The Beyerdynamic T1 is a great example of what is wrong with the headphone industry.  You go to their website and you see pictures like this along with a bunch of hype about engineering and perfection and fidelity. 




But open a pair up in your home and this is what you see




It's a fancy, or at least fancy-looking driver thrown into an empty plastic cup with no damping whatsoever.  There is no way that could be ideal acoustically.  Maybe if it was a completely open back headphone, but this is a mostly closed cup.  Vents cut down on resonance but it's not enough.  It comes down to Beyer either being lazy or cheap with their TOTL 1,200 dollar headphone.  I'm not talking about some exotic damping materials that would drive the cost up.  I'm talking about materials that cost pennies.  It's Beyer taking time to make a finished product and not just throw cool looking stuff together. 

You would never see this kind of design or engineering from a well known respected speaker company making a product at the 1k price point.  I just got a pair of Mackie HR624 powered monitors, and can't find any internal photographs except for this simple schematic, but for about the same cost (or less) of a Beyerdynamic T1 you get 2 bookshelf speakers with 2 drivers each, one 5x bigger than the T1's (ie a heckof a lot more magnets, which is the T1's claim to fame), in a precisely tuned enclosure with a passive radiator in the back and two amplifiers per speaker.  That's not only a lot more hardware for the money, it's also a lot more engineering.  The Mackie is a fully engineered, precision made product that has dealt with the acoustic challenges of it's goals and design.  So let's lay it out here

Beyer T1
2 drivers
cool looking, but under-engineered plastic and metal enclosure (designed by Beyer decades ago...)
velour earpads

Mackie HR624 Monitor
2 tweeters
2 woofers
precisely designed and tuned wooden, metal and plastic enclosure
damping materials
2 passive radiators
4 amplifiers

Not only that, but the HR624 performs substantially better than the T1 in every way except maybe lower bass extension, which it's not designed for so it's not a flaw.  The T1's response is full of resonance, ringing and uneven FR peaks along with very inconsistent driver matching between channels and units.  The HR624 has little to none and their consistency from unit to unit is good enough that they sell the speakers individually, not in pairs.  Imagine getting an L and R T1 individually and how far off they would be. 

Something is wrong with this.  We as consumers need to stop getting dooped by cool looking pictures and marketing and start demanding well engineered products.  There is no excuse for what Beyer has done with the T1.  And the same goes for almost all headphones on the market today by every manufacturer. 

The argument could be made that headphones are a more complicated acoustic environment to deal with.  But look what LFF and I have done with the T50rp, a 75 dollar headphone.  The Fostex T50rp is a planar magnetic headphone that is very similar to the Beyer T1 in that it has an empty, under-engineered plastic cup.  The difference is that the T50rp uses a better, more sophisticated driver than the T1, and costs 75 dollars (1,125 dollars less than the T1).   There is a lot of modification potential in the T50rp because if you finish the job the engineers left undone and make the cups more acoustically ideal, it can be turned into one of the best headphones on the market at any price.  Both LFF and I took the time to properly design and tune the acoustics of the cup.  It took a lot of time.  LFF has training in this field, but I have 0 audio training.  If that is possible with a 75 dollar headphone and materials pulled out of wive's drawers and bought at craft stores, then there is really no excuse for companies like Beyerdynamic, Denon, Audio Technica, etc who have huge amounts of engineering capability.  With effort, it is clearly possible to produce headphones that perform as true Hi-Fidelity audio devices, but sadly that is a word that applies to very few headphones on the market today at any price.   Because they don't take the time.

And yet we consumers just lap it up.  The headphone enthusiast community actually seems to be so used to glaring colorations that they have accepted it and even learned to love them, creating collections of headphones and choosing certain colorations for certain moods and genres like wines at a fine restaurant.  And we're in a constant state of what is nick named "upgraditis" because the reality is so far from our ideal that with each new headphone, we talk ourselves into believing in the perfection of a highly flawed reality and when our "new toy high" wears off, we come back to the reality of those glaring flaws.  Headphone companies release flawed headphone after flawed headphone and we just beg for more.  Shure is about to realease a new TOTL open back headphone that measures (and performs according to early reports) no better than anything we've had for decades and Head-fi is mostly full of excited buyers who can't wait to find out what color they will be.  It's just a new frame, and a new kind of coloration. 

We're like addicts, and the headphone industry is playing us for fools.

No more crappy headphones!!!!