Help with the acoustics of a headphone design

[Leonardo Drummond]

Hey everyone,

 

I am in the process of developing a headphone for the Brazilian market, and thought I could use some help of the many knowledgeable people here, especially regarding the acoustics.

 

Some background info on it: it's not going to be a high-end headphone, but one that has style, nicer choice of materials and decent sound quality, compatible with the $150-200 price that we hope to sell it for when it's done. I think something like an M50 but more stylish and with better materials would be a good analogy for what we're trying to achieve. I'm not sure it's possible, but that's our goal.

 

The problem is that we're just a group of 4 people, with no engineers and in a country that has pretty much no industry dedicated to audio. So we have no choice but to use a readily available driver. We have found a few promising drivers in LunaShops, and some of those appear to be nice indeed. We made a wood thing that enabled us to test the drivers and liked the results, even though it was in an open configuration and our headphone will need to be closed or at least semi closed if that gives us a significantly better end result. However, when I put those drivers in an HD449's carcass, it sounded quite weird, with sucked out and dark mids. Putting a lot of cotton on the enclosure only made matters worse.

 

What I wanted to know is whether you guys would have any tips of things that I could do to in terms of acoustically tweaking the enclosure in order to improve the driver's performance - or maybe even some ideas of other drivers I could consider. For example, both the HD449 and the Momentum have completely sealed drivers in a very small enclosure (much smaller than the cup itself), something that to me seems a bit unusual.

 

Here are some images of what the cups look like as of now. The idea is that the drivers are going to be glued to the front of the cups. They're very early renderings and a few things will change, but still - any ideas?

 

Thank you guys in advance! And sorry for the long post.

 

[ftpmastering]

Two cylindrical sweeps in cad (5 min?) and "a wood thing" to for tests. This is exactly how Stax is product developing. Be sure you don't steal any tech from them by misstake!

[Earspeakers]

No, making a 'wood thing' is exactly the kind of things real engineers do when starting out. We hack something together best we can to get an idea of what we're doing (do searches for prototype Google Glass for an example). 

But not having any engineers on your team is dubious, which necessitates you coming to forums for help. Without engineering how will you do the CAD? Measurements? Testing? Design for production? 

I'd recommend you find an engineer first.