Why do these types of market partitioning practices anger people so much? Isn't it a good thing that these companies are offering different price points for people to choose from?
Why do these types of market partitioning practices anger people so much?
Because it makes them feel ripped off.
Enthusiasts were likely having positive feelings about their purchase of Sennheiser products and now they feel like an idiot. Psychology is a big part of the audio business.
Isn't it a good thing that these companies are offering different price points for people to choose from?
That Sennheiser is taking headphones and expending extra cost to muffle them in order to sell them at a lower price indicates that they do not consider themselves to be in an efficient economic market. Likely they are selling the muffled headphones in order to artificially inflate the price of the normal ones.
It also raises the question of in what other ways Sennheiser might be intentionally degrading the quality of its products.
A similar thing happens with TVs in electrical appliance stores. Brighter pictures are more appealing to the average viewer, so the stores bump up the brightness setting on the more expensive TVs.
They can pull tricks like this because most people don't care that much about whether their chosen product is better according to some objective measurement. Rather, they care about getting a good deal and being made to feel happy about their purchase.
Unfortunately for Sennheiser, high-end audio customers are probably one group who do care about buying something objectively better. News like this risks hurting their target market substantially, I'd say.
Perhaps it's that people who bought the more expensive model thought they were buying higher quality components, but now realise they paid to have a piece of foam not be put where a piece of foam should not be?
That consumers in general are happy to pay premium for premium features, but not for nothing?
I mean, to me this practice is practically fraudulent when it comes to consumer goods. Yes, it makes business sense to offer product at different price points. You could argue that the higher priced model pays for the R&D that went into developing the headphones. That doesn't change the fact that these are the exact same headphones with a $150 price difference.
Comparing to the software case where you pay more to have features put in that may be disabled in the cheaper version, there is a big difference there. When you buy the more expensive version you know what was taken out, and getting that is what you are paying for. Would anyone buy the more expensive headphones if the box said "unnecessary foam not added"?
On the flip side - whenever I see stuff which is so easily modded to its full version I usually imagine an engineer inside a large corporation grinning because he knows some kid somewhere will figure this out and get an early christmas present. Case in point - the amd 6950 radeons that can be flashed to radeon 6970's, earlier nvidia cards that could be softmodded to quadros etc . I mean the product differentiation could be actually a lot more involved and sometimes it just feels like the product was designed to be unlocked by the hackers and tinkerers.
I see a lot of Web 2.0 applications these days that have their own pieces of foam. It's really all the same code on the backend and theoretically it wouldn't cost them anymore to enable all features completely. They purposely disable features or put their own pieces of "digital" foam in between plans in order to provide different price points for users.
The difference is that people generally expect to own the utilitarian physical goods that they pay for. Since information can't be owned in the same sense, it's understood that buying it is going to take the form of some sort of licensing arrangement with more arbitrary conditions.
In reality, the economics of the utilitarian physical goods business may sometimes resemble more those of the information business, but it's up to manufacturers to justify that to their customers.
Most of us would like to believe that the companies from which we purchase products have our best interests at heart when we buy their products. Apple, for instance, has benefited enormously from this brand perception. We'd like to believe that they built the best product at that price point which they could afford to, given their commitment to supporting excellent R&D, QA, etc. Intentionally crippling a product, particularly a physical product, means that resources were expended to produce an intentionally suboptimal product. What if auto manufacturers could intentionally reduce the fuel efficiency of their vehicles, say by manipulating the ignition control software, in order to differentiate their vehicles? Or produce were intentionally held in storage for a few extra days, at additional expense, in order to create a lower price category? What if life saving drugs where partially denatured by heating them to artificially reduce their effectiveness to provide lower price points for people who couldn't afford the premium medication? It feels wrong, perhaps because it is wrong. Companies should at least be up front about it, rather than concealing the practice, and acting huffy when they are called on it.
It is not only about feeling personally cheated, it is about observing such a glaring inefficiency of the economy. Sennheiser expended a lot of effort to create a perfectly good product, and then our economy stimulates them to waste a part of this effort by crippling the product just to create... a kind of pay-what-you can scheme.
Did you read the post? The $200 headphones are /exactly the same/ as the $350 ones, except for a piece of easily-removable foam they crammed in the opening to reduce the sound quality.
That's not "market partioning" -- that's utter hostility toward your customers.
In the general human mindset, there's a huge difference between "they're adding extra for those who pay more" and "they're taking stuff away from those who pay less".
If the feature differentiation is achieved by taking the premium offering and adding a component to remove functionality, then that feels a lot worse than taking the mid-range offering and adding components to result in the premium one.
In this case it does cost less to produce since they don't have to develop a new product and setup separate manufacturing processes. That piece of foam saves a lot of money.
Software doesn't have a per-unit manufacturing cost, and everyone knows that, so it does feel bad if a firm offers different versions of the software based on price.
Hardware does have a per-unit manufacturing cost, and people expect a more expensive product to cost more to make.
The anger comes from essentially paying for air, or just adding profit for the company. If two parts are almost essentially the same, why am I paying more just for a different label?
Chip manufacturers actually do sell you a different product when you buy the high performance product, and it's related to chip yields.
> The anger comes from essentially paying for air, or just adding profit for the company. If two parts are almost essentially the same, why am I paying more just for a different label?
I think this question is rooted in a flawed "cost-based" perception of product pricing, which is intuitive and seemingly "fair", but not how the world works. In reality businesses should charge based on the value (perceived or actual) their product brings to their customers.
Consumer surplus through cost-based pricing is the very goal of having a free market. We route resources to the most efficient producers because they're capable of offering lower prices. If Sennheiser can come out ahead by doing useless things to reduce the value of their products (that don't even reduce costs!) without fear of being undercut, that represents a market failure.
This is really disappointing. My excellent HD-280s are finally cracking after years of heavy use, and now I have to reconsider doing business with them for a replacement.
A perfectly efficient market is nice in theory but I don't think it exists outside of commodities like "sorghum and gypsum" (I think those are tptacek's words). Consumers are usually not going to be perfectly informed so there's always room for marketing to increase the perceived value of a product.
In this case it might be exactly same as with chips, with headphones failing some QC test being labeled as cheaper and getting additional piece of foam to partially fix whatever badness was discovered in such test (like unintended resonance caused by manufacturing tolerances).
In my opinion, the high-res photos in the original forum thread clearly shows some difference in build quality between both models. Compare for example how cleaner is hot gluing job on the driver on the 595 and that there is glob of something (hot glue?) on the external grill catch (lowest on first picture) on the 555 where there does not apear to be anything like that on the 595.
Extruding things from plastics (and especially ABS which this appears to be made from) is surprisingly inexact process and one would assume that manufacturing headphones selling for hundreds of dollars requires quite tight tolerances. My assumption is that the foam is there to damp rattling of case that is made from not exactly matched parts (and this is consistent with few posts in the forum which describe sound quality getting worse after removing the foam).
And I don't see why speakers/headphones/whatever can't be differentiated on quality, while having same overall design.
There is no way to sort out speaker driver rejects into 1st, 2nd and whatever category. If a sample has quality issue, it is likely to deteriorate further in use rapidly.
Lower quality speakers are not rejects of high quality speakers, they are just cheaper designs.
As to the mold, the holes there require no tolerances, they are there just to avoid air cushion behind the driver and serve no other purpose. Similarly, a foam pad is a rough hack to reduce its effectiveness, driving the speaker's response down. Do you really feel like this foam cut is some precision fix to tolerances problem?
Because it makes them feel ripped off.
Enthusiasts were likely having positive feelings about their purchase of Sennheiser products and now they feel like an idiot. Psychology is a big part of the audio business.
Isn't it a good thing that these companies are offering different price points for people to choose from?
That Sennheiser is taking headphones and expending extra cost to muffle them in order to sell them at a lower price indicates that they do not consider themselves to be in an efficient economic market. Likely they are selling the muffled headphones in order to artificially inflate the price of the normal ones.
It also raises the question of in what other ways Sennheiser might be intentionally degrading the quality of its products.