Klipsch HO Walkthrough...
http://www.engadget.com/2009/12/25/klipsch-headquarters-walkthrough-behind-the-scenes-and-between/
Every time trade shows such as CES and CEDIA open their doors, the collective masses are flooded with headphone after headphone, speaker after speaker. After awhile, one driver looks just as round as the next, and frankly, you start to take for granted what all goes into bringing the tunes we all dig to our ears, dens and underutilized kitchens. One of the mainstays in the audio industry opened their doors up to us this past weekend, and it didn't take much arm pulling to get us inside. We've generally found the design and sound qualities associated with Klipsch gear to be top-shelf, and we've struggled in the past to find too many gripes with the headphones and sound systems we've had the opportunity to review. Needless to say, we were quite curious to hear about (and see) what all goes into imagining, designing, testing and qualifying the 'buds and speakers that we've enjoyed for so many years, and if you share that same level of curiosity, join us after the break for the full walkthrough (and a few heretofore unreleased secrets, to boot).
Just so you have some background, Klipsch's headquarters are located in Indianapolis, Indiana, with another major production facility located in Hope, Arkansas. The Indy HQ (where we visited) is home to a dedicated design lab, one of only a smattering of anechoic chambers in the world, an in-house painting facility, a construction lab (for building wooden mockups as well as cabinets and the like), an environmental simulator for testing product response to weather variations and an SLA machine that's used to create minuscule mockups of earbuds. Oh, and there's also a handful of extremely passionate employees, a few one-off speakers that were built but never sold and a corporate mandate that music must be played be played at all times. Just kidding on that last one.
Our tour started out with a roundtable discussion involving a number of Klipsch's best and brightest headphone engineers and product managers, and we simply asked them to tell us (and in turn, you) what exactly goes into designing some of the smallest speakers known to man. Klipsch itself hasn't actually been in the headphone business forever; a few years back, the outfit made a few check swings (and misses) in the sector, but it wasn't until it dove deeply into ear canal research that things started to come together. You'll notice that the outfit's entire range of earbuds (including the S2, S4, S4i, X10, etc.) sport ear tips that aren't exactly round. In fact, they're oval.
An engineer explained to us (and showed us boxes upon boxes of proof) that hundreds of ear impressions were gathered in the name of research, and while each one obviously boasted its own unique shape and size, one single characteristic remained uniform across the board: the entrance into the ear canal is not a perfect circle, it's an oval. For decades, in-ear headphones have been forcing users to shove circular tips into oval-shaped holes, and that certainly explains the nagging pain that generally sets in after a few hours of solid listening. Klipsch decided to change the game up, and just recently it was granted a patent for its oval ear tips. We've tested these tips against more conventional alternatives, and there's no question that the oval ones fit more comfortably (and for longer periods).
We were also shown the actual speaker mechanism used within the S4 and S4i, and while it was far smaller than even a raisin, engineers somehow managed to implement a dual magnet design for the added kick on the low-end. During the briefing, we were introduced to a pair of to-be announced products that the company let us talk about early. The first is the new black-and-white Image S4i, which is the first set of iPhone remote-equipped earbuds that Apple has sold in white aside from its own. We're told that these will be out early next year for $99, and based on the immense amount of color mockups we witnessed in the design lab, we're all but certain that more variations are on the way. The second is an iPhone-friendly version of the high-end X10 (dubbed the X10i, naturally), which will ship in early 2010 for $349.
Courtesy of www.endgadget.com
http://www.engadget.com/2009/12/25/klipsch-headquarters-walkthrough-behind-the-scenes-and-between/
Every time trade shows such as CES and CEDIA open their doors, the collective masses are flooded with headphone after headphone, speaker after speaker. After awhile, one driver looks just as round as the next, and frankly, you start to take for granted what all goes into bringing the tunes we all dig to our ears, dens and underutilized kitchens. One of the mainstays in the audio industry opened their doors up to us this past weekend, and it didn't take much arm pulling to get us inside. We've generally found the design and sound qualities associated with Klipsch gear to be top-shelf, and we've struggled in the past to find too many gripes with the headphones and sound systems we've had the opportunity to review. Needless to say, we were quite curious to hear about (and see) what all goes into imagining, designing, testing and qualifying the 'buds and speakers that we've enjoyed for so many years, and if you share that same level of curiosity, join us after the break for the full walkthrough (and a few heretofore unreleased secrets, to boot).
Just so you have some background, Klipsch's headquarters are located in Indianapolis, Indiana, with another major production facility located in Hope, Arkansas. The Indy HQ (where we visited) is home to a dedicated design lab, one of only a smattering of anechoic chambers in the world, an in-house painting facility, a construction lab (for building wooden mockups as well as cabinets and the like), an environmental simulator for testing product response to weather variations and an SLA machine that's used to create minuscule mockups of earbuds. Oh, and there's also a handful of extremely passionate employees, a few one-off speakers that were built but never sold and a corporate mandate that music must be played be played at all times. Just kidding on that last one.
Our tour started out with a roundtable discussion involving a number of Klipsch's best and brightest headphone engineers and product managers, and we simply asked them to tell us (and in turn, you) what exactly goes into designing some of the smallest speakers known to man. Klipsch itself hasn't actually been in the headphone business forever; a few years back, the outfit made a few check swings (and misses) in the sector, but it wasn't until it dove deeply into ear canal research that things started to come together. You'll notice that the outfit's entire range of earbuds (including the S2, S4, S4i, X10, etc.) sport ear tips that aren't exactly round. In fact, they're oval.
An engineer explained to us (and showed us boxes upon boxes of proof) that hundreds of ear impressions were gathered in the name of research, and while each one obviously boasted its own unique shape and size, one single characteristic remained uniform across the board: the entrance into the ear canal is not a perfect circle, it's an oval. For decades, in-ear headphones have been forcing users to shove circular tips into oval-shaped holes, and that certainly explains the nagging pain that generally sets in after a few hours of solid listening. Klipsch decided to change the game up, and just recently it was granted a patent for its oval ear tips. We've tested these tips against more conventional alternatives, and there's no question that the oval ones fit more comfortably (and for longer periods).
We were also shown the actual speaker mechanism used within the S4 and S4i, and while it was far smaller than even a raisin, engineers somehow managed to implement a dual magnet design for the added kick on the low-end. During the briefing, we were introduced to a pair of to-be announced products that the company let us talk about early. The first is the new black-and-white Image S4i, which is the first set of iPhone remote-equipped earbuds that Apple has sold in white aside from its own. We're told that these will be out early next year for $99, and based on the immense amount of color mockups we witnessed in the design lab, we're all but certain that more variations are on the way. The second is an iPhone-friendly version of the high-end X10 (dubbed the X10i, naturally), which will ship in early 2010 for $349.
Courtesy of www.endgadget.com
