Gadgetory

for my entire life I've always been in the theist of audio I loved sound reproduction and music even as a child probably getting into it when I was about four years old and air guitaring to the Beatles on my dad's old Macintosh based tube system in high school I worked at a audio retailer in Sausalito California called music by design which was a really nice high-end retailers have a lot of audio research equipment they understand loudspeakers and was always a passion for me I studied engineering in college to go into audio but ended up getting into high tech instead and while I had some tangential work in audio video and 3d graphics you know I was taken in other directions eventually moving into Internet security which I hope to say was kind of a soul-sucking experience and as I became less and less enamored with high tech I started thinking about my life and what I wanted to accomplish and I realized I'd really walked away from my biggest passion and source of fun which was audio lots of different generations of Technology here these were some of the original Mad Dogs modified fostex t 50 RP headphones and they were really a affordable fun super reliable headphone I think we charged $2.99 for them at the time a version that came out that we really loved was the Mad Dog Pro which was probably our most underappreciated headphone it really brought some of the fun of the alphas out using a newly using the Alpha baffle technology and design it just pumped out a great bass heavy sound it was a lot of fun for electronica these are some of our alpha dogs and an early production prototype with you can see the resolution of 3d printing at the point also some tuning holes that were dialed in there is a way of prototyping airflow these things are very sensitive to having a small amount of pressure relief for the cup so you can't make closed headphones that are perfectly closed but that allowed us to fine-tune it eventually we got a patent on this which is the variable screw for adjusting air damping where the set screw is built into the sidewall of the cup and you can control the size of the aperture with a wrench through here and that allowed us to precision tune and balance the bass so that each headphone had perfect precision on that here are some the original prototypes for the ether this was a real crude first proof-of-concept and just wanted to make sure that it actually worked then we began working on the gimble design and original wires and this was a steel wire before we hit upon our nitinol wire design in here is where we fabricate the electrostatic headphones it's a clean room which is operating at class-one levels so you basically have no measurable contaminants of any size in here we have less than 10 samples we're ten contaminants per cubic meter it's a super big filtration system up in the ceiling and then we also have filtration of their work bench level here so that in addition to having a very low contaminant level within the room there's very clean air being washed across the production surfaces so that anything like skin or dander or small hairs that can fall off the operator are being flown away from the parts and that allows us to keep the parts entirely free of contamination during the production process and when I started looking into closed headphones they didn't really do it for me at the time there wasn't anything that I felt was a fun and engaging experience so I started modifying headphones after finding a couple of forms on head by four people who were enthusiastically making changes to some products made by fostex the t-50 RP and so I started the business to do that and left high tech with the help and goal of making products that would make people's day a little nicer when they got the product at the end of the day after coming home from work find a headphone at their house and be able to have a really nice experience enjoying music in a way that would be fun and refreshing for them