Acoustics Lab, Zürich
The lab opened in 2021 with one question: why is a €700 reference headphone thrown away when a €4 pad tears? The answer is that repairability costs performance, and nobody wants to publish the trade.
So we publish it. A screwed cup leaks more than a welded one. A composite shell damps worse than aluminium. An on-ear cannot be flat. All three statements are on the relevant product pages, next to the products they make sound worse.
What that buys is credibility for the claims that matter. When we say the N1 holds ±1.5dB from 20Hz to 20kHz, and we ship the sweep for your specific unit, there is no reason to doubt it — because we already told you about the 0.4dB leak.
01
A welded cup cannot be opened, so a driver failure at year four is a replacement rather than a repair. We use six M2 torx screws per cup and accept the 0.4dB extra leak at 40Hz, which we compensate for in the rear chamber.
02
A response curve without its measurement conditions is decoration. Every product page states the rig, the coupling and the smoothing, and every unit ships with its own sweep rather than a representative one.
03
The bayonet pad mount has not changed since 2021 and will not change. A pad bought today fits a first-generation N1, which is the difference between a headphone that lasts a decade and one that becomes landfill when a pad tears.
The exploded view on the homepage separates all six layers as you scroll.