I have given up on portable musical electronic until I can find something that isn’t defective, because my old source, best buy all became defective in 2021. All headphones I’ve ever gotten have been defective cheap garbage, made with miniscule little wires and cheap connections, as if it’s unforeseeable the cord would get yanked.
It’s not like these are all cheap products either, paying 30 dollars for headphones, I expect more than 50 cents worth of raw materials. I don’t even know why we have forced labour factories overseas if we are paying more than we did back when we made our own quality products.
Most of the good audio gear is coming from niche channels direct from China. Moondrop and Fiio/Snowsky are probably the two biggest brands that you’d potentially find in your nearest city if there’s an audio shop with a chi-fi bent.
Getting iems with removable cables also helps. I resoldered my Porta Pros with MMCX jacks so that I could replace the cable. It is shit that you can’t get anything worth having unless you arguably know too much about the category, but it is out there.
Beyerdynamic still produces some of their headphones in Germany. Granted, that doesn’t necessarily make them more reliable. But spealing from experience (have a gaming headset for 7 years now), they have excellent customer service and repair your headphones in Germany swiftly (and in my case free of charge as well as providing new softening)
Yes after buying some manufactured goods at Aldi, I have come to not think german engineering is better necessarily as well. At least they pay their workers a living wage and don’t overly pollute as much though.
I have given up on portable musical electronic until I can find something that isn’t defective, because my old source, best buy all became defective in 2021. All headphones I’ve ever gotten have been defective cheap garbage, made with miniscule little wires and cheap connections, as if it’s unforeseeable the cord would get yanked.
It’s not like these are all cheap products either, paying 30 dollars for headphones, I expect more than 50 cents worth of raw materials. I don’t even know why we have forced labour factories overseas if we are paying more than we did back when we made our own quality products.
Wall Street is a fucking joke.
Most of the good audio gear is coming from niche channels direct from China. Moondrop and Fiio/Snowsky are probably the two biggest brands that you’d potentially find in your nearest city if there’s an audio shop with a chi-fi bent.
Getting iems with removable cables also helps. I resoldered my Porta Pros with MMCX jacks so that I could replace the cable. It is shit that you can’t get anything worth having unless you arguably know too much about the category, but it is out there.
Beyerdynamic still produces some of their headphones in Germany. Granted, that doesn’t necessarily make them more reliable. But spealing from experience (have a gaming headset for 7 years now), they have excellent customer service and repair your headphones in Germany swiftly (and in my case free of charge as well as providing new softening)
Thanks for the tip, I will check that out.
Yes after buying some manufactured goods at Aldi, I have come to not think german engineering is better necessarily as well. At least they pay their workers a living wage and don’t overly pollute as much though.
To be fair, part of this is that it’s been like 30 years since we made our own electronics
Longer for almost all of it really, it was already fucked in the 90s, but quality just keeps getting worse.