It’s the time of year for saving money!
Two weeks ago Kodak went into the final stages of their corporate death-spiral. It did not come as a surprise. Articles about Kodak’s demise all mentioned that Kodak had plenty of opportunities to embrace digital technology and could as easily have remained a market leader if it had been willing to “cannibalize” their film sales for digital technology. Being faithful to a dying medium made the final act inevitable as Kodak threw itself on top of the funeral pyre.
Ask anyone in the industry what high-performance audio product area has the most potential for growth and they will say, “portable personal audio.” That means earphones. Yet how many top-echelon speaker manufacturers have introduced their own take on ear-speakers?
Before CES only PSB’s Paul Barton has taken up the gauntlet and introduced a headphone. I’ve heard his M4U 2 headphone and it’s a honey. At CES I saw new headphones from Focal, Paradigm, Velodyne, and Cardas. But why haven’t other, equally gifted designers and industry-leading speaker companies stepped up with their own ear-speakers? The time is past now – Monster and Logitech are already eating your lunch…
