![]() ![]() There's a trick to securely attaching the padding quite a few of our group failed this part a few times. ![]() The headband, earcup and ear padding are the other separate pieces that will go into making the final headphone.įirst, I needed to place the transducer unit in the earcup, then I needed to cover the driver with a mesh layer, and then attach the padding, sealing it all together. The electronics side has come from the manufacturing cell I described above, all in one complete unit per earcup. This particular model comes in a few separate parts. We were introduced to the team who were building Sennheiser HD-600 models that day, which involves assembling the final unit, testing the quality of the headphones, and then boxing them up to go out to customers. This is where I got to try my hand at building the headphones. Not all headphones are being made at any one time – teams (who always work together, and rotate through jobs within a cell) move from model to model, depending on what's needed and when. There are different areas for putting together different models of headphones, where the transducers, headbands earbuds and padding are all combined. The actual assembly is done in cells, too, to add to the flexibility of the factory. It was surreal, and such an impactful demonstration of what goes into this tech. I couldn't differentiate them by touch from the grooves in my skin the only way I knew I was holding something was because I could see it. The two ends of the metal thread dangle loose at this stage, and I held it by grabbing these two threads… and they were so thin that I literally could not feel them between my fingers. Sadly, I couldn't take pictures of my own within the factory to point this out to you (the pictures on this page of us on the factory floor were provided by Sennheiser).īut one of the most impactful moments about the precision of the components came away from the machines, when I was handed the coil used in the Sennheiser HD-800 headphones, before it's then built into the rest of the transducer. The tour given by Sennheiser's experts was fascinating, pointing out all the little intricacies of the process, and where to look for the most interesting machine work. This isn't the part of building headphones that I experienced, unsurprisingly (though Sennheiser says that some transducers are made by hand still, because their designs don't lend themselves to being made by machine, though didn't clarify much on what this meant in practice). These machines are usually nearly 100% successful anyway, but if there's an unusual number of failures, it can be caught rapidly and engineers can step in to see what's up. Each transducer's accuracy is tested as soon as it's been made, with a readout showing whether its capabilities are within acceptable margins, and what the current failure rate on the cell is. ![]() The manufacturing cell basically takes things start to finish on the transducers you can watch mesmerizing machines spin magnetic coils from ultra-fine metal threads, add the various parts over time, seal them with heat, and more – leading up to testing as part of the production process. ![]()
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