Hey Dekoni Fans, I am Dylan the Product Manager for Dekoni Audio. Today I wanted to go over our ear pad development process from start to finish to clue you in on how we make the ear pads people across the world love. It's a long process that can take weeks to months, but once a product is complete and on the market it is great to see the feedback we get from our diehard community.
Let's start with conception, what headphone do we make ear pads for? There are plenty of headphones and headsets out there, but which ones to choose? Personally I look to communities of audiophiles to see what they are talking about. If there is a lot of buzz around a headphone or negativity around their comfort, we take the chance to pounce! We acquire the necessary product and hopefully a spare set of stock ear pads. It is extremely important to have two sets of earpads so we can do frequency measurements and sometimes isolation tests.
Okay, so we have the headphones in hand. Next, I usually take a very long listen. This could be anywhere from a few hours to a few days. It is extremely important to understand what a headphones’ strength and weakness is in terms of comfort and sound. Sometimes a set of headphones could be too thin(in terms of sound signature), or the low mids are just ever present and muddy. There can be hotspots from the ear pads or even the ear pad can be too short. I try to assess every possible thing an audiophile might question about the headphone.
After a long listen we start designing what we want our pads to look like and what materials will be beneficial to offer. Would it be better in our Elite line of ear pads or should we stick with Choice? Should we use custom foam or square the dimensions up a bit. Every little thing you change on the ear pad from start to finish will affect the comfort and sound signature. Lucky for us we can guess early on in the process what something will sound or feel like, it's part of collective ear pad knowledge at the company.
We take our newly designed drawings and wishes and have our manufacturing department generate a sample or proof for us. This is where it gets interesting, my ear pad attachment always gains muscle memory during this process. I swap ear pads back and forth doing an A/B process to make sure we didn’t destroy the headphones sound or comfort. The process for this testing is really up to my discretion. Some days you take a break and come back the following with fresh ears, especially since ears hear differently day to day. If everything goes according to plan, the finalized samples get run through our frequency response rig and we double check our findings.
When I am enthusiastic about our design we order the product in bulk, otherwise I end up changing dimensions or materials. At this point let's say we approved all of the ear pads in the new line. Lucky for us we have packaging already designed for our entire product line so we create a barcode and label. The marketing department kicks into gear and we plan on a release date. We double check the manufacturing quality before sales go live and the rest becomes history, at least for my responsibilities. That's how we design Dekoni Earpads from start to finish!

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