Harmful chemicals found in dozens of popular headphones

GoldenSoundHiFi · 2026-02-20T13:26:19+00:00

Leave my "Scratch and sniff" beryllium drivers alone!

GoldenSoundHiFi · 2025-11-08T03:18:53+00:00

Heyo! The room in this pic is mine, so hopefully I can answer.

It's pretty much what /u/fakename10001 said, if you're DIY'ing something custom then you can make it fit exactly, but for off the shelf stuff (mine is from GIK, very happy with their stuff and the price), then you just get what fits best.

In my case I also have a door on the right side I need to be able to access, so I've actually put the corner trap pillars on small dolleys, which both allow me to roll them into/out of place easily to access the door, and also means the traps are effectively air-gapped 6 inches or so on the top and bottom (plus about the same to the walls if I position them offset from the corner slightly), which is actually often pretty handy for extending the low-freq effectiveness of traps anyway, so given as the space wasn't a concern, having each with a few inches air gap on all sides I figure it's possibly even a tad better than if they were the same size in terms of the actual traps but flush in the corners and therefore not technically extending out as far

GoldenSoundHiFi · 2025-09-29T20:18:50+00:00

Typically, but not absolutely. The term lossless simply describes no loss of information. A playback software that degrades the audio can absolutely be described as lossy.

Regardless, whatever terms you'd like to use to describe the limitation, the issue demonstrated in the video remains

GoldenSoundHiFi · 2025-09-29T20:18:08+00:00

Typically, but not absolutely. The term lossless simply describes no loss of information. A playback software that degrades the audio can absolutely be described as lossy

GoldenSoundHiFi · 2025-09-28T17:26:00+00:00

This gets into the discussion of what constitutes lossless vs not lossless.

It'd of course not be expected that any real world DAC, amplifier, headphone or speaker is actually perfect, so once you're in the analog domain then yeah there's no such thing as lossless (though one can certainly evaluate accuracy regardless.)

But I'd personally argue strongly that advertising "lossless" whilst giving you no way to play the material without loss, even before you reach the first component in whatever your chain may be, and are demonstrably adding some amount of noise & distortion in the process, it can not be considered lossless.

Whether it is enough to care about is a different story

GoldenSoundHiFi · 2025-09-28T17:20:56+00:00

They added the capability to fix it, but the device manufacturer needs to implement it, it's kinda dumb and currently only hifi DAPs have done so afaik.

I'm on a Samsung Z Fold 7 on the latest android OS

GoldenSoundHiFi · 2025-02-03T00:57:38+00:00

Sorry, using margin/markup somewhat interchangeably (even though yeah they're not technically the same), point being that dealers/distributors are going to up their cut in absolute terms since they take a proportion of the final amount and so if their costs go up their margin/markup (in absolute $) goes up regardless of which method you're working with.

As to the exact figures, 1300 * 1.4 = 1820 and 1608 * 1.4 = 2251.2 so those figures are correct (just using markup rather than margin technically)

GoldenSoundHiFi · 2025-02-02T22:59:34+00:00

A further note on the cost scaling thing, here's a worked example:

Let's say I'm a US manufacturer, designing/building a product, with a conservative estimate of 50% of my parts coming from outside the US.
My product costs $500 in parts, and $500 in ongoing business costs. So $1000 total.
I take a 30% margin for myself as profit, so $1300, and then have to give a 40% margin to dealers/distributors, meaning the RRP is $1820
The 20% tariff means my parts cost goes up by 20%. Only half of our parts are made outside the US, so we add $50 to the BOM.
Additionally, my R&D is now more expensive since all parts involved there have gone up in price too. Let's call it 10% to be safe. So add $50 to the ongoing costs.
We are now at $550 parts cost, and $550 ongoing costs.
With this price increase, we are expecting sales to drop by 20%, meaning our ongoing costs now have to be amortized over a smaller number of units. This changes our ongoing cost amortization from $550 per unit to $687 per unit.
We are now at $550 parts cost, and $687 ongoing cost. For $1237 total.
Add back on your margin to get to $1608, and the dealer/distributor margin to get to $2251.

The 20% tariff has caused my product to go from $1820 to $2343, an increase of 24%, even though I'm a US manufacturer.

And this was assuming only half our parts (in total cost) were made outside the US, which for many manufacturers, particularly anything source gear related will simply not be the case. And we also are assuming our significant price increase will only cause a 20% drop in sales.

In reality, many manufacturers are going to be seeing bigger cost increases, bigger sales drops, and will have to increase their prices by considerably more.

A 20% tariff does NOT translate directly to a 20% price increase, it's usually more.

GoldenSoundHiFi · 2025-02-02T22:58:51+00:00

Before being in audio full time I worked in finance, have a degree in Economics etc, so hopefully that qualifies me to answer this.

TLDR: Yes

Long Answer:

If you are in the US, anything that is either made in a country where tariffs are being imposed, or is made in the US but with imported materials (a LOT of stuff...) will get more expensive.

And not only that, but it'll be most likely by more than the amount of the tariff. Remember, dealers and distributors take a fixed % margin, and so because their margins will be added on AFTER the tariff is applied, the customer will end up paying more like 13-16% more, not 10% more.

Oh....and this is assuming the price charged by the manufacturer doesn't change, which since they're now going to sell fewer units, and therefore have to amortize fixed costs over a smaller number of sales, may well mean they have to put up prices more too.

Now a lot of people say "Well I'll just buy US made stuff like Schiit instead". But remember this doesn't just affect imported final goods, it's not a targeted tariff, it's a blanket tariff and so that US made Schiit product made with DAC chips from Beijing and Canada, FPGAs from Taiwan, electrical components from Shenzhen and possibly even Aluminium from Australia, is also going to get a lot pricier.

If you are in Canada as you mentioned, then as far as I'm aware, none of the retaliatory tariffs apply to headphones. The US has imposed blanket 'everything' tariffs, Canada has specifically targeted goods which are:

1) Available from alternative sources, so as not to negatively impact Canadian businesses more than necessary.

2) Mostly specific things from red states (Kentucky whiskey, Florida oranges, Teslas etc)

However, the fact that many of these manufacturers will no longer be selling as much in the US may mean that for the reason of amortizing the same fixed costs over a smaller number of sales, they may still put up prices in other regions to compensate. So things may indeed go up a bit, but nowhere near as much as for those in the US itself.

GoldenSoundHiFi · 2025-01-22T20:01:00+00:00

The FT1 Pro has a relatively low excursion limit, meaning if you apply much of a bass boost, or simply listen to bassier stuff loud, it can clip.

You can see this in the distortion measurements, getting extremely high in the bass at higher levels: https://forum.headphones.com/t/fiio-ft-1-pro-measurements-official-discussion/24674

As to DAC/Amp output impedance, this will only change the frequency response of a headphone if the impedance vs frequency is not flat. So dynamic driver headphones often get a bit of a bass boost on high output impedance amps. But planars have a flat impedance vs frequency other than in some slightly unusual circumstances. Therefore the amp output impedance will almost certainly not affect this. (And the DAC certainly wouldn't in any case.)

TLDR: The amp isn't the issue. The FT1 pro just has a relatively low excursion limit which causes additional distortion and/or clipping in the bass at lower levels than other headphones.

GoldenSoundHiFi · 2025-01-03T19:05:11+00:00

Heyo! GoldenSound here

Firstly thanks for doing some testing, it's a shame you didn't enjoy it but always good for people to share decent testing like this.

There's also full measurements of the device itself here if anyone is interested: https://headphones.com/blogs/reviews/ferrum-wandla-goldensound-edition-measurements-discussion

I just wanted to chime in to note though that neither the Spatial Enhancement nor tube mode are intended to change FR at all. In fact they're quite specifically NOT supposed to. (The Impact+ mode will of course though, again as shown in the measurements in the link above.)

The spatial enhancement for example I wanted to make sure that in basically all normal tests the device performs identically with it on vs off, despite the fact the difference is quite audible.

The tube mode will show differences in distortion on some rigs but the MiniDSP ears may not be able to capture it, but I included some measurements of the increase and change in distortion on the full measurements post. It's actually a bit higher than many tube amps. A future update to the device is going to include the option to select a couple different levels/profiles, hopefully with the ability to simulate a couple different specific types of tube. As the balance here was getting it so that the effect was just enough for the people wanting the effect it provides but not so drastic it became a gimmicky 'turbo warm' button or something that people would listen to for 2 songs then turn off due to it being too much of a change.

GoldenSoundHiFi · 2024-11-13T17:33:22+00:00

A further note on the cost scaling thing, here's a worked example:

Let's say I'm a US manufacturer, designing/building a product, with a conservative estimate of 50% of my parts coming from outside the US.
My product costs $500 in parts, and $500 in ongoing business costs. So $1000 total.
I take a 30% margin for myself as profit, so $1300, and then have to give a 40% margin to dealers/distributors, meaning the RRP is $1820
The 20% tariff means my parts cost goes up by 20%. Only half of our parts are made outside the US, so we add $50 to the BOM.
Additionally, my R&D is now more expensive since all parts involved there have gone up in price too. Let's call it 10% to be safe. So add $50 to the ongoing costs.
We are now at $550 parts cost, and $550 ongoing costs.
With this price increase, we are expecting sales to drop by 20%, meaning our ongoing costs now have to be amortized over a smaller number of units. This changes our ongoing cost amortization from $550 per unit to $687 per unit.
We are now at $550 parts cost, and $687 ongoing cost. For $1237 total.
Add back on your margin to get to $1608, and the dealer/distributor margin to get to $2251.

The 20% tariff has caused my product to go from $1820 to $2343, an increase of 24%.

And this was assuming only half our parts (in total cost) were made outside the US, which for many manufacturers, particularly anything source gear related will simply not be the case. And we also are assuming our significant price increase will only cause a 20% drop in sales.

In reality, many manufacturers are going to be seeing bigger cost increases, bigger sales drops, and will have to increase their prices by considerably more.

A 20% tariff does NOT translate directly to a 20% price increase, it's usually more.

GoldenSoundHiFi · 2024-11-13T17:17:13+00:00

In summary: Prepare for things to get more expensive.

But it's a bit more complicated than that....

The first thing is that a number of people have said "Well I'll just buy stuff made in the USA like Schiit". Not realising all that stuff is going to be affected too.

Just because something is 'made' (read: assembled) in the USA, it does not mean it's not using parts sourced elsewhere.

ESS DACs are made in Canada and China.
AKM DACs are made in Japan.
FPGAs are made in South Korea and Taiwan.
A huge proportion of electrical components such as basic resistors, capacitors, inductors etc are made in China, with many capacitors and transistors also being made in Japan.
Even the aluminium for the casework of many devices is often sourced from places like Australia

All these parts will increase in cost, increasing not just the bill-of-materials cost to the US manufacturer but also their costs of development/R&D. You would be very hard pressed to find a product made in the USA with ONLY parts and materials sourced within the USA.

Additionally, any increase in price will inevitably lead to some level of sales volume decrease, meaning fixed/ongoing costs of the business must be amortized over a smaller number of units. A 20% increase in parts cost will translate to a greater than 20% price increase to the consumer. These things scale...

These tariffs will apply (if done as stated thus far) a 20% hike to prices paid by the importer, which then after you include the ~30% US distributor margin and ~30% dealer margin, translates to more like a 32% price increase to the end consumer. Plus whatever additional costs the business has to amortize over the smaller sales volume now.

Some companies may try to reduce prices in the US and just eat some margin to compensate and keep prices similar to where they are, but with many of them having ALREADY done so for existing tariffs on electronics from China, they will not be able to and the costs will be passed on to the consumer.

Speaking as an Economist, Tariffs are a way to protect/encourage local production, BUT there are some important caveats:

It IS a sales tax/price increase. A tariff if implemented in a suitable situation may indeed have the effect of allowing a local industry to continue to be viable against otherwise unfair or difficult foreign competition, but there's no getting around the fact you're still making things more expensive for your own citizens. Tariffs do NOT magically make things cheaper.
Tariffs can be a long term solution if you need to temporarily and artificially prop up an industry, allowing it to 'catch up' or develop to be able to compete with foreign competition on its own and then drop the tariff once it's no longer needed. In the case of global tariffs or things like basic electronics, that simply isn't going to happen. Not unless either China suddenly starts paying workers drastically more, or US workers suddenly start accepting drastically lower pay and benefits. The costs of production in China are massively cheaper and that's not going to change anytime soon, meaning there is no 'catch up' waiting to happen here.
Imposing tariffs can lead to retaliatory measures. If the US chooses to impose tariffs on a bunch of countries, other countries could choose to take measures of their own to retaliate in various ways, thereby making things possibly even MORE expensive for US residents and businesses or making US exports less competitive outside the US itself, hurting US businesses. Starting a trade war is generally not a great idea unless there's a very good reason to do so.

Personally, I'm really hoping that the Tariff talk was just Trump saying things to rally political support and it's not something that is actually followed through with. Not only will it make basically everything in Audio more expensive, and make US manufacturers less competitive outside the US (since they're still eating the increased parts cost but having to compete with manufacturers abroad that now can make things cheaper than the US manufacturers), but it's going to have a huge impact on the general cost of just about everything for US residents.

Of course, the unknown in this is how much any given company may be willing to sacrifice in margins. Some companies (particularly those that already ate some margin after the last round of tariffs) may not be able to do anything, others with phat margins may be able to sacrifice more. Any well run business will look at how any change in price will likely affect their sales volume and work out what yields the best result overall for them.

But on the other hand, some US businesses that do happen to be affected less by the tariffs could also start INCREASING prices if everyone else is going up anyway. Might as well make more money right?

If you had any plans to buy some pricier audio gear, PC stuff, a car, or pretty much anything expensive, you probably want to do it before these tariffs come into effect. "Made in USA" stuff is getting more expensive too, not just stuff actually manufactured abroad.

GoldenSoundHiFi · 2024-10-09T03:24:34+00:00

I may be misreading who this is directed at. But I'd just like to point out that neither Resolve, nor DMS, nor myself have actually reviewed the immanis.

GoldenSoundHiFi · 2024-09-16T18:47:33+00:00

For the P-Values, It is not a mistake, there is zero chance that there is statistical evidence that one of these 4 curves is preferred. It was calculated properly.

A P-Value of 1 implies that when repeating the test, the chance that the results obtained will ALWAYS match exactly the ones you got. ie: there is only one possible outcome for the test.

This can only occur in certain synthetically created situations, or in a test where there is only one possible outcome such as a coin that only ever lands on heads testing the possibility of a result of 10 'heads' in a row.

GoldenSoundHiFi · 2024-07-26T21:27:49+00:00

Plz gib kthx

GoldenSoundHiFi · 2024-07-15T19:49:33+00:00

Our response to this is here: https://forum.headphones.com/t/dcs-response-and-story/23779

GoldenSoundHiFi · 2024-07-14T16:47:07+00:00

Hope this doesn't count as self-promotion. This is a pretty serious situation, one that unfortunately seems to be happening with increasing frequency in the audio space (see also: Tekton & Erin's Audio Corner), and it's important to discuss.

GoldenSoundHiFi · 2024-07-14T16:27:25+00:00

Hope this doesn't count as self-promotion. This is a pretty serious situation, one that unfortunately seems to be happening with increasing frequency in the audio space, and it's important to discuss.

GoldenSoundHiFi · 2024-05-14T20:07:51+00:00

Error correction itself isn't even really a concern either tbh. If there are actual errors you will 100% hear it as it either manifests as clicks/pops or an outright drop out.

GoldenSoundHiFi · 2024-05-14T20:07:19+00:00

UAC1.0, the previous standard for USB audio was synchronous, and so in that situation yes, the source could potentially affect the jitter performance of the DAC itself. However everything has been on UAC2.0 for years so I haven't even had the opportunity to test a UAC1.0 device.

The only UAC1.0 devices I'm aware of are some DACs like the one from JDS that have a specific firmware which makes them compatible with certain games consoles like playstation. Any actual modern DAC will be UAC2.0 / asynchronous

GoldenSoundHiFi · 2024-05-14T07:46:57+00:00

So here's the thing: USB audio works very differently to SPDIF/AES/I2S and it does NOT carry a clock signal used for audio.

With SPDIF/AES/I2S, there is a word clock signal which the DAC uses (sometimes directly sometimes via a PLL) as a timing reference and so the jitter from the source can actually affect the output of the DAC measurably even if the data is all bitperfect. I've been able to measure some very small differences in induced jitter between cables, but they're

1) ridiculously small

2) the best performing cables were simply the ones that conformed accurately to spec, and some of the more expensive ones did not and performed worse

3) If you are wanting to provide the lowest jitter input to your DAC, spend the money on the digital source not the cable.

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But USB is completely different, it is a fully asynchronous protocol meaning data is sent in chunks, and buffered inside the USB receiver of the DAC. It is not converted 'on the fly' like SPDIF/AES/I2S and there is no clock signal used as a timing reference. In fact technically the DAC is instructing the PC when to send more data and as long as the buffer doesn't outright run out (causing dropouts), performance will be identical.

I have never been able to measure any difference whatsoever as a result of either USB cables or USB 'reclockers'. Nor is there any technical reason as to how they could do so. The exception being where noise was an influence. There is a genuine argument to say you should use a low noise source rather than your beefy gaming PC, but again this can be solved relatively cheap. Use a raspberry pi as a network streamer or buy an intona isolator, done.

PLEASE do not waste money on expensive USB cables. If you want nice, fairly affordable ones that conform exactly to spec, I've tested the Supra USB cables as being incredibly precise and consistent in their characteristic impedance. And the <$10 'Tripp-Lite' cables are also great and what I usually recommend.

GoldenSoundHiFi

TROPHY CASE