w so for our factory tour of Sennheiser
they actually decided on what I thought was a really cool way of of showing us
how it works uh we got to follow the
entire production line for the
hd800 headphones so they're top topof
thee line topof thee line ere headphones
we essentially got our own like guided tour How It's Made episode so now of
course we're going to start making HD 8001 line is tips Edition headphones oh
that would be so CU we have all that expertise oh definitely yeah we saw how
they they W so it starts with the coil being wound by an automated coil Winder
machine that's got this heat gun that
lets the uh that lets the wound coil kind of stick to itself so it all stays
exactly precisely exactly the way it's supposed to be and then it comes out on
like a a spool of of coiled spools and
they just if if it's not exactly perfectly round they just ditch it yeah
there's an entire bin of just nope these wer round enough they were ever so
slightly off the curve so no so the Finish coils get delivered to the next
station where I was actually really surprised to see someone hand gluing
coils onto diaphragms at this stage in
the I assumed something like this would be automated I assumed the entire
process would be automated but no at almost every stage there's some amount
of uh hand-based intervention and they were saying the reason for this is that
for certain tasks it's apparently still
more precise to to have someone do it by hand because there's lots of products
they even showed us some microphones or or a microphone assembly area that was
100% automated start to finish being delivered in a mastercart and a
microphones but the hd800s had a lot of hand assembly and
then something I didn't notice until they pointed it out was how many of the
workers in this area of the factory were female really large percentage and not
necessarily because females tend to love
playing around with soldering irons more than other people or whatever else the
case may be but but they were looking for a particular background very high
skilled in fine motor skills so they would specifically hire people that were
previously things like hairdressers or florist things that required small fine
precise motor skills and attention to detail and attention to detail
specifically yeah so at this next step the chassis for the headphones which was
actually produced elsewhere in the factory we never got to see Raw
materials being turned into hd800
unfortunately pieces which would have been super cool so these get the uh the
coil and the diaphragm actually installed in them along with the magnet
and then the whole thing's glued in place and at this point you've basically
got a fully assembled transducer that's ready for the first QC step in the
assembly process so they have to make sure first of all that it fits within
the appropriate frequency response range and that it can pair properly with
another transducer so they need to test all of these things and then find good
pairs so they can both go within the same set of hd800s and you you have the
same sound signature for each one yeah because you might have the sort of the
the acceptable frequency response curve
but there might be a range of that so they actually will have like an A and A
B and that doesn't necessarily mean better or worse it just means they're trying to look for ones that go together
as best as they can now what was interesting to me was how many assem
pieces failed which is not that it the
fail isn't necessarily a bad thing though because they're they're being
very tight about their regulations and they're making sure that if it's not
perfect it's not getting through which is actually awesome and anything even a
high Precision product like a like a CPU processor is going to have a a yield
rate and a lot of failures the important thing is seeing that they're testing
them and junking them at this stage in the procing here not when they're at
your door yeah was cool pretty cool now it actually wasn't necessarily the
coolest thing about this step in the process the final step in the assembly
process um but it was definitely the first thing that caught my eye in the
back of the tiny little like four or
five square meter area where by the way every single hd800 in the world gets
built in this exact place by one of five people they had 19 we counted them 19 HD
800s on a rack ready to go out the door
absolutely freaking beautiful but the
coolest thing about this workstation was probably how optimized it is yeah you
could tell as the as the work was moving through all the stages of creating the
headphones that she definitely had this place optimized just to even where the
bins were placed and the whole thing was made out of Extrusion to the point where
you knew that Sennheiser just made these custom for the employees yeah they
looked kind of modular even yeah extremely modular and that's because
they cardboard Prototype all of their stations for the employees that will be
working there so they get all the employees that will use that station in
with these cardboard crafted prototypes to make sure that everything's in
exactly the right spot so that if some box is a little bit too far to the way
and in a kind of crappy position you can move that so it won't make their ARM
sore if they're working so all these all these workstations are specifically
built for them now it should be noted
that not every product gets the same treatment with like every piece being
hand assembled the way the hd800 does um
particularly the very high-end products especially the ones made in Germany this
is going to be more common but sometimes you're going to have certain parts of
the product made let's say for example I believe it's momentum where uh certain
components are made in the Ireland facility and then shipped to China for
assembly so depending on the product it might be actually manufactured in
Germany Ireland uh the US for some of the professional grade stuff or in China
it seemed very common that they would make the uh acoustically important parts
in something like Germany or maybe even possibly Ireland and then they would do
a lot of the assembly in somewhere like China what's cool though is they were
saying that regardless of where the manufacturing facility is they're still
trying to keep things very senheiser in terms of the of the quality of life of
the workers regulations and the regulations and you know same thing like
uh prototyping the workstations to make sure that they actually are as efficient
as possible and comfortable as possible so I thought I thought that was really
really incredible and cool next up was another QA station so this time you you
put the headphones on kind of an artificial head that will have a
microphone on each side so it can hear each one of the individual uh
transducers from the headphones and then they'll roll it into a soundproof box so
that no sound is going to leak in from the factory floor automatically like an
automatic like track we actually didn't get to see it
working Unfortunately they do the QA in batches so uh but but we had it explain
to us and it looks pretty baller even if we don't get to see it in action yeah
they were they were so careful about this box not having any outside noise that it was even on dampeners so that if
someone was to walk by really heavily there would be none of that transferred
into the inside of the box so just making sure that all the frequency
responses here and everything is perfect yeah so then you Unfortunately they
don't include a print out in the box or anything like that but what's cool is
with the hd800 you can actually contact Sennheiser and they will mail you the
exact testing report from your exact serial number because they manually
record them at this stage in the process which I thought was pretty darn cool uh
they also have an artificial mouth on this artificial head with artificial
ears that is used for Aviation headsets
and then they have speakers inside the Sound Chamber for testing the noise
cancellation of aforementioned headset so very interesting stuff so we were on
our way to product development and they asked us if we wanted to see the
companion product had the hd800 the hdvd
800 so this is an amplifier and I think the coolest thing about it was had it's
got to be the testing apparatus we didn't actually see a ton of the actual
assembly but we saw a little bit of it but again the really interesting part
was the testing so he hooked up everything you possibly could all the
things tested multiple volume levels for
all every single possible mode that there was and tested everything on this
thing so you know it's going to work the whole thing took about 10 minutes and
then it wasn't until after it passed testing that it even got a serial number
and then it was polished polished twice
P twice and then finally put away and
then ready to rock then we made our way upstairs and this was probably one of
the coolest things about the entire tour we got to visit the anaco chamber so
this is a twostory chamber full of noise dampening
foam that's got this that's got this triangular shape that is designed to
pretty much eliminate wall Reflections
it was super weird standing in the room just because they only allow four people
at a time because you're actually standing on mesh this wire mesh yeah cuz
because you're standing above an entire story of more noise dampening foam below
you um so the room is mostly mostly used
for microphone testing but what's really
cool is not necessarily the anaco chamber but actually a new testing
facility that they're in the process of building which is going to be an entire
Auditorium and stage where they'll not only apparently actually have concerts
yeah but they'll use as a testing ground for their professional grade equipment
which is pretty awesome and then I think they're going to have another chamber in there so that they can rebuild that one
so they can use that in the future as well and then eventually they'll have two and yeah crazy all I know is I want
one yeah that would be pretty cool so with the factory out of the way this was
this was really cool we got to actually see a little bit of the Sennheiser
company history I mean it's still actually a family-owned business which
for a company that size is um is pretty unusual but we got to go and chill in
The Farmhouse which is at the very heart of uh the Sennheiser campus they just
tack on new things every time they they make some money and they they need a new
facility or equipment so it's in various states of of uh sophistication depending
on you can see how far along the company was based on how big the building is and
how modern The Bu is yeah it's very cool um so we actually got to go into into
the old farmhouse where they the original Seven Engineers started
building audio equipment for other companies right at the end of the second
world war just to make ends meet because they they were actually audio engineers
and professors that had worked in a university and that University had been
unfortunately basically flattened yeah so they needed somewhere to work and
that was a farmhouse and the Americans came along and put a sign on the door
that said basically we don't know what you're doing here but stop
and the sign mysteriously disappeared in the
night and they and they kept working and I guess I guess any audio files today
are probably glad that they did definitely so inside there they had some
really cool stuff they had uh sennheiser's first they their patented
uh open headphones think they're the 414
yeah something along those lines by today's standards they look like a joke
but at the time that was that was really amazing um they've got a lot of their
earlier microphon products um they even
had stuff for testing telecommunication cables which was one of the first things
they did uh for kind of rebuilding different parts of Germany just out of
necessity because the Sennheiser had to make some some money at the time the
centerpiece here though and this was unfortunately it was under glass we
didn't even get a chance to listen to it but they had an orus oh man super nice
super nice the the most amazing thing about the manufacturing of the orus I
think is the glass pieces with thousand holes right a thousand drilled holes
them I me if you ever tried to drill one hole inass that probably gives you some
idea how hard it is to drill a thousand yeah um and then they also had another
little Wall of Fame inside that they let us have a look at so they've got Grammys
Academy Awards uh all kinds of other Awards and then some really cool
products in the case across from there yeah some stuff that they've never even
actually released because they just couldn't actually find a market for it
but was super cool I mean seeing all this history stuff was really cool but
then we actually an opportunity to sit down with some of the Sennheiser folks
and talk about what they're doing today
with the consumer products like the momentum and the urbanites so uh we'll
let them kind of take it from here and talk about the the philosophy and and
especially the way that that product
development the product design is being translated into a message that the more
mainstream public can can relate to a little bit better yeah we don't see it
as a campaign we see it as we see it more as a kind of project and the
project is that we would like to keep in contact with people who drive sound one
step forward as we do and uh we would we
would stay in contact yeah we would uh work on some projects together Ingress
was a good example we are supporting D mainstone with some some uh uh stuff uh
she could use for performing Bridges and
uh um I don't want to say the project ends short terms for us a campaign is a
is a kind of short-term or midterm activity yeah you you you you produce
some banners you do some advertising stuff and you have a short-term
effect but what we see is that uh a long-term relationship a long-term
impact driven message is more successful
for us and that's the reason why this uh this uh project is more kind of
long-term project yeah where of course we have to bring new stories in from
time to time but it's not a kind of short-term effect of course we need we
we we need to sell products yeah and uh
uh after after running this campaign for the first 6 months we see big lift in in
selling products but uh again this is more kind of two years activity instead
of uh doing this for two months or or a bit longer because we started uh in a
position especially in the US market which is the biggest Market in the world
um with not the strong position as we
are in mid of Europe so it's from from
the brand itself not and everybody knows
it so it's more kind of a who is Sennheiser so we need something uh I
would call a bridge to a Target group maybe not interested uh in the sound
device itself but terms of the image um
headphones especially the big ones like we produce now with the urbanite uh
became more a fashion item device something you want to express your
personality and U there people looking more
what it means to them in terms of of stylish component um so the idea was to
to turn the perspective not talk about the device itself about the sound the
style who made but talking about the end user so from people looking to Simply
sound devices um Express uh a different
kind of style of music um and this was always the Sennheiser approach to be uh
some kind of neutral was a Sennheiser sound I would say be very clear C uh
crisp um could display nearly every kind
of music from bbop Jazz to uh hard rock
or whatever we we found in story studies that really the audience prefer this
kind of devices not um display the whole
area the whole range of the music portfolio but have an expression is in a
very specific kind of music style and this is um our gift I would say our uh
present to them um and to really recognize that the that
the listen experience changed in in the
last 5 years I would say so when we were done the interviews one of the most
disappointing things of the day or moments was when we arrived we were told
that Axel gr the original designer of the hd800 headphones was not able to be
there because he was sick after the interviews we found out he was able to
make it still sick made it he still sick we couldn't shake his hand or anything
which I really wanted to do but uh even cooler than that probably he gave us a
little mini lesson yeah the probably one of the coolest lessons I've ever sat in
on uh there was there was essentially two students lonus and myself and he
went up there on on this on this grid paper essentially with a marker and just
showed us how audio drivers work yep why bigger is good for some things but
actually smaller is better for other things and the and the delicate
balancing act that you have to go through to make a headphone product and
then how they overcame the traditional design with the hd800 and and made it
perform the way that it does it was it was incredibly cool and uh I think he
might have felt a little bit awkward at the end when I asked him to sign the
lesson sheet because I planned to roll it up and take it away with me but cuz
we're quite literally going to frame it and put it up in the office yeah so uh
so that was incredibly cool just to to get to get to meet someone with who's
had that kind of an impact on on headphones it's it's it's just it's
interesting being in the presence of someone that obviously knows that much
about their specialty and it's just whenever you meet someone like that it's
like okay I need to pay attention he's probably lost more brain cells sneezing
from being sick that know more about audio equipment than I will ever learn
in my life just just incredible so um
speaking of incredible our our trip to Sennheiser was an incredible ride I hope
you guys enjoyed coming along for it uh give this video a like if you liked it
give it a dislike if you thought it sucked and we'll try and do better next
time let us know in the comments if you want to see more of these behind the
scenes factory tours and and more insight into these companies that make
the products that you you like or maybe don't like you know depending who knows
yeah who knows let us know um guys check out the video description we've got a
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told I I do the ending of my video
differently
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