16 ms·

HD 555 to HD 595 mod (or: how Sennheiser cripples cheaper headphones)

395 points by ryanf 16y ago

iwwr 16y ago
Intel, AMD and Nvidia are also notorious for these kinds of practices.
- johnkary 16y ago
  Reminds me of the days of using graphite pencils to unlock CPUs :)
  - erickhill 16y ago
    Or a paper clip to open an old Mac's CD tray. "Who has a paper clip? Anyone?" So, the lack of a CD open/close button made it more "luxurious".
- meastham 16y ago
  Why do these types of market partitioning practices anger people so much? Isn't it a good thing that these companies are offering different price points for people to choose from?
  - joelhaasnoot 16y ago
    The anger comes from essentially paying for air, or just adding profit for the company. If two parts are almost essentially the same, why am I paying more just for a different label? Chip manufacturers actually do sell you a different product when you buy the high performance product, and it's related to chip yields.
    - dfox 16y ago
      In this case it might be exactly same as with chips, with headphones failing some QC test being labeled as cheaper and getting additional piece of foam to partially fix whatever badness was discovered in such test (like unintended resonance caused by manufacturing tolerances).
      - varjag 16y ago
        It most certainly isn't the same. It doesn't work like that with defective speakers.
        dfox 16y ago
        In my opinion, the high-res photos in the original forum thread clearly shows some difference in build quality between both models. Compare for example how cleaner is hot gluing job on the driver on the 595 and that there is glob of something (hot glue?) on the external grill catch (lowest on first picture) on the 555 where there does not apear to be anything like that on the 595. Extruding things from plastics (and especially ABS which this appears to be made from) is surprisingly inexact process and one would assume that manufacturing headphones selling for hundreds of dollars requires quite tight tolerances. My assumption is that the foam is there to damp rattling of case that is made from not exactly matched parts (and this is consistent with few posts in the forum which describe sound quality getting worse after removing the foam). And I don't see why speakers/headphones/whatever can't be differentiated on quality, while having same overall design.
        varjag 16y ago
        There is no way to sort out speaker driver rejects into 1st, 2nd and whatever category. If a sample has quality issue, it is likely to deteriorate further in use rapidly. Lower quality speakers are not rejects of high quality speakers, they are just cheaper designs. As to the mold, the holes there require no tolerances, they are there just to avoid air cushion behind the driver and serve no other purpose. Similarly, a foam pad is a rough hack to reduce its effectiveness, driving the speaker's response down. Do you really feel like this foam cut is some precision fix to tolerances problem?
    - defen 16y ago
      > The anger comes from essentially paying for air, or just adding profit for the company. If two parts are almost essentially the same, why am I paying more just for a different label? I think this question is rooted in a flawed "cost-based" perception of product pricing, which is intuitive and seemingly "fair", but not how the world works. In reality businesses should charge based on the value (perceived or actual) their product brings to their customers.
      - prodigal_erik 16y ago
        Consumer surplus through cost-based pricing is the very goal of having a free market. We route resources to the most efficient producers because they're capable of offering lower prices. If Sennheiser can come out ahead by doing useless things to reduce the value of their products (that don't even reduce costs!) without fear of being undercut, that represents a market failure. This is really disappointing. My excellent HD-280s are finally cracking after years of heavy use, and now I have to reconsider doing business with them for a replacement.
        defen 16y ago
        A perfectly efficient market is nice in theory but I don't think it exists outside of commodities like "sorghum and gypsum" (I think those are tptacek's words). Consumers are usually not going to be perfectly informed so there's always room for marketing to increase the perceived value of a product.
        tomjen3 16y ago
        And that is why marketeers are the scum of the earth. And why your company cannot afford to not have them.
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
  - thefool 16y ago
    Because it feels like your being cheated when you are sold something that the person that is selling it to you broke on purpose. It doesn't really matter if the practice actually lets more people use a product, it just feels dirty.
    - dman 16y ago
      On the flip side - whenever I see stuff which is so easily modded to its full version I usually imagine an engineer inside a large corporation grinning because he knows some kid somewhere will figure this out and get an early christmas present. Case in point - the amd 6950 radeons that can be flashed to radeon 6970's, earlier nvidia cards that could be softmodded to quadros etc . I mean the product differentiation could be actually a lot more involved and sometimes it just feels like the product was designed to be unlocked by the hackers and tinkerers.
    - thematt 16y ago
      I see a lot of Web 2.0 applications these days that have their own pieces of foam. It's really all the same code on the backend and theoretically it wouldn't cost them anymore to enable all features completely. They purposely disable features or put their own pieces of "digital" foam in between plans in order to provide different price points for users.
      - extension 16y ago
        The difference is that people generally expect to own the utilitarian physical goods that they pay for. Since information can't be owned in the same sense, it's understood that buying it is going to take the form of some sort of licensing arrangement with more arbitrary conditions. In reality, the economics of the utilitarian physical goods business may sometimes resemble more those of the information business, but it's up to manufacturers to justify that to their customers.
    - ringm 16y ago
      It is not only about feeling personally cheated, it is about observing such a glaring inefficiency of the economy. Sennheiser expended a lot of effort to create a perfectly good product, and then our economy stimulates them to waste a part of this effort by crippling the product just to create... a kind of pay-what-you can scheme.
  - paulsmith 16y ago
    Did you read the post? The $200 headphones are /exactly the same/ as the $350 ones, except for a piece of easily-removable foam they crammed in the opening to reduce the sound quality. That's not "market partioning" -- that's utter hostility toward your customers.
    - meastham 16y ago
      I did. I just don't see how this is any different than intentionally removing features from software in order to sell it at lower prices.
      - kenjackson 16y ago
        I agree. This seems like a reasonable thing to do if you want to have multiple price points for your product. Would people feel a lot better if instead they just went and changed the circuitry to produce lower quality sound?
        marshray 16y ago
        Would people feel a lot better if instead they just went and changed the circuitry to produce lower quality sound? Yes, as long as there was a halfway plausible explanation that it cost less to produce.
        jmaygarden 16y ago
        In this case it does cost less to produce since they don't have to develop a new product and setup separate manufacturing processes. That piece of foam saves a lot of money.
        colanderman 16y ago
        My guess is the headphones cost $20 to produce. The $350 price tag covers R&D.
      - jbri 16y ago
        In the general human mindset, there's a huge difference between "they're adding extra for those who pay more" and "they're taking stuff away from those who pay less". If the feature differentiation is achieved by taking the premium offering and adding a component to remove functionality, then that feels a lot worse than taking the mid-range offering and adding components to result in the premium one.
  - krig 16y ago
    Perhaps it's that people who bought the more expensive model thought they were buying higher quality components, but now realise they paid to have a piece of foam not be put where a piece of foam should not be? That consumers in general are happy to pay premium for premium features, but not for nothing? I mean, to me this practice is practically fraudulent when it comes to consumer goods. Yes, it makes business sense to offer product at different price points. You could argue that the higher priced model pays for the R&D that went into developing the headphones. That doesn't change the fact that these are the exact same headphones with a $150 price difference. Comparing to the software case where you pay more to have features put in that may be disabled in the cheaper version, there is a big difference there. When you buy the more expensive version you know what was taken out, and getting that is what you are paying for. Would anyone buy the more expensive headphones if the box said "unnecessary foam not added"?
  - sharmajai 16y ago
    Because that's inNOvaTion.
  - marshray 16y ago
    Why do these types of market partitioning practices anger people so much? Because it makes them feel ripped off. Enthusiasts were likely having positive feelings about their purchase of Sennheiser products and now they feel like an idiot. Psychology is a big part of the audio business. Isn't it a good thing that these companies are offering different price points for people to choose from? That Sennheiser is taking headphones and expending extra cost to muffle them in order to sell them at a lower price indicates that they do not consider themselves to be in an efficient economic market. Likely they are selling the muffled headphones in order to artificially inflate the price of the normal ones. It also raises the question of in what other ways Sennheiser might be intentionally degrading the quality of its products.
    - cabalamat 16y ago
      > Psychology is a big part of the audio business. It's a big part of most businesses; you want the customer to have positive emotions regarding your company/product.
    - mryall 16y ago
      A similar thing happens with TVs in electrical appliance stores. Brighter pictures are more appealing to the average viewer, so the stores bump up the brightness setting on the more expensive TVs. They can pull tricks like this because most people don't care that much about whether their chosen product is better according to some objective measurement. Rather, they care about getting a good deal and being made to feel happy about their purchase. Unfortunately for Sennheiser, high-end audio customers are probably one group who do care about buying something objectively better. News like this risks hurting their target market substantially, I'd say.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - antihero 16y ago
    It's just a great example of how capitalism leads to do things that are utterly perverse.
  - artsrc 16y ago
    If it is such a good thing, they should clearly describe what they are doing to potential customers. People who are not given all relevant information before they buy are product can legitimately feel upset.
    - carpo 16y ago
      "Now without foam!!!"
- nhebb 16y ago
  So are software companies. I offer two versions of my software and will be adding a 3rd soon. The program is the same, but the availability of some features is based on the license. In light of that, I'd be a hypocrite if I complained about these practices with hardware vendors when it's done all the time in software, including my own.
  - patio11 16y ago
    Yep. Difference between free and registered versions of my software: one single if statement.
    - nhebb 16y ago
      Marginal cost of an if statement: $0. Knowing where to place it: $29.95
  - tomjen3 16y ago
    There are lots of differences between hardware and software, so I don't think it is hypocritical to complain about the hardware manufactures doing this.
defen 16y ago
How long until we get a DMCA-like law preventing these kinds of blog posts? He'd be guilty of trafficking in technology which aids in the circumvention of profit-enhancing business practices.
- iwwr 16y ago
  I never realized plain foam can be an object of DMCA :) It really doesn't matter how broken the security is, doesn't it.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
spiralganglion 16y ago
The added piece of foam has to cost them something. So, really, the "broken" headphones should be more expensive, right? In any case, my friends and I have long held the belief that "If you can't open it, you don't really own it". If my toaster breaks, you can be sure I'll open it up and try to fix it before I think of buying a new one. Though before anyone thinks of flaming, I'm ok with my iPad. I can make an exception for this type of tech!
- jasonlotito 16y ago
  And even then, you still have ifixit to fall back on to get it done should you want to. =)
jrockway 16y ago
So the plastic bag that supposedly contains the driver is labeled, "System with resonator left side". Is "System" what they call the driver? I'm interested in seeing what Sennheiser's justification for this is. It seems odd to piss off buyers of high-end products, because they're the ones that do the research. You can't just go to Target and buy some HD5*5 cans; you have to order them from an audiophile-y place (or Amazon). (The processor manufacturers make their price structure clear. They make the good ones, part of it is broken, so they turn off the broken part and sell it to you as a lower-end model. And if there is no demand for the fully-working ones, and they don't have enough broken ones to meet the demand for them, they just cripple the good ones. But like unscrewing the headphone and taking out foam, you can just change the multiplier and enjoy the increased performance. So why complain unless you already bought the high-end product?)
- russss 16y ago
  > So the plastic bag that supposedly contains the driver is labeled, "System with resonator left side". Is "System" what they call the driver? Well, the driver itself in those headphones is an integral part of a larger piece which includes some more acoustic parts. That's what you can see there, and it's not symmetrical, so it has left-hand and right-hand versions. > I'm interested in seeing what Sennheiser's justification for this is. It seems odd to piss off buyers of high-end products, because they're the ones that do the research. It's worth noting that the 595s have a better standard of finish and come with a few accessories such as a nifty desk-mounting hook. Not that that justifies it.
apl 16y ago
I understand that this raises eyebrows, but it's hardly fraud. Do people actually think that retail price is a function of production/R&D cost? It's not, never has been. Dropbox charges 20$ for something that consumes marginally more ressources and incurs identical R&D costs when compared to the 10$ product. Chip manufacturers do this all the time. Discounts for electronics and groceries are fully artificial. A much more realistic model is price as whatever the market can bear. I sincerely doubt that there is a moral obligation to set price points in any other way. [This may be relevant: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckies.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckie...]
- AndyJPartridge 16y ago
  Agreed it's not fraud... But wouldn't it be (morally? commercially?) better to sell one product at the mid-point? I know in a limited range it's good to have a better and a worse to sell the median, but that doesn't apply here. They have many models above and below these two.
  - jbri 16y ago
    It's all about what's called the consumer surplus. If someone is willing to pay $350 for a pair of headphones, but they only paid $200 because you didn't have a $350 offering, you just lost $150. The trick is to effectively capture that surplus without pissing off your customers or making them feel they're being ripped off.
    - AndyJPartridge 16y ago
      What I was thinking, put another way, is that they are taking a risk with these two price-points doing this and getting caught out. There is no need when they have headphones much cheaper, and MUCH more expensive than these two. I do agree with your reasoning if the above wasn't so.
      - lukeschlather 16y ago
        Are they really getting caught? Near as I can tell, there are no penalties for this sort of behavior, and for every person who is willing to rip open a $150 pair of headphones to get them working like the $350 pair, there's someone who has no idea how headphones work, but is still willing to pay top dollar for the best they can get. And odds are these people won't even be aware of this blog post.
xal 16y ago
Great bargain. Additionally, the HD-555 can be had for about 100 on eBay. I've been buying my Sennheisers there for years, always the 570 model but that's a bit dated now.
foresterh 16y ago
On Amazon, the headphones are closer in price... $85 for the HD555 and $150 for the HD595. Still paying $65 for one less piece of foam.
daeken 16y ago
For what it's worth, I picked up a pair of HD595s back in early 2007 for $150, refurbed. They're still in absolutely perfect quality (despite more abuse than you can imagine) and by far the best headphones I've ever owned. Worth every cent, no questions asked.
- boyter 16y ago
  Im going to agree. I have the HD555's and have given them a lot of abuse over 3 years or so of owning them. They are still in very good condition and sound the same as the first day I got them. Totally reccomend the 555 or the 595 as being the best quality affortable headphones I have ever come across.
  - Qz 16y ago
    Apparently I am more abusive to my headphones because I managed to break a plastic part on one side that connects the ear parts to the headband, mainly from them getting dropped on the floor countless times due to repeatedly tripping over the cord that's just a bit too long. I've kept them together with glue and tape in various combinations, since otherwise they still work fine.
    - andrewcooke 16y ago
      This part is cracked on my pair too. It's a common failure with these headphones - you can search for people complaining about it...
      - daemin 16y ago
        I had a pair of my 555's sent for repair twice over 5 years. Once under warranty for a bad speaker module, and once for cracking. Still it's lasted this long, one pair 6+ years, another going on 3 now, so I'm pretty satisfied with them.
Semiapies 16y ago
Maybe I'm just cheap, but $200 for the cheaper headphones sounds ridiculous to begin with, and well into "anyone paying that much probably deserves it" territory.
- hartror 16y ago
  I know plenty of people who pay that much, and more for headphones. These are people who get into discussions about the loudness war [1] and the pros/cons of various audio formats for different musical genres. They're not stupid, just enthusiasts, and as such enjoy using high quality equipment, just like any enthusiast. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
  - Semiapies 16y ago
    The loudness war is one the very reasons expensive headphones are a complete waste of time.
    - wmf 16y ago
      What if you're listening to jazz on vinyl with a tube amp? :-)
    - JonnieCache 16y ago
      What if you're writing your own music?
  - _delirium 16y ago
    True, and I'm something of a headphone enthusiast as well, but there is a lot of snake oil. Even among stuff that isn't outright snake oil, it's very hard to actually spot differences above a certain level, and I'm not convinced everyone who claims they can is actually doing so. Sometimes I'm not that sure for my own listening. I do try to do blind tests sometimes, but they're hard to really keep blind (different feel of headphones, recognize the sound of a headphone I've already heard before, etc.). And beyond that, what exactly constitutes "quality" is a whole other story! The easiest way to tell differences among high-end headphones is to train yourself on certain test samples that are notoriously hard to reproduce properly, and then listen for differences, but it's not at all clear that doing that is a meaningful predictor of subjective enjoyability when using the headphone to listen to normal music. Overall I've settled on open-back headphones in the ~$70-150 range as the sweet spot for me personally (I mostly use Grado SR-80s).
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ent 16y ago
In case anyone is interested, I just did this mod for my hd555s and can confirm that it does seem to make the sound clearer although I can't really make a good comparison for obvious reasons.
- Qz 16y ago
  I'm interested in trying it, mine are beat up as is. How do you get the ear pads off to be able to unscrew the parts shown in the pictures?
  - ent 16y ago
    I just pulled them off. They are attached with small plastic clips but luckily not the nasty ones that break. The fabric mesh under those also comes off just by pulling. You should probably be careful with pulling the ear pads, they are glued to a plastic ring and apparently it is possible to just pull them off the glue (my friend did that to his ones).
ck2 16y ago
I've got a better hack for you. Buy a $20 pair of Koss KTXPRO1 http://amazon.com/dp/B00007056H http://amazon.com/dp/B00007056H Read the reviews. They sound almost as good as $200 headphones. I own a couple of Sennheiser, and I prefer the Koss unless I need closed cans for some reason.
- rms 16y ago
  Those are indeed the best $20 headphones (and the same drivers are available in all sorts of different form-factors) but they only sound better than the $149 Bose headphones, not anything remotely audiophile quality. I definitely prefer certain $60 Sennheiser headphones (HD497, which I don't think they make anymore, haven't listened to the equivalent from the current product line) to the Koss drivers.
- adolfojp 16y ago
  Could you recommend a good cheap pair of over the ear headphones to a non audiophile like me?
  - alexqgb 16y ago
    Grado makes some really nice stuff. Their cheapest model (SR-60i) gets rave reviews as one of the audio world's very best values. http://www.gradolabs.com/frameset_main.htm http://www.gradolabs.com/frameset_main.htm I've used the same pair of Sony MDR-7506's on a professional, near daily basis for about seven years. They're very accurate, and more importantly, super solid. I mean, they're tools. And they work. About $100, and a really good value for money. http://www.amazon.com/Sony-MDR7506-Professional-Diaphragm-Headphone/dp/B000AJIF4E/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1297648596&sr=1-1 http://www.amazon.com/Sony-MDR7506-Professional-Diaphragm-He...
    - wiredfool 16y ago
      I love the sound from my Grados, but they're not exactly the most comfortable headphones in the world. they can be somewhat painful if you're wearing glasses, since your ear tends to get some pressure on it. My sennhausiers (585) are a lot more comfortable. A bit clearer sound, a touch less bass, and way less reliable cords. I've had the Grados since the early 90s, and the Sennhausers since about 2000.
strlen 16y ago
Sounds similar to IBM's practice of inserting 'nops' into software of the AS-400s on otherwise identical hardware to create price gradations.
- gwern 16y ago
  But is IBM's practice as easily circumvented? If they are literally inserting nops, then that sounds like something a quick binary conversion could erase.
  - Udo 16y ago
    My assembly-fu is weak, but wouldn't that invalidate all jump addresses and data pointers inside the program?
    - gwern 16y ago
      Yes, but that's not hard to fix either. For example, Google's binary deltas for Chrome updates would be huge if they couldn't easily fix those addresses; see http://dev.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/software-updates-courgette http://dev.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/software...
  - strlen 16y ago
    If you could then update the jump addresses (which are relative to IP) -- definitely possible programmatically, then yes. However, I don't believe you had the permission to alter the system software on an AS400. Not to mention, if you have engineers capable of doing systems programming and re-imaging the system, you're not a target customer for an AS400 or the AS400 is used in such a function where it makes no business sense for you to allocate "real" engineering resources (who are working on your core product, not your accounting system) for this. The AS400 was/is meant to be a turn key solution: IBM profesional services sets it up for you, after which you run SAP (or the like) on it. It also already came with DB2 and is fairly interesting by making the database the file system (decades before WinFS failed, Hans Reiser went to pursue other interests and btrfs is promising but still unstable).
- 16y ago
m3mb3r 16y ago
Brilliant. Brought my HD-555 alive.
sfphotoarts 16y ago
This article is good for Sennheiser, I just ordered a pair of the 555's from Amazon for $85
- rtomayko 16y ago
  Same :)
- dougabug 16y ago
  This could all be a diabolical marketing ploy to move a whole lot of HD555's.
- sudonim 16y ago
  As did I.
- misterbwong 16y ago
  Oblig. marketing cliche: There's no such thing as bad publicity.
gojomo 16y ago
Years ago, I recall reading (almost certainly on Usenet) a parable which involved a king who needed some bricks, but the cost of getting them could only be recouped by creating some artificial distinction between 'gold' and common bricks, to sell some at a low-price/high-volume and others at high-price/low-volume. In a contrived manner, it neatly illustrated the case that some arrangements that offend one's intuition are actually the best way to get certain things everyone wants financed. Would love to find a link; it's stumped all my search attempts (including at Google Groups) ever since.
georgecmu 16y ago
A related pricing quirk that I found interesting. HD 555 MSRP in the States is $170, and you can buy it for $85 on amazon.com[1]. Right across the border, the MSRP is 200 CAD (202.5 USD) and you could get it for 180 CAD on amazon.ca[2]. In other words, the discounted price in Canada is higher than the nominal price in the States, which in turn is almost twice what consumers actually pay for these headphones. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Sennheiser-HD555-Professional-Headphones-Channeling/dp/B0001FTVDQ http://www.amazon.com/Sennheiser-HD555-Professional-Headphon... [2] http://www.amazon.ca/Sennheiser-Open-Hi-Fi-Stereo-Headphone/dp/B0001FTVDQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1297647160&sr=1-1 http://www.amazon.ca/Sennheiser-Open-Hi-Fi-Stereo-Headphone/...
- jarek 16y ago
  Welcome to Canada. We're still celebrating that Amazon.ca actually has them. Their electronics selection is less than inspiring.
- teamonkey 16y ago
  It's not just Sennheiser, all quality headphones seem to have a high markup in Canada. In addition, many companies refuse to ship them across the border (I suspect because the don't want to deal with customers who refuse to pay import tax).
  - jedbrown 16y ago
    The retailer may to agree not to ship internationally. A lot of outdoor gear companies require this so they can price independently in different countries, it seems at least plausible that these companies do the same.
    - teamonkey 16y ago
      Perhaps, but I've experienced this specifically for headphones. Companies that will ship other goods refuse to ship headphones. Maybe it applies to other electronics, but I've had no problem with getting electronics across the border in the past.
latch 16y ago
I understand people defending the practice, but this nonetheless offends me. For me, it isn't about the 555 owners getting a crippled product, but that the 595 owners are paying a huge markup. People are talking about market behavior and what not, but I don't feel like Sennheiser is behaving in good faith here. They are intentionally relying on opaque information (this is obviously news to almost everyone), and making price the only way consumers have to reliably differentiate between the products (you can't even test drive the products to tell). Also, with respect to the "luxury" part of the discussion, they are competing against themselves, the branding and "Sennheiser" name you get with the 595 or 555 is the same. I've been considering getting 800's, I'm a huge Sennheiser fan. I think this has put me off though (even knowing that everyone else probably does the same thing).
- sofuture 16y ago
  >I understand people defending the practice, but this nonetheless offends me. For me, it isn't about the 555 owners getting a crippled product, but that the 595 owners are paying a huge markup. The baseline in this discussion is $200 headphones. Do you really want to talk huge markup?
- jamesaguilar 16y ago
  If they didn't know about this, you could probably argue that they actually enjoyed paying a huge markup for little benefit. Considering most of them would probably not be able to tell the difference in a blind test between the two states of the cheaper headphone, the only possible difference is price and perceived value. They are paying more simply to pay more, not because they're actually getting better sound quality.
  - latch 16y ago
    I totally hear what you are saying, but I honestly believe that most people are paying more, at least partially, to get a better product. Even if they can't tell that the product is better (say, because they can't hear the difference), I think the difference is night and day.
- jarek 16y ago
levigross 16y ago
Man that is one expensive piece of foam.
- thristian 16y ago
  Not at all, it's worth negative $200.
  - siika2000 16y ago
    Anyone know where I could buy some of that?
    - yigit 16y ago
      http://www.amazon.com/Sennheiser-HD555-Professional-Headphones-Channeling/dp/B0001FTVDQ http://www.amazon.com/Sennheiser-HD555-Professional-Headphon...
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
aforty 16y ago
I just performed the mod. Was really easy and I hear an audible difference (even to my untrained, non-audiophile ears). For the record, the practice does not offend me. This has been done for ages. R&D costs for creating the HD595's were no doubt great and to recoup some money they created a cheaper, crippled version. With headphones you aren't paying for the parts but for the engineering.
ramchip 16y ago
According to Amazon, the HD595 is actually heavier by 10g than the HD555. Is the headband different?
- deltaqueue 16y ago
  Yes, the HD595's have a leather headband and some sort of chrome accents. Also, the 595's come with a headphone mount/clip you can attach to your desk.
Goonbaggins 16y ago
While this is really neat, the 595s also feature some nicer padding on the headband. Probably not enough for the price difference, but I just wanted to note that the piece of foam is not the only difference between the two.
teyc 16y ago
Actually, this is an article that'll make Steve Blank proud. His SuperMac cards were all the same, but tuned slower for the cheaper versions.
darkmethod 16y ago
As for the mod itself. I just tried it on my 555 and I noticed only a subtle difference. As odd as it may be, I think I prefer the foam. As for Sennheiser's strategy to cripple the product line to handle a different marketing segment; it reminded me of a Steve Blank's post. http://steveblank.com/2009/04/16/supermac-war-story-7-building-the-whole-product/ http://steveblank.com/2009/04/16/supermac-war-story-7-buildi...
juiceandjuice 16y ago
Sennheiser is a company I've always tried to steer clear of because of this. There's a lot of companies that take advantage of their branding (i.e. M-Audio, Monster cable, etc) to jack up the prices on mediocre hardware. Once stuff hits guitar center and best buy, you're probably going to be getting ripped off somewhere. You can buy better quality Mogami mic cable from a pro-audio supplier than you can from Guitar Center for half the cost. The audiophile world (along with the "guitar aficionado") is a very strange place.
- mambodog 16y ago
  I think the key is to actually find out about what you're buying and get some word-of-mouth recommendations rather than relying on brand alone as a measure of quality. I think the pro-audio industry is small enough that nearly all big players expand into the consumer region eventually. That doesn't mean that all their stuff is crap. I still think my Sennheiser HD-25s are some of the very best DJ monitor headphones, but they are a world away from the Sennheiser consumer stuff.
sudonim 16y ago
If only there were a mod to add an Apple headphone connector and a Zalman microphone to the sennheiser 555, that would be an amazing VOIP headset for the Mac.
- jarek 16y ago
  Break out the soldering iron and duct tape, nothing's stopping you.
  - sudonim 16y ago
    I was lying in bed last night think about how to do it. Im thinking of cutting the end off of old iPhone buds and then soldering the mic, and headset together with that on the end. Fun times! Thanks for the encouragement.
cypherpunks01 16y ago
I just did this, and performed a very rough A/B test with one earpiece modded, while leaving the foam on the other. The bass (on a bass-heavy song) was very noticeably more muted on the stock earpiece, sounding almost completely dead compared to the one without the foam. Needless to say, I quickly removed the other, and now they sound better than ever. Highly recommended!
- carterschonwald 16y ago
  how do you remove it properly? after removing the earpads I don't quite see how to pop out the rest.
georgieporgie 16y ago
I'm not an audiophile, because audiophiles are the homeopathic suckers of the audio world. I do, however, like high-quality sound. If you want a good over-the-ear headphone, the Sony MDR-V6 is quite nice. They sound decent, are built a tank, and have been in continuous production since the mid 80's. They're $90 on Amazon. If you want in-ear, get Etymotic ER-4's. They're the only headphone I've ever found that can compete with my NHT 2.5i speakers. They should be available around $200.
edge17 16y ago
looks like you can just pay $150 bucks for HD 595 on Amazon - http://www.amazon.com/Sennheiser-HD595-High-Grade-Premiere-Headphones/dp/B0001FTVE0/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1297662051&sr=8-1 http://www.amazon.com/Sennheiser-HD595-High-Grade-Premiere-H...
deltaqueue 16y ago
The blog post doesn't mention all of the aesthetic differences--which, at the current Amazon price point, could justify the price difference for some--so I thought I would mention the others here: -the headband is leather -cans have a Sennheiser logo on them -cans have a chrome ring around them -comes with a nifty headphone stand / mount disclosure: I own some 555's, and will be trying this mod at the office on Monday.
- deltaqueue 16y ago
  FWIW, I did the mod, but I don't have an effective way to AB test. Tried one ear at a time, but could not detect the difference. Went ahead and removed the foam from the other, and the increased sound stage sounds great (though without an accurate test it's difficult to say how much of a change is placebo vs. noticeable).
  - evandena 16y ago
    Once the foam is removed, how did you access the driver assembly? Is the screwdriver used as a prying tool?
krakensden 16y ago
It's pricing like this that leads people to just buy the cheapest offering available, without doing any research. If you already know you will be taken for a ride, why not just pay the least amount possible for the 'privilege'?
- vacri 16y ago
  Er, no it isn't. People pay the least amount possible because they're tight. Some people are actually offended when I tell them "you get what you pay for" - particularly for services rather than products. There's this weird consumer fantasy land where you get top quality for fire sale prices.
omarqureshi 16y ago
Having tried this mod out about a year ago - there is a definite increase in sound quality. However, it does turn your headphones into the most annoying things ever for people who are in the same room as you as they too can hear, quite loudly and clearly.
jasonkester 16y ago
I see a lot of people reacting to this the wrong way. Rather than getting angry at the company for segmenting its market, why not enjoy the fact that you can buy their top-of-the-line product for a fraction of the price? Rather than raise a stink and force them to do something about it, why not stay relatively quiet about it and let those of us in the know profit from it? I'm still upset that Baush and Lomb got raked over the coals so publicly for packaging the exact same lenses as monthly, weekly, and daily wear at different prices. I would have been perfectly happy to wear my "daily" lenses for a month each, thus saving several hundred dollars a year. Instead, a witch hunt was raised and they were forced to actually develop a flimsy contact lens to sell cheaply. It's a good thing, and now you know about it. Try not to ruin it for the rest of us.
TimothyBurgess 16y ago
You know what the most depressing thing about this article is for me? I no longer have the option of being an audiophile. :( I toured professionally as a drummer with a tech metal band and played with a click track every night. I used Ultimate Ears (high-quality earbuds) with ProTools through a rack amp. I had guitar tracks going behind the click track (metronome) for reference and let's put it this way... the reference guitar tracks had to be louder than the actual live amplifiers/PA and the click track had to be even louder than that. On a scale of 1 to 10, relative to the loudness of the vast majority of electronic music players (computers/mp3 players/phones/etc.)... I'd say my click track was at least 17. It hurts my ears just thinking about it now... constant TICK TICK TICK TICK TICK for 30 (sometimes 45) minutes every night for weeks at a time! I don't wish that upon my worst enemy. If it was another style of music there's no doubt I could have had it turned down to a fraction of what it was... but it was tech metal so it was always loud and heavy and all over the place. Most of the time I'm playing upwards of 300 bpm and the tempo and time signatures were always changing so the click track was necessary. I remember I tried turning it down a few times and it didn't work out so well haha... Bye bye hearing! I miss you.
- khafra 16y ago
  That's astounding--the UE page says they provide up to 32db of sound reduction; and that wasn't enough to reduce the ambient sound from the speakers and other monitors to non-hearing-damaging levels? I feel sorry for the patrons of the venues you played in. I do care about my own hearing, and I hate it when I forget to bring non-distorting attenuators of some sort to a place which makes a goal of preventing conversation even in shouts.
  - TimothyBurgess 16y ago
    I'm not sure if the UE model I used reduced sound by 32db but they definitely reduced it a LOT. That's actually why I bought them. I didn't buy the high-end though. At the time I needed them immediately and could only afford the $50 buds from Best Buy. The difference in sound when wearing the headphones was insane, but the click trick still had to be turned way up. Now that I think about it iirc, it was actually mostly my drums (mostly cymbals) that I had to drown out... the guitar cabs/PA levels varied depending on the venue setup.
troydavis 16y ago
FWIW, Sennheiser USA's CEO says the mod upgrade claim isn't accurate: http://twitter.com/#!/SennheiserUSA/status/37092187850153984 http://twitter.com/#!/SennheiserUSA/status/37092187850153984 ("Urban myth deserves no response. Read the specs; do the tests....all factual. Listen to both and you be the judge.") I interpreted "urban myth" as a slam instead of a firm answer, but he confirmed that's their position: http://twitter.com/#!/SennheiserUSA/status/37163867276574720 http://twitter.com/#!/SennheiserUSA/status/37163867276574720 ("Urban Myth=Not True.") I asked him to comment here, since I'd like to hear more than can fit in a tweet. With 170 comments in 16 hours, it should be in their interest to describe any manufacturing differences in more depth.
scotty79 16y ago
You manufacture your product and you intentionally damage part of the volume to sell it cheaper only to make the price of other part of the volume justifiable. If that's not sign of pathology of free market than I don't know what is.
scotty79 16y ago
Imagine you are kid and the other kid approaches you with mug you really like: - Take a look at this wonderful mug with Mickey Mouse. It's worth 20$ - I'd love to buy that but I only have 5$ - Would you pay 50$ for it if the mug didn't have handle? - Yes I need a mug, but handle is so convenient... - I can take 5$ (as he breaks of the mug handle) Could you really buy this thing and not feel like he spat in your face? It's not about market it's about psychology of human exchange. Someone destroys value with no purpose other than better conning his peers. How could that not infuriate specimen of social species?
- scotty79 16y ago
  Too late to edit s/50/5/
zzzmarcus 16y ago
We had two pairs in the office and modded one and not the other. In a blind test two of three actually preferred the non-modded 555's. Our test wasn't great though, 10 seconds of a relatively low quality mp3 and none of us are audiophiles, though the one of us who is the closest to being an audiophile was the one who preferred the modded headphones so, take that fwiw. If you're going to do it, I found that you have to pull hard, as in really, uncomfortably hard on the foam padding to get it off. It does come off though, and everything went back together fine.
- daemin 16y ago
  My friends and I tested both the 555's and 595's in the shop to see which one we wanted to buy, and all of us agreed on the 555's because they sounded better to us. I seem to recall something about not being so blatantly bass-ey and being able to hear the mid range more.
js4all 16y ago
This is called Product differentiation. Every company is doing it. And if not, they will likely lose to their competitors. This is Marketing base knowledge: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_differentiation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_differentiation
javanix 16y ago
In case anyone is wondering, I just did this on my almost four-year old pair of HD555s and you can definitely tell the difference. Sure glad I bought the cheaper pair now.
sudonim 16y ago
I just did this mod and posted a pic: http://www.flickr.com/photos/colin_n/5451298732/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/colin_n/5451298732/

395 points by ryanf 16y ago

iwwr 16y ago

Intel, AMD and Nvidia are also notorious for these kinds of practices.

johnkary 16y ago
Reminds me of the days of using graphite pencils to unlock CPUs :)
- erickhill 16y ago
  Or a paper clip to open an old Mac's CD tray. "Who has a paper clip? Anyone?" So, the lack of a CD open/close button made it more "luxurious".
meastham 16y ago
Why do these types of market partitioning practices anger people so much? Isn't it a good thing that these companies are offering different price points for people to choose from?
- joelhaasnoot 16y ago
  The anger comes from essentially paying for air, or just adding profit for the company. If two parts are almost essentially the same, why am I paying more just for a different label? Chip manufacturers actually do sell you a different product when you buy the high performance product, and it's related to chip yields.
  - dfox 16y ago
    In this case it might be exactly same as with chips, with headphones failing some QC test being labeled as cheaper and getting additional piece of foam to partially fix whatever badness was discovered in such test (like unintended resonance caused by manufacturing tolerances).
    - varjag 16y ago
      It most certainly isn't the same. It doesn't work like that with defective speakers.
      - dfox 16y ago
        In my opinion, the high-res photos in the original forum thread clearly shows some difference in build quality between both models. Compare for example how cleaner is hot gluing job on the driver on the 595 and that there is glob of something (hot glue?) on the external grill catch (lowest on first picture) on the 555 where there does not apear to be anything like that on the 595. Extruding things from plastics (and especially ABS which this appears to be made from) is surprisingly inexact process and one would assume that manufacturing headphones selling for hundreds of dollars requires quite tight tolerances. My assumption is that the foam is there to damp rattling of case that is made from not exactly matched parts (and this is consistent with few posts in the forum which describe sound quality getting worse after removing the foam). And I don't see why speakers/headphones/whatever can't be differentiated on quality, while having same overall design.
        varjag 16y ago
        There is no way to sort out speaker driver rejects into 1st, 2nd and whatever category. If a sample has quality issue, it is likely to deteriorate further in use rapidly. Lower quality speakers are not rejects of high quality speakers, they are just cheaper designs. As to the mold, the holes there require no tolerances, they are there just to avoid air cushion behind the driver and serve no other purpose. Similarly, a foam pad is a rough hack to reduce its effectiveness, driving the speaker's response down. Do you really feel like this foam cut is some precision fix to tolerances problem?
  - defen 16y ago
    > The anger comes from essentially paying for air, or just adding profit for the company. If two parts are almost essentially the same, why am I paying more just for a different label? I think this question is rooted in a flawed "cost-based" perception of product pricing, which is intuitive and seemingly "fair", but not how the world works. In reality businesses should charge based on the value (perceived or actual) their product brings to their customers.
    - prodigal_erik 16y ago
      Consumer surplus through cost-based pricing is the very goal of having a free market. We route resources to the most efficient producers because they're capable of offering lower prices. If Sennheiser can come out ahead by doing useless things to reduce the value of their products (that don't even reduce costs!) without fear of being undercut, that represents a market failure. This is really disappointing. My excellent HD-280s are finally cracking after years of heavy use, and now I have to reconsider doing business with them for a replacement.
      - defen 16y ago
        A perfectly efficient market is nice in theory but I don't think it exists outside of commodities like "sorghum and gypsum" (I think those are tptacek's words). Consumers are usually not going to be perfectly informed so there's always room for marketing to increase the perceived value of a product.
        tomjen3 16y ago
        And that is why marketeers are the scum of the earth. And why your company cannot afford to not have them.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
- thefool 16y ago
  Because it feels like your being cheated when you are sold something that the person that is selling it to you broke on purpose. It doesn't really matter if the practice actually lets more people use a product, it just feels dirty.
  - dman 16y ago
    On the flip side - whenever I see stuff which is so easily modded to its full version I usually imagine an engineer inside a large corporation grinning because he knows some kid somewhere will figure this out and get an early christmas present. Case in point - the amd 6950 radeons that can be flashed to radeon 6970's, earlier nvidia cards that could be softmodded to quadros etc . I mean the product differentiation could be actually a lot more involved and sometimes it just feels like the product was designed to be unlocked by the hackers and tinkerers.
  - thematt 16y ago
    I see a lot of Web 2.0 applications these days that have their own pieces of foam. It's really all the same code on the backend and theoretically it wouldn't cost them anymore to enable all features completely. They purposely disable features or put their own pieces of "digital" foam in between plans in order to provide different price points for users.
    - extension 16y ago
      The difference is that people generally expect to own the utilitarian physical goods that they pay for. Since information can't be owned in the same sense, it's understood that buying it is going to take the form of some sort of licensing arrangement with more arbitrary conditions. In reality, the economics of the utilitarian physical goods business may sometimes resemble more those of the information business, but it's up to manufacturers to justify that to their customers.
  - ringm 16y ago
    It is not only about feeling personally cheated, it is about observing such a glaring inefficiency of the economy. Sennheiser expended a lot of effort to create a perfectly good product, and then our economy stimulates them to waste a part of this effort by crippling the product just to create... a kind of pay-what-you can scheme.
- paulsmith 16y ago
  Did you read the post? The $200 headphones are /exactly the same/ as the $350 ones, except for a piece of easily-removable foam they crammed in the opening to reduce the sound quality. That's not "market partioning" -- that's utter hostility toward your customers.
  - meastham 16y ago
    I did. I just don't see how this is any different than intentionally removing features from software in order to sell it at lower prices.
    - kenjackson 16y ago
      I agree. This seems like a reasonable thing to do if you want to have multiple price points for your product. Would people feel a lot better if instead they just went and changed the circuitry to produce lower quality sound?
      - marshray 16y ago
        Would people feel a lot better if instead they just went and changed the circuitry to produce lower quality sound? Yes, as long as there was a halfway plausible explanation that it cost less to produce.
        jmaygarden 16y ago
        In this case it does cost less to produce since they don't have to develop a new product and setup separate manufacturing processes. That piece of foam saves a lot of money.
        colanderman 16y ago
        My guess is the headphones cost $20 to produce. The $350 price tag covers R&D.
    - jbri 16y ago
      In the general human mindset, there's a huge difference between "they're adding extra for those who pay more" and "they're taking stuff away from those who pay less". If the feature differentiation is achieved by taking the premium offering and adding a component to remove functionality, then that feels a lot worse than taking the mid-range offering and adding components to result in the premium one.
- krig 16y ago
  Perhaps it's that people who bought the more expensive model thought they were buying higher quality components, but now realise they paid to have a piece of foam not be put where a piece of foam should not be? That consumers in general are happy to pay premium for premium features, but not for nothing? I mean, to me this practice is practically fraudulent when it comes to consumer goods. Yes, it makes business sense to offer product at different price points. You could argue that the higher priced model pays for the R&D that went into developing the headphones. That doesn't change the fact that these are the exact same headphones with a $150 price difference. Comparing to the software case where you pay more to have features put in that may be disabled in the cheaper version, there is a big difference there. When you buy the more expensive version you know what was taken out, and getting that is what you are paying for. Would anyone buy the more expensive headphones if the box said "unnecessary foam not added"?
- sharmajai 16y ago
  Because that's inNOvaTion.
- marshray 16y ago
  Why do these types of market partitioning practices anger people so much? Because it makes them feel ripped off. Enthusiasts were likely having positive feelings about their purchase of Sennheiser products and now they feel like an idiot. Psychology is a big part of the audio business. Isn't it a good thing that these companies are offering different price points for people to choose from? That Sennheiser is taking headphones and expending extra cost to muffle them in order to sell them at a lower price indicates that they do not consider themselves to be in an efficient economic market. Likely they are selling the muffled headphones in order to artificially inflate the price of the normal ones. It also raises the question of in what other ways Sennheiser might be intentionally degrading the quality of its products.
  - cabalamat 16y ago
    > Psychology is a big part of the audio business. It's a big part of most businesses; you want the customer to have positive emotions regarding your company/product.
  - mryall 16y ago
    A similar thing happens with TVs in electrical appliance stores. Brighter pictures are more appealing to the average viewer, so the stores bump up the brightness setting on the more expensive TVs. They can pull tricks like this because most people don't care that much about whether their chosen product is better according to some objective measurement. Rather, they care about getting a good deal and being made to feel happy about their purchase. Unfortunately for Sennheiser, high-end audio customers are probably one group who do care about buying something objectively better. News like this risks hurting their target market substantially, I'd say.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- antihero 16y ago
  It's just a great example of how capitalism leads to do things that are utterly perverse.
- artsrc 16y ago
  If it is such a good thing, they should clearly describe what they are doing to potential customers. People who are not given all relevant information before they buy are product can legitimately feel upset.
  - carpo 16y ago
    "Now without foam!!!"
nhebb 16y ago
So are software companies. I offer two versions of my software and will be adding a 3rd soon. The program is the same, but the availability of some features is based on the license. In light of that, I'd be a hypocrite if I complained about these practices with hardware vendors when it's done all the time in software, including my own.
- patio11 16y ago
  Yep. Difference between free and registered versions of my software: one single if statement.
  - nhebb 16y ago
    Marginal cost of an if statement: $0. Knowing where to place it: $29.95
- tomjen3 16y ago
  There are lots of differences between hardware and software, so I don't think it is hypocritical to complain about the hardware manufactures doing this.

defen 16y ago

How long until we get a DMCA-like law preventing these kinds of blog posts? He'd be guilty of trafficking in technology which aids in the circumvention of profit-enhancing business practices.

iwwr 16y ago
I never realized plain foam can be an object of DMCA :) It really doesn't matter how broken the security is, doesn't it.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

spiralganglion 16y ago

The added piece of foam has to cost them something. So, really, the "broken" headphones should be more expensive, right? In any case, my friends and I have long held the belief that "If you can't open it, you don't really own it". If my toaster breaks, you can be sure I'll open it up and try to fix it before I think of buying a new one. Though before anyone thinks of flaming, I'm ok with my iPad. I can make an exception for this type of tech!

jasonlotito 16y ago
And even then, you still have ifixit to fall back on to get it done should you want to. =)

jrockway 16y ago

So the plastic bag that supposedly contains the driver is labeled, "System with resonator left side". Is "System" what they call the driver? I'm interested in seeing what Sennheiser's justification for this is. It seems odd to piss off buyers of high-end products, because they're the ones that do the research. You can't just go to Target and buy some HD5*5 cans; you have to order them from an audiophile-y place (or Amazon). (The processor manufacturers make their price structure clear. They make the good ones, part of it is broken, so they turn off the broken part and sell it to you as a lower-end model. And if there is no demand for the fully-working ones, and they don't have enough broken ones to meet the demand for them, they just cripple the good ones. But like unscrewing the headphone and taking out foam, you can just change the multiplier and enjoy the increased performance. So why complain unless you already bought the high-end product?)

russss 16y ago
> So the plastic bag that supposedly contains the driver is labeled, "System with resonator left side". Is "System" what they call the driver? Well, the driver itself in those headphones is an integral part of a larger piece which includes some more acoustic parts. That's what you can see there, and it's not symmetrical, so it has left-hand and right-hand versions. > I'm interested in seeing what Sennheiser's justification for this is. It seems odd to piss off buyers of high-end products, because they're the ones that do the research. It's worth noting that the 595s have a better standard of finish and come with a few accessories such as a nifty desk-mounting hook. Not that that justifies it.

apl 16y ago

I understand that this raises eyebrows, but it's hardly fraud. Do people actually think that retail price is a function of production/R&D cost? It's not, never has been. Dropbox charges 20$ for something that consumes marginally more ressources and incurs identical R&D costs when compared to the 10$ product. Chip manufacturers do this all the time. Discounts for electronics and groceries are fully artificial. A much more realistic model is price as whatever the market can bear. I sincerely doubt that there is a moral obligation to set price points in any other way. [This may be relevant: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckies.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckie...]

AndyJPartridge 16y ago
Agreed it's not fraud... But wouldn't it be (morally? commercially?) better to sell one product at the mid-point? I know in a limited range it's good to have a better and a worse to sell the median, but that doesn't apply here. They have many models above and below these two.
- jbri 16y ago
  It's all about what's called the consumer surplus. If someone is willing to pay $350 for a pair of headphones, but they only paid $200 because you didn't have a $350 offering, you just lost $150. The trick is to effectively capture that surplus without pissing off your customers or making them feel they're being ripped off.
  - AndyJPartridge 16y ago
    What I was thinking, put another way, is that they are taking a risk with these two price-points doing this and getting caught out. There is no need when they have headphones much cheaper, and MUCH more expensive than these two. I do agree with your reasoning if the above wasn't so.
    - lukeschlather 16y ago
      Are they really getting caught? Near as I can tell, there are no penalties for this sort of behavior, and for every person who is willing to rip open a $150 pair of headphones to get them working like the $350 pair, there's someone who has no idea how headphones work, but is still willing to pay top dollar for the best they can get. And odds are these people won't even be aware of this blog post.

xal 16y ago

Great bargain. Additionally, the HD-555 can be had for about 100 on eBay. I've been buying my Sennheisers there for years, always the 570 model but that's a bit dated now.

foresterh 16y ago

On Amazon, the headphones are closer in price... $85 for the HD555 and $150 for the HD595. Still paying $65 for one less piece of foam.

daeken 16y ago

For what it's worth, I picked up a pair of HD595s back in early 2007 for $150, refurbed. They're still in absolutely perfect quality (despite more abuse than you can imagine) and by far the best headphones I've ever owned. Worth every cent, no questions asked.

boyter 16y ago
Im going to agree. I have the HD555's and have given them a lot of abuse over 3 years or so of owning them. They are still in very good condition and sound the same as the first day I got them. Totally reccomend the 555 or the 595 as being the best quality affortable headphones I have ever come across.
- Qz 16y ago
  Apparently I am more abusive to my headphones because I managed to break a plastic part on one side that connects the ear parts to the headband, mainly from them getting dropped on the floor countless times due to repeatedly tripping over the cord that's just a bit too long. I've kept them together with glue and tape in various combinations, since otherwise they still work fine.
  - andrewcooke 16y ago
    This part is cracked on my pair too. It's a common failure with these headphones - you can search for people complaining about it...
    - daemin 16y ago
      I had a pair of my 555's sent for repair twice over 5 years. Once under warranty for a bad speaker module, and once for cracking. Still it's lasted this long, one pair 6+ years, another going on 3 now, so I'm pretty satisfied with them.

Semiapies 16y ago

Maybe I'm just cheap, but $200 for the cheaper headphones sounds ridiculous to begin with, and well into "anyone paying that much probably deserves it" territory.

hartror 16y ago
I know plenty of people who pay that much, and more for headphones. These are people who get into discussions about the loudness war [1] and the pros/cons of various audio formats for different musical genres. They're not stupid, just enthusiasts, and as such enjoy using high quality equipment, just like any enthusiast. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
- Semiapies 16y ago
  The loudness war is one the very reasons expensive headphones are a complete waste of time.
  - wmf 16y ago
    What if you're listening to jazz on vinyl with a tube amp? :-)
  - JonnieCache 16y ago
    What if you're writing your own music?
- _delirium 16y ago
  True, and I'm something of a headphone enthusiast as well, but there is a lot of snake oil. Even among stuff that isn't outright snake oil, it's very hard to actually spot differences above a certain level, and I'm not convinced everyone who claims they can is actually doing so. Sometimes I'm not that sure for my own listening. I do try to do blind tests sometimes, but they're hard to really keep blind (different feel of headphones, recognize the sound of a headphone I've already heard before, etc.). And beyond that, what exactly constitutes "quality" is a whole other story! The easiest way to tell differences among high-end headphones is to train yourself on certain test samples that are notoriously hard to reproduce properly, and then listen for differences, but it's not at all clear that doing that is a meaningful predictor of subjective enjoyability when using the headphone to listen to normal music. Overall I've settled on open-back headphones in the ~$70-150 range as the sweet spot for me personally (I mostly use Grado SR-80s).

ghjktykyu 16y ago

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ent 16y ago

In case anyone is interested, I just did this mod for my hd555s and can confirm that it does seem to make the sound clearer although I can't really make a good comparison for obvious reasons.

Qz 16y ago
I'm interested in trying it, mine are beat up as is. How do you get the ear pads off to be able to unscrew the parts shown in the pictures?
- ent 16y ago
  I just pulled them off. They are attached with small plastic clips but luckily not the nasty ones that break. The fabric mesh under those also comes off just by pulling. You should probably be careful with pulling the ear pads, they are glued to a plastic ring and apparently it is possible to just pull them off the glue (my friend did that to his ones).

ck2 16y ago

I've got a better hack for you. Buy a $20 pair of Koss KTXPRO1 http://amazon.com/dp/B00007056H http://amazon.com/dp/B00007056H Read the reviews. They sound almost as good as $200 headphones. I own a couple of Sennheiser, and I prefer the Koss unless I need closed cans for some reason.

rms 16y ago
Those are indeed the best $20 headphones (and the same drivers are available in all sorts of different form-factors) but they only sound better than the $149 Bose headphones, not anything remotely audiophile quality. I definitely prefer certain $60 Sennheiser headphones (HD497, which I don't think they make anymore, haven't listened to the equivalent from the current product line) to the Koss drivers.
adolfojp 16y ago
Could you recommend a good cheap pair of over the ear headphones to a non audiophile like me?
- alexqgb 16y ago
  Grado makes some really nice stuff. Their cheapest model (SR-60i) gets rave reviews as one of the audio world's very best values. http://www.gradolabs.com/frameset_main.htm http://www.gradolabs.com/frameset_main.htm I've used the same pair of Sony MDR-7506's on a professional, near daily basis for about seven years. They're very accurate, and more importantly, super solid. I mean, they're tools. And they work. About $100, and a really good value for money. http://www.amazon.com/Sony-MDR7506-Professional-Diaphragm-Headphone/dp/B000AJIF4E/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1297648596&sr=1-1 http://www.amazon.com/Sony-MDR7506-Professional-Diaphragm-He...
  - wiredfool 16y ago
    I love the sound from my Grados, but they're not exactly the most comfortable headphones in the world. they can be somewhat painful if you're wearing glasses, since your ear tends to get some pressure on it. My sennhausiers (585) are a lot more comfortable. A bit clearer sound, a touch less bass, and way less reliable cords. I've had the Grados since the early 90s, and the Sennhausers since about 2000.

strlen 16y ago

Sounds similar to IBM's practice of inserting 'nops' into software of the AS-400s on otherwise identical hardware to create price gradations.

gwern 16y ago
But is IBM's practice as easily circumvented? If they are literally inserting nops, then that sounds like something a quick binary conversion could erase.
- Udo 16y ago
  My assembly-fu is weak, but wouldn't that invalidate all jump addresses and data pointers inside the program?
  - gwern 16y ago
    Yes, but that's not hard to fix either. For example, Google's binary deltas for Chrome updates would be huge if they couldn't easily fix those addresses; see http://dev.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/software-updates-courgette http://dev.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/software...
- strlen 16y ago
  If you could then update the jump addresses (which are relative to IP) -- definitely possible programmatically, then yes. However, I don't believe you had the permission to alter the system software on an AS400. Not to mention, if you have engineers capable of doing systems programming and re-imaging the system, you're not a target customer for an AS400 or the AS400 is used in such a function where it makes no business sense for you to allocate "real" engineering resources (who are working on your core product, not your accounting system) for this. The AS400 was/is meant to be a turn key solution: IBM profesional services sets it up for you, after which you run SAP (or the like) on it. It also already came with DB2 and is fairly interesting by making the database the file system (decades before WinFS failed, Hans Reiser went to pursue other interests and btrfs is promising but still unstable).
16y ago

m3mb3r 16y ago

Brilliant. Brought my HD-555 alive.

sfphotoarts 16y ago

This article is good for Sennheiser, I just ordered a pair of the 555's from Amazon for $85

rtomayko 16y ago
Same :)
dougabug 16y ago
This could all be a diabolical marketing ploy to move a whole lot of HD555's.
sudonim 16y ago
As did I.
misterbwong 16y ago
Oblig. marketing cliche: There's no such thing as bad publicity.

gojomo 16y ago

Years ago, I recall reading (almost certainly on Usenet) a parable which involved a king who needed some bricks, but the cost of getting them could only be recouped by creating some artificial distinction between 'gold' and common bricks, to sell some at a low-price/high-volume and others at high-price/low-volume. In a contrived manner, it neatly illustrated the case that some arrangements that offend one's intuition are actually the best way to get certain things everyone wants financed. Would love to find a link; it's stumped all my search attempts (including at Google Groups) ever since.

georgecmu 16y ago

A related pricing quirk that I found interesting. HD 555 MSRP in the States is $170, and you can buy it for $85 on amazon.com[1]. Right across the border, the MSRP is 200 CAD (202.5 USD) and you could get it for 180 CAD on amazon.ca[2]. In other words, the discounted price in Canada is higher than the nominal price in the States, which in turn is almost twice what consumers actually pay for these headphones. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Sennheiser-HD555-Professional-Headphones-Channeling/dp/B0001FTVDQ http://www.amazon.com/Sennheiser-HD555-Professional-Headphon... [2] http://www.amazon.ca/Sennheiser-Open-Hi-Fi-Stereo-Headphone/dp/B0001FTVDQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1297647160&sr=1-1 http://www.amazon.ca/Sennheiser-Open-Hi-Fi-Stereo-Headphone/...

jarek 16y ago
Welcome to Canada. We're still celebrating that Amazon.ca actually has them. Their electronics selection is less than inspiring.
teamonkey 16y ago
It's not just Sennheiser, all quality headphones seem to have a high markup in Canada. In addition, many companies refuse to ship them across the border (I suspect because the don't want to deal with customers who refuse to pay import tax).
- jedbrown 16y ago
  The retailer may to agree not to ship internationally. A lot of outdoor gear companies require this so they can price independently in different countries, it seems at least plausible that these companies do the same.
  - teamonkey 16y ago
    Perhaps, but I've experienced this specifically for headphones. Companies that will ship other goods refuse to ship headphones. Maybe it applies to other electronics, but I've had no problem with getting electronics across the border in the past.

latch 16y ago

I understand people defending the practice, but this nonetheless offends me. For me, it isn't about the 555 owners getting a crippled product, but that the 595 owners are paying a huge markup. People are talking about market behavior and what not, but I don't feel like Sennheiser is behaving in good faith here. They are intentionally relying on opaque information (this is obviously news to almost everyone), and making price the only way consumers have to reliably differentiate between the products (you can't even test drive the products to tell). Also, with respect to the "luxury" part of the discussion, they are competing against themselves, the branding and "Sennheiser" name you get with the 595 or 555 is the same. I've been considering getting 800's, I'm a huge Sennheiser fan. I think this has put me off though (even knowing that everyone else probably does the same thing).

sofuture 16y ago
>I understand people defending the practice, but this nonetheless offends me. For me, it isn't about the 555 owners getting a crippled product, but that the 595 owners are paying a huge markup. The baseline in this discussion is $200 headphones. Do you really want to talk huge markup?
jamesaguilar 16y ago
If they didn't know about this, you could probably argue that they actually enjoyed paying a huge markup for little benefit. Considering most of them would probably not be able to tell the difference in a blind test between the two states of the cheaper headphone, the only possible difference is price and perceived value. They are paying more simply to pay more, not because they're actually getting better sound quality.
- latch 16y ago
  I totally hear what you are saying, but I honestly believe that most people are paying more, at least partially, to get a better product. Even if they can't tell that the product is better (say, because they can't hear the difference), I think the difference is night and day.
jarek 16y ago

levigross 16y ago

Man that is one expensive piece of foam.

thristian 16y ago
Not at all, it's worth negative $200.
- siika2000 16y ago
  Anyone know where I could buy some of that?
  - yigit 16y ago
    http://www.amazon.com/Sennheiser-HD555-Professional-Headphones-Channeling/dp/B0001FTVDQ http://www.amazon.com/Sennheiser-HD555-Professional-Headphon...
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

aforty 16y ago

I just performed the mod. Was really easy and I hear an audible difference (even to my untrained, non-audiophile ears). For the record, the practice does not offend me. This has been done for ages. R&D costs for creating the HD595's were no doubt great and to recoup some money they created a cheaper, crippled version. With headphones you aren't paying for the parts but for the engineering.

ramchip 16y ago

According to Amazon, the HD595 is actually heavier by 10g than the HD555. Is the headband different?

deltaqueue 16y ago
Yes, the HD595's have a leather headband and some sort of chrome accents. Also, the 595's come with a headphone mount/clip you can attach to your desk.

Goonbaggins 16y ago

While this is really neat, the 595s also feature some nicer padding on the headband. Probably not enough for the price difference, but I just wanted to note that the piece of foam is not the only difference between the two.

teyc 16y ago

Actually, this is an article that'll make Steve Blank proud. His SuperMac cards were all the same, but tuned slower for the cheaper versions.

darkmethod 16y ago

As for the mod itself. I just tried it on my 555 and I noticed only a subtle difference. As odd as it may be, I think I prefer the foam. As for Sennheiser's strategy to cripple the product line to handle a different marketing segment; it reminded me of a Steve Blank's post. http://steveblank.com/2009/04/16/supermac-war-story-7-building-the-whole-product/ http://steveblank.com/2009/04/16/supermac-war-story-7-buildi...

juiceandjuice 16y ago

Sennheiser is a company I've always tried to steer clear of because of this. There's a lot of companies that take advantage of their branding (i.e. M-Audio, Monster cable, etc) to jack up the prices on mediocre hardware. Once stuff hits guitar center and best buy, you're probably going to be getting ripped off somewhere. You can buy better quality Mogami mic cable from a pro-audio supplier than you can from Guitar Center for half the cost. The audiophile world (along with the "guitar aficionado") is a very strange place.

mambodog 16y ago
I think the key is to actually find out about what you're buying and get some word-of-mouth recommendations rather than relying on brand alone as a measure of quality. I think the pro-audio industry is small enough that nearly all big players expand into the consumer region eventually. That doesn't mean that all their stuff is crap. I still think my Sennheiser HD-25s are some of the very best DJ monitor headphones, but they are a world away from the Sennheiser consumer stuff.

sudonim 16y ago

If only there were a mod to add an Apple headphone connector and a Zalman microphone to the sennheiser 555, that would be an amazing VOIP headset for the Mac.

jarek 16y ago
Break out the soldering iron and duct tape, nothing's stopping you.
- sudonim 16y ago
  I was lying in bed last night think about how to do it. Im thinking of cutting the end off of old iPhone buds and then soldering the mic, and headset together with that on the end. Fun times! Thanks for the encouragement.

cypherpunks01 16y ago

I just did this, and performed a very rough A/B test with one earpiece modded, while leaving the foam on the other. The bass (on a bass-heavy song) was very noticeably more muted on the stock earpiece, sounding almost completely dead compared to the one without the foam. Needless to say, I quickly removed the other, and now they sound better than ever. Highly recommended!

carterschonwald 16y ago
how do you remove it properly? after removing the earpads I don't quite see how to pop out the rest.

georgieporgie 16y ago

I'm not an audiophile, because audiophiles are the homeopathic suckers of the audio world. I do, however, like high-quality sound. If you want a good over-the-ear headphone, the Sony MDR-V6 is quite nice. They sound decent, are built a tank, and have been in continuous production since the mid 80's. They're $90 on Amazon. If you want in-ear, get Etymotic ER-4's. They're the only headphone I've ever found that can compete with my NHT 2.5i speakers. They should be available around $200.

edge17 16y ago

looks like you can just pay $150 bucks for HD 595 on Amazon - http://www.amazon.com/Sennheiser-HD595-High-Grade-Premiere-Headphones/dp/B0001FTVE0/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1297662051&sr=8-1 http://www.amazon.com/Sennheiser-HD595-High-Grade-Premiere-H...

deltaqueue 16y ago

The blog post doesn't mention all of the aesthetic differences--which, at the current Amazon price point, could justify the price difference for some--so I thought I would mention the others here: -the headband is leather -cans have a Sennheiser logo on them -cans have a chrome ring around them -comes with a nifty headphone stand / mount disclosure: I own some 555's, and will be trying this mod at the office on Monday.

deltaqueue 16y ago
FWIW, I did the mod, but I don't have an effective way to AB test. Tried one ear at a time, but could not detect the difference. Went ahead and removed the foam from the other, and the increased sound stage sounds great (though without an accurate test it's difficult to say how much of a change is placebo vs. noticeable).
- evandena 16y ago
  Once the foam is removed, how did you access the driver assembly? Is the screwdriver used as a prying tool?

krakensden 16y ago

It's pricing like this that leads people to just buy the cheapest offering available, without doing any research. If you already know you will be taken for a ride, why not just pay the least amount possible for the 'privilege'?

vacri 16y ago
Er, no it isn't. People pay the least amount possible because they're tight. Some people are actually offended when I tell them "you get what you pay for" - particularly for services rather than products. There's this weird consumer fantasy land where you get top quality for fire sale prices.

omarqureshi 16y ago

Having tried this mod out about a year ago - there is a definite increase in sound quality. However, it does turn your headphones into the most annoying things ever for people who are in the same room as you as they too can hear, quite loudly and clearly.

jasonkester 16y ago

I see a lot of people reacting to this the wrong way. Rather than getting angry at the company for segmenting its market, why not enjoy the fact that you can buy their top-of-the-line product for a fraction of the price? Rather than raise a stink and force them to do something about it, why not stay relatively quiet about it and let those of us in the know profit from it? I'm still upset that Baush and Lomb got raked over the coals so publicly for packaging the exact same lenses as monthly, weekly, and daily wear at different prices. I would have been perfectly happy to wear my "daily" lenses for a month each, thus saving several hundred dollars a year. Instead, a witch hunt was raised and they were forced to actually develop a flimsy contact lens to sell cheaply. It's a good thing, and now you know about it. Try not to ruin it for the rest of us.

TimothyBurgess 16y ago

You know what the most depressing thing about this article is for me? I no longer have the option of being an audiophile. :( I toured professionally as a drummer with a tech metal band and played with a click track every night. I used Ultimate Ears (high-quality earbuds) with ProTools through a rack amp. I had guitar tracks going behind the click track (metronome) for reference and let's put it this way... the reference guitar tracks had to be louder than the actual live amplifiers/PA and the click track had to be even louder than that. On a scale of 1 to 10, relative to the loudness of the vast majority of electronic music players (computers/mp3 players/phones/etc.)... I'd say my click track was at least 17. It hurts my ears just thinking about it now... constant TICK TICK TICK TICK TICK for 30 (sometimes 45) minutes every night for weeks at a time! I don't wish that upon my worst enemy. If it was another style of music there's no doubt I could have had it turned down to a fraction of what it was... but it was tech metal so it was always loud and heavy and all over the place. Most of the time I'm playing upwards of 300 bpm and the tempo and time signatures were always changing so the click track was necessary. I remember I tried turning it down a few times and it didn't work out so well haha... Bye bye hearing! I miss you.

khafra 16y ago
That's astounding--the UE page says they provide up to 32db of sound reduction; and that wasn't enough to reduce the ambient sound from the speakers and other monitors to non-hearing-damaging levels? I feel sorry for the patrons of the venues you played in. I do care about my own hearing, and I hate it when I forget to bring non-distorting attenuators of some sort to a place which makes a goal of preventing conversation even in shouts.
- TimothyBurgess 16y ago
  I'm not sure if the UE model I used reduced sound by 32db but they definitely reduced it a LOT. That's actually why I bought them. I didn't buy the high-end though. At the time I needed them immediately and could only afford the $50 buds from Best Buy. The difference in sound when wearing the headphones was insane, but the click trick still had to be turned way up. Now that I think about it iirc, it was actually mostly my drums (mostly cymbals) that I had to drown out... the guitar cabs/PA levels varied depending on the venue setup.

troydavis 16y ago

FWIW, Sennheiser USA's CEO says the mod upgrade claim isn't accurate: http://twitter.com/#!/SennheiserUSA/status/37092187850153984 http://twitter.com/#!/SennheiserUSA/status/37092187850153984 ("Urban myth deserves no response. Read the specs; do the tests....all factual. Listen to both and you be the judge.") I interpreted "urban myth" as a slam instead of a firm answer, but he confirmed that's their position: http://twitter.com/#!/SennheiserUSA/status/37163867276574720 http://twitter.com/#!/SennheiserUSA/status/37163867276574720 ("Urban Myth=Not True.") I asked him to comment here, since I'd like to hear more than can fit in a tweet. With 170 comments in 16 hours, it should be in their interest to describe any manufacturing differences in more depth.

scotty79 16y ago

You manufacture your product and you intentionally damage part of the volume to sell it cheaper only to make the price of other part of the volume justifiable. If that's not sign of pathology of free market than I don't know what is.

scotty79 16y ago

Imagine you are kid and the other kid approaches you with mug you really like: - Take a look at this wonderful mug with Mickey Mouse. It's worth 20$ - I'd love to buy that but I only have 5$ - Would you pay 50$ for it if the mug didn't have handle? - Yes I need a mug, but handle is so convenient... - I can take 5$ (as he breaks of the mug handle) Could you really buy this thing and not feel like he spat in your face? It's not about market it's about psychology of human exchange. Someone destroys value with no purpose other than better conning his peers. How could that not infuriate specimen of social species?

scotty79 16y ago
Too late to edit s/50/5/

zzzmarcus 16y ago

We had two pairs in the office and modded one and not the other. In a blind test two of three actually preferred the non-modded 555's. Our test wasn't great though, 10 seconds of a relatively low quality mp3 and none of us are audiophiles, though the one of us who is the closest to being an audiophile was the one who preferred the modded headphones so, take that fwiw. If you're going to do it, I found that you have to pull hard, as in really, uncomfortably hard on the foam padding to get it off. It does come off though, and everything went back together fine.

daemin 16y ago
My friends and I tested both the 555's and 595's in the shop to see which one we wanted to buy, and all of us agreed on the 555's because they sounded better to us. I seem to recall something about not being so blatantly bass-ey and being able to hear the mid range more.

js4all 16y ago

This is called Product differentiation. Every company is doing it. And if not, they will likely lose to their competitors. This is Marketing base knowledge: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_differentiation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_differentiation

javanix 16y ago

In case anyone is wondering, I just did this on my almost four-year old pair of HD555s and you can definitely tell the difference. Sure glad I bought the cheaper pair now.

sudonim 16y ago

I just did this mod and posted a pic: http://www.flickr.com/photos/colin_n/5451298732/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/colin_n/5451298732/