The Secret Scam of Cheap Earbuds [Earbuds]

Those cheap earphones you keep buying year after year? The ones with the cool designs? They all kinda sound a similar, huh? There’s a gorgeous good reason behind that: They actually are the entire same earphones.

In the sector of gadgets, earphones occupy a decidedly weird space. Few categories can boast mind-numbing variety (both in price and quality) that headphones offer. Annually, companies like Sony trot out a phalanx of multi-colored ear candy at CES, each with various frequency responses and designs. You possibly can pay as little as $10 for a traditional pair earbuds, or drop as much as $2,000 for a pair of custom molded in-ear monitors. The gap in between these extremes is even becoming crowded, with offerings designed specifically for running, yoga, juggling chainsaws-basically any activity you might conjure up which might be done while listening to music. And that’s not even coming into traditional over-the-ear (or on-ear) cans.

Turns out, all that variety could be misleading-particularly once you inspect the lower end of the market. While the sheer number of options from companies like Skullcandy and Scosche may suggest otherwise, you’re definitely not buying a novel sonic snowflake whenever you select the Asym Rasta IEMs .

” The best approach to get into the industry is to select something that looks and sounds reasonable and have it printed and choked with your name on it,” says Neville Stuart, principle research engineer at Bowers & Wilkins.

That’s precisely what the Skullcandys, Cobys and iLuvs of the arena are doing-with great success, too.

According to recent CEA figures, shipment revenue for wired earbuds will top $447 million this year, with a projected increase of another $10 million by the tip of 2011. This, despite a mean factory manufacturing price that continues to hover around $8.

With an increasingly low barrier of entry, the low-end market has exploded during the last few years. It caters to you-and everyone else who either must replace prepackaged MP3 player garbage, or craves something less ugly to stick into the perimeters of their heads.

” The sub-$50 earbud market has become an entirely commoditized space,” says Seth Burgett, president and CEO of Yurburds . One where everything from design to tooling is outsourced to handful of manufactures in China and the Far East.

Here’s how things generally work on earth of cheap earphones: Every fall, two enormous tradeshows occur in Hong Kong: The Global Sources Fair and the Hong Kong Electronics Fair . Like CES and the Adult Entertainment Expo, they have a tendency to overlap by a couple of days. And like CES and the AEE, there’s a number of cross-pollination between attendees.

While neither event is restricted to just headphones, the first makes a speciality of parts. Here, you’ll find the rubber grips guy, the knobs guy, the capacitive amplifier guy-the full family. The second fair is all about finished goods; you are able to wander through row upon row of ” finished” reference designs. For a lower-tier company, these events are heaven, and customarily the premise of next year’s line-up.

” You basically get spec sheets from these manufacturers and then a la carte what you’d prefer to see,” says Burgett.

Take a gander at any of the catalogues handed out at these shows and you’ll see what he’s talking about. These 200-page books feature hundreds of ISO -certified specialty manufacturers and suppliers, each hawking their ability to replicate popular designs, provide you with their own designs, and, yes, simply slap your company’s logo on one of their offerings.

” Once we say our earphones, headphones and other items are customizable, we mean it,” reads one such ad featuring a huge pair of pink cans. ” Just select the model of your choice, and you may adjust the parameters, colors, logos, prints and even choose the packaging.”

” Our 10 R&D engineers create 15 new headphones and earphones monthly,” reads another. That’s various headphones and earphones. And necessarily so. Because lower-tier earphone companies generally don’t employ designers or engineers, manufacturers have a gigantic captive market. And a respectable design doesn’t must be expensive. Especially after you crib from somebody else’s.

Understandably, there aren’t a lot of people within the industry comfortable talking on the record about this, even those that consider themselves above the fray. But the ones we did speak with only reinforced this sad scenario, albeit off the record.

” What companies like Skullcandy will do is go to these shows and ask these factory guys what headphones they’ve this year,” said one exec at a well-known headphone company. What follows is largely wholesale, unrepentant copying-sans the quality components. an organization will select a well-liked reference design, tell the manufacturer to slap their logo on the side, maybe change a couple of colors around, order a couple of thousand, and get in touch with it a day.

What you turn out with, needless to say, are earphones that have an identical middling performance and are largely in-built same factory.

Others will take a piecemeal approach, opting to handle the parts guys and then select one or two factories to gather their buds. Things get incredibly incestuous here too, as Neville notes.

” There are likely thousands of other manufacturers of 15mm earbud speakers, but only a handful of those have any significant acoustic competence,” he says. ” Some make good copies of the market leaders’ designs. But a few of the market leaders are using copies, which means some are copies of copies, including the mistakes.”

It’s a simulacrum of suck!

So if these collaborations inevitably lead to nothing more than rebranded mediocrity, backed by companies that spend more on marketing than the rest, why do consumers keep coming back? The answer shouldn’t surprise anyone.

Sound quality remains essentially the mostsome of the most subjective and personal measurements inside the gadget world. Unlike video, there isn’t a industry standard for good sound, no benchmark to assert whether what you’re hearing is sonic gold or audiocrap. In it’s stead has emerged a selected fixation with brand, which goes to the distinct good thing about a lot of these companies.

While there’s been movement faraway from the prepackaged garbage that includes bundled your media player, the sub-$50 realm of the earphone market continues to thrive, based largely on its ability to market the hell out of its products and push style over substance.

Which leads us back to some degree we’ve made before: Please, in the event you care about music, spend a little bit extra on earphones . On condition that your source material is decent, even spending $100 can make an international of difference. Yes, sometimes it’s hard to face up to a clever design , or sleek packaging . But the law of diminishing returns is for your favor. Make the jump from a $20 earphone to a $100 one from a reputable company and you’ll hear what you’ve been missing.

And in case you don’t believe that, well, I beg you check up on my new line of Cranium Crackers™ q4. They’ll are available in lots of hot colors and have sick bass too.

Original art by guest artist Chuck Anderson . See Chuck’s work at www.nopattern.com and follow him on Twitter .

Images courtesy of Sergey Dolya

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This post is tagged: Earbuds, scam