Article: Review | RAAL-requisite SR1a Earfield Headphone Monitor

[gmgraves]

22 hours ago, audiobomber said:

Wow, that was a rave! I'd love to hear these, but I'm a little afraid to, because I'm happy with my current headphones. They may be as good as you say, and I don't want to spend this much on headphones. 😏

I agree. I love my Stax so much that I can’t imagine how much better the SR1a’s could sound. I’m afraid that if I tried them, I’d find out! Also I ‘m a bit put off by not being able to listen to them laying down. Finally, the ribbons are user replaceable in these phones. Could that be because at some point they are going to require replacing, and perhaps replacing often? Only time will tell on this last point.

[gmgraves]

11 minutes ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

With respect to the drivers, here is what designer Aleksandar Radisavljević has to say:

 

 

 

It is not a fact that the ribbons are more consumable than anything else that vibrates all the time. The fact is that nothing that vibrates lasts forever, though.

I have a few ribbons that were working for 1k hrs and still remain like new. I also have a few that are totally sagging after I have severely overdriven them during testing phases of development. They tend to make popping sounds only on loud bass-effect in movies, so I just reduce the volume and continue...It's not like they became unusable all of a sudden. In any case, my normal pair proved to be less consumable than my Audezes that developed buzzing noises really quickly and I can't do anything to fix them.

Anyhow, we've had wonderful experiences with reliability of our tweeters and we have the best customer care ever in the industry:
For 4+ years now, we send free replacement ribbons to RAAL tweeter owners, no questions asked. With more that 12k tweeters out there, we don't send out more than 7-8 pairs per year. The cost of doing that means nothing to us at such insignificant failure rate.

I did the best I could in trying to engineer the same reliability. We will do the same kind of customer care policy if the reliability proves to be similar. Or if failure rates become significant, we could make them cheap enough that replacement after a few years is a non-issue.

Even at our start, we are the only ones that make repairable headphones. Not because we expect them to fail, but because I like things that are repairable. This is a dying feature for any product nowadays and I hate that, so I'm fighting it. I like good tools and I like to have the full control over things I use. My Weller soldering stations are not user repairable because they're bad, but because they're good tools and I can't remember when we replaced a heater on one of those. I especially don't like that companies that make things I use have the control over my time. I hate sending things back and waiting to get it repaired as it always takes more than necessary amount of time.
Ribbon headphones are my baby, my life's work. I certainly wont let them become a flop because of reliability issues, if any. The thing is out and there's no turning back now. They must give you a feeling of a good tool. We'll simply do what it takes to make these a legendary product and customer satisfaction is a major ingredient to make it such.

https://www.head-fi.org/threads/raal-ribbon-headphones-srh1a.890603/page-10#post-14777903

 

 

 

Thanks for that Chris. I like that attitude. I’ve always felt a little uncomfortable with our throw-away world. I come from an age that when a TV, Radio, or amplifier died, you call the local repair man. Now when one’s big, 4K flat screen TV fails, it ends up in a land fill and we are expected to buy a new one!