band pass enclosure inside it? what are your thoughts?
looks really cool!
cheers
The technology is interesting, but at $1000, I'm not sure they fit in the market.
I honestly didn't watch the whole thing, but in general band pass configurations are not hi-fi. Of course everything can be optimized to a degree.
Headphone marketing is mostly hype and bull. I've been auditioning headphones lately and have been sorely disappointed. A couple years ago I bought some Skull Candy cans based on reviews and testimonials. I only shelled out $60, but they were unbelievably awful. I gave them away to a teenager and went back to my ancient $25 Phillips cans.
If you can't give me twice the performance for ten times the price, you fail miserably. It's that simple.
I honestly didn't watch the whole thing, but in general band pass configurations are not hi-fi. Of course everything can be optimized to a degree.
Headphone marketing is mostly hype and bull. I've been auditioning headphones lately and have been sorely disappointed. A couple years ago I bought some Skull Candy cans based on reviews and testimonials. I only shelled out $60, but they were unbelievably awful. I gave them away to a teenager and went back to my ancient $25 Phillips cans.
If you can't give me twice the performance for ten times the price, you fail miserably. It's that simple.
First of all, these in-ears are not earbuds (which per definition sit just outside the ear canal and don't seal it).
$1000 is a bit steep even for a flagship universal BA IEM (usually those regions are only inhabited by customs), but I suppose the guys at Shure saw a market for it. You can spend that much for a Sennheiser HD800, too. Obviously you're pretty far up the diminishing returns curve at this point, and the most attractive models typically are a step or two down the food chain. Like HD600s or somesuch. We're talking about some of the fundamentally "techy" companies, not fashion brands. (Which doesn't mean that "techy" companies can't have their stinkers and fashion cans can't be good, but you know, statistics.)
From what I remember, this bandpass config solved a crossover design problem - all you can ever physically fit in there is Rs and Cs, no Ls. The impedance response for a number of BA IEMs looks the part.
Maybe we will be seeing dynamic driver IEMs with the same kind of sound quality and isolation at some point, who knows. Right now, some sound great but don't isolate a lot while e.g. the SE215 isolates as well as their balanced armature models but is too bassy to pass as hi-fi. I don't think anyone really needs the extreme sensitivity that BA drivers can provide in this application, it's more of a nuisance in practice.
$1000 is a bit steep even for a flagship universal BA IEM (usually those regions are only inhabited by customs), but I suppose the guys at Shure saw a market for it. You can spend that much for a Sennheiser HD800, too. Obviously you're pretty far up the diminishing returns curve at this point, and the most attractive models typically are a step or two down the food chain. Like HD600s or somesuch. We're talking about some of the fundamentally "techy" companies, not fashion brands. (Which doesn't mean that "techy" companies can't have their stinkers and fashion cans can't be good, but you know, statistics.)
From what I remember, this bandpass config solved a crossover design problem - all you can ever physically fit in there is Rs and Cs, no Ls. The impedance response for a number of BA IEMs looks the part.
Maybe we will be seeing dynamic driver IEMs with the same kind of sound quality and isolation at some point, who knows. Right now, some sound great but don't isolate a lot while e.g. the SE215 isolates as well as their balanced armature models but is too bassy to pass as hi-fi. I don't think anyone really needs the extreme sensitivity that BA drivers can provide in this application, it's more of a nuisance in practice.
That's very interesting, and clever.
I still wouldn't ever want earbuds (or small headphones). In my experience, even modest over the ear cans sound better than fancy earbuds. I've heard some good earbuds too, and I would be interested in hearing these.
i'm still learning, but i thought band pass where only any good at narrow ranges? and did that narrow range really well, and this does what apears to be between 15hz and 75 hz. that to me doesnt look that large a range?
Band pass systems do only cover narrow ranges. They also introduce other distortions as well.
15 to 75 Hz is a pretty good range to cover but it doesn't tell the whole story. What is the tolerance within that range? Is it 3 dB or 10 dB? What other distortions does it produce?
For $1000 (which is absolutely ridiculous) I would hope that the engineers took great pains to optimize everything to the maximum possible degree. I don't doubt that the phones are absolutely amazing for their size, but we have all seen products (like Beats by Dr. Dre and of course Bose) that are long on marketing, hype, and snake oil; and short on actual performance and optimal design.
I do find the concept interesting. I reserve final judgement for when (if) I get a chance to actually audition them. Since I have been auditioning headphones, as well as reading reviews, I have noticed that cheap isn't always bad and expensive can be pretty bad. Whatever I eventually buy will probably be conventional and manufactured by a well known manufacturer. But I have listened to some cheap, "no-name" cans recently that were pretty decent considering the price and dubious source of manufacture; although I'm too old to be caught wearing some hyped up cans with ridiculous names designed to market to teenagers.
True, I picked those 2 numbers based on its frequency response of the entire unit and the cut off frequency of the "subwoofer". so I really have no idea of what it actually measures like. I do think the idea is a little wanky, and expensive, but I see allot of these exotic things allot like valve amps, some people love them, some people believe a well designed SS can sound just as good, but if it works it works.
I know what you mean though about cheap not always meaning bad. I'm more into car audio at the moment, (because in my car is where I listen to music most,) and I've been using a cheap brand called kasun that offer for example, 8" subs for as little as $25 each. long story short, I thought I'd upgrade to some "real" car subs that went for $150 each. safe to say they sounded so bad they even played the incorrect note when turned up. so I swapped them back. but I digress..
I know what you mean though about cheap not always meaning bad. I'm more into car audio at the moment, (because in my car is where I listen to music most,) and I've been using a cheap brand called kasun that offer for example, 8" subs for as little as $25 each. long story short, I thought I'd upgrade to some "real" car subs that went for $150 each. safe to say they sounded so bad they even played the incorrect note when turned up. so I swapped them back. but I digress..
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