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"the only physical difference was an additional piece of foam inside the cheaper HD555 headphones, blocking about 50% of the outside-facing vents" They are lik
by UberFly 3y ago
"the only physical difference was an additional piece of foam inside the cheaper HD555 headphones, blocking about 50% of the outside-facing vents"
They are likely still making a good profit on the $200.00 "cheaper" pair - just goes to show what a rip-off the $350.00"premium" level of equipment is. Sennheiser should be embarrassed. I hope buyers take notice and send their money elsewhere.
- H8crilA 3y agoLol, why embarrassed. Sennheiser was happy and still is happy, this tutorial will not reach nearly enough people to make a difference in their sales. It is a very cool tutorial, though.
- squarefoot 3y agoYes, they probably don't care. In some circles, quite often the ones where the most money is, a hacked pair of headphones will always sound worse than an untouched one, no matter if lab instrumentation would say otherwise.
- COGlory 3y agoYou're looking at this all wrong. The 595s were competitive at their price point. They reviewed extremely well. They are considered good value. The 555s were excellent value, using the same driver. Neither is a ripoff. They're both good to excellent value when looking at the market.
- recursive 3y agoI still like Sennheiser. What makes you think elsewhere is any different?
- tzmudzin 3y agoDoes this make the practice any better?
- szundi 3y agoWhy don’t you give 1$ to everyone, they would be happy. Not doing it is not that nice. Same logic after reading and accepting the comments above.
- recursive 3y agoNo. But I didn't think it was that bad in the first place. They offer a product for a price. As a customer, I'm free to take it or leave it based on merits. I'm not familiar with this model, but at least one thing must be true. 1. A competitor offers an alternative product at a better price. 2. Sennheiser produces these more efficiently than anyone. 3. All alternatives have similar margins. 4. No other manufacturer has a similar product. Whatever the case may be, it will inform the rational comparison shopping process. This is a discretionary item. There's probably some economics name for this, but it's not insulin. Sennheiser isn't coercing anyone.
- yread 3y agoNote that the customer headphones Sennheiser brand was sold to Sonova in 2021. Sennheiser company only makes professional equipment.
- lrem 3y agoHow do I know which is which?
- yread 3y agoIf it would be easy to find out who actually makes the stuff no one would buy the brand. Seriously, EU should make some legislation against this kind of shady shit. It's confusing the consumer. If you don't want to make headphones anymore stop making them. Or license the "technology" but make them say "Sonova headphones with Sennheiser technology"
- Toutouxc 3y agoBoth the HD555 and 595 were very competitively priced (!), were popular and sold well. How exactly do you think that companies price their products other than "what enough people are willing to pay"?
- ricardobeat 3y agoThere is a significant gap between charging high prices for a quality product that people want to buy, and charging even higher prices by deceiving your customers about quality.
- 5tefan 3y agoI remember the times these cans were priced way cheaper. This is a fantastic rip off across all brands.
- Tildey 3y agoI’m curious if the chi-fi market will take over headphones in the coming years. IEMs are a bit easier to be competitive at, not having to worry about acoustic effects of ear/head shape, ergonomics/comfort is much simpler with IEMs, etc. But clearly good headphones are still working on a massive margin.
- csdvrx 3y ago> I’m curious if the chi-fi market will take over headphones in the coming years. For me, it already has: more choice, better quality, unmatched comfort - and that's fully leaving aside the costs. My favorite brands are SIVGA and LINSOUL.
- jorvi 3y agoGoing by Crinacle the current king of chi-fi is Moondrop. Personally I own Moondrop Aria IEMs for on the road, and for home Shure 840a cans with 1540 pads to kill the extreme treble. My cans before that were Audio Technica M40x with felt mod + new pads. I’m excited to see if chi-fi will be able to dethrone either of those bang-for-buck kings.
- voytec 3y ago> I hope buyers take notice and send their money elsewhere. I'm currently in the market for both in-ears and over-ears. Was looking into HD 25 model for over-ears. What other brands are worth looking into? KEF? Focal? Meze?
- 4ggr0 3y agoI personally like Beyerdynamic. MX 150/100 if you want to have a mic, DT990 Pro if you want open-back and DT770 Pro for closed-back. Worth mentioning that they're studio headphones, so if you like headphones with a lot of bass you might have to consider other models. At home I use Sennheiser Game One, before they were rebranded to EPOS. I really, really love them so if you can find them second-hand, go for them. They're hooked up to a Sennheiser GSX 1000. I use this setup for almost three years now and I'm really happy. For in-ears I use Marshall Mode EQs, I'm on the third pair now and am also really happy. They've got a lot of bass but when I'm commuting I actually prefer it over "true" sound :) As always with headphones, YMMV. I care about good sound but I'm not that much of an audiophile to care about exact frequency curves etc.
- csdvrx 3y agoBeyerdynamics are wonderful. I'd add SIVGA, far better than the Sennheiser I had! I'd suggest the SV021 if you want bass, or the SV003 if you prefer the flatness of studio headphones like the Beyers. I use them with a Sony Walkman DAP: best money I've ever spent! Good bass matters for some styles: the SV021 is better when I listen to say Моргенштерн
- 4ggr0 3y ago> I'd suggest the SV021 if you want bass Hmm, I actually am considering buying bassy over-ears, because all the over-ears I have are pretty neutral/studio sounding. I game a lot of singleplayer story-games and sometimes I feel that a bit more bass would be enjoyable for explosions, gunshots etc. Thanks for the recommendation, never heard of SIVGA :)
- 3y ago
- throwanem 3y agoI don't believe Sennheiser still make or sell either of the mentioned models. I might be wrong, but I recall them both being superseded some years ago. In any case, for less than the 595's original MSRP, these days you can get an HD 6XX that very perceptibly outdoes both 5-series models in frequency response. Yours is more of a 2013 complaint than a 2023 one, I think.
- Reason077 3y agoYes, the post should really have a [2008] tag. These are not current models.
- hinkley 3y agoAmazon still has some 555s but the top hits for the 595s list them as discontinued. I was trying to determine the price difference since I didn’t spot it in the article.
- throwanem 3y agoIt was somewhere around a hundred bucks, as I recall. The argument you're making wouldn't necessarily have been a bad one in its day, but its day is long past; the current successors of these models, the HD 569 and HD 599, differ in price by $20.
- hinkley 3y agoYeah I don’t think I’d be too keen to disassemble my headphones and potentially break or chip them to save myself the price of lunch. If it was a difference of half the price? Maybe. But not 15%.
- londons_explore 3y agoFor many consumer products, the R&D cost is most of the cost. The actual parts and raw materials are normally only a small fraction of the cost. Therefore, the $350.00 'rip off' may not in fact be a rip-off. In fact, with the quantity of them they sell, they may barely cover the R&D costs.
- ilyt 3y agoNot if you're Sennheiser. Can certainly be true for smaller brands
- londons_explore 3y agoIt isn't a given - we have no idea how much R&D went into those... maybe to design the shape of that plastic entire research teams invented new methods of acoustic modelling...
- wahnfrieden 3y agoIP shouldn't exist
- flushit 3y ago> rip-off This term demonstrates a lack of understanding of market dynamics. As a company you aim for a certain profit when developing and later manufacturing and selling a product. The market has multiple segments and ideally you re-use design and manufacturing processes for multiple segments. Simply speaking, you can basically sell a single tier for $250 or differentiate by different means into a $150 tier and a $350 premium tier. In the end, people with higher quality demands will pay a significant, dis-proportionate premium. So, you can tap into that, which means the premium tier essentially cross-subsidizes the cheap tier. Everybody angry at this practice needs to understand that they couldn't just sell the premium tier for $150. They'd need to sell it for $250, or whatever the weighted mean is. Worse, they'd likely sell fewer items in total, so $280 or some such is more likely to reach the same total profit. Really, it's not about being evil, it's about economy.
- kleiba 3y ago> In the end, people with higher quality demands will pay a significant, dis-proportionate premium. Also known as "rip-off".
- lotsofpulp 3y ago>In the end, people with higher quality demands will pay a significant, dis-proportionate premium. So, you can tap into that, which means the premium tier essentially cross-subsidizes the cheap tier. Everybody angry at this practice needs to understand that they couldn't just sell the premium tier for $150. They'd need to sell it for $250, or whatever the weighted mean is. Worse, they'd likely sell fewer items in total, so $280 or some such is more likely to reach the same total profit. See: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/marketsegmentation.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/marketsegmentation.asp Another example is selling books for cheaper in countries with lower incomes. Yet another example is countries charging more for access to national parks to people from richer countries than poorer countries. And another example is using coupons to get discounts, or student discounts, etc. It is not a perfect mechanism, and sometimes the subsidies are not from and to the populations that would make it "fair", but on a population wide level, it works pretty well.
- 3y ago
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- shrimp_emoji 3y ago> Sennheiser should be embarrassed. I hope buyers take notice and send their money elsewhere. Hell to the nah. Sennheiser is the last decent manufacturer of headphones. Everything else is literal garbage (especially headsets, which prove that there's some law of physics by which if you add a microphone to a pair of headphones the entire thing will fall apart in around a year). I just hope they stay in business. Logitech's gotten way more of my money over the years as I've bought replacement after replacement headset once they invariably break down, as well as proprietary lithium batteries that literally last a fraction as long as the rechargeable AAAs in my Sennheisers (which haven't even ran out once in over a year of using them ~15 hours per day)!
- jen20 3y agoI'm not sure I'd call them the _last_ decent manufacturer of headphones - perhaps if you only include brands that target the consumer/prosumer space. Beyerdynamic, for example, still make excellent products, including headsets and supply spare parts for headphones manufactured decades ago.
- bobsomers 3y ago> Sennheiser is the last decent manufacturer of headphones. Are you just not familiar with many headphone manufacturers? I had Sennheisers years ago and they were fine, but since then I've had headphones from Sony, AudioTechnica, and Shure (just to name a few) which I've much preferred to the Sennheisers I had.
- atoav 3y agoAs a circuit designer and audio tech person I'd highly caution against simply equating "visually the same" with "technically the same" without measurements and thorough checking. E.g. I could easily build exactly the same circuit multiple times, once for x Euros once for 10x Euros and once for 100x Euros just by picking the best components out of a heap and having them go to the 10x or 100x models. Visually this would look exactly the same, but in terms of tolerances there would be a huge difference. Same can be true for mechanical parts. I am not saying corporations are not greedy, I'd just say without measurement we can just assume it is the same without knowing.
- samstave 3y agoRecall that after Apple bought BEATS headsets it was revealed that BEATS was putting dummy-metal into the headsets to make them heavier, thus resulting in the purchaser to think that they had better-than headsets based on the perceived weight of the headset - but the weight was not in higher-powered magnets in the drivers...
- starky 3y agoThe price a product sells for is driven purely by the market that you are selling it into. If the market will bear a higher price to maximize profit then it is in the company's best interest (and is indeed their responsibility to their shareholders) to sell it for that price. That actual cost to make the product has practically zero bearing on the pricing, other than setting a floor for which the product will make a profit. If this pricing model is enough to get you to not buy a product then you probably will have a hard time finding anything to buy if you have a clue how much things actually cost to manufacture. I often look at products and get pissed off when I see the price because I have a good idea what the actual manufacturing cost is.