Lab II: Your first set of 3D-printed earphones with unparalleled style, made with titanium!
Japanese manufacturer S’Next managed to designed a never-seen before set of earphones, made with titanium and 3D-printed, while keeping an unparalleled quality of sound despite all the difficulties that this molding process represents.
The difficulties of the 3D process
If 3D printer allows an undeniable quality of details, you don’t have to just push a button to realise your product. It is quite the contrary! The creation of Lab II earphones took hours of work even for 3D specialists, who worked in close collaboration with sound experts from S-Next.
Finally, Lab II earphones represent a shape never seen before on the earphone market that helps to improve the sound in terms of high frequencies, low frequencies and acoustic. After trying many prototypes, S-next expert teams have realised that Lab II earphones should answer to extremely precise criteria: having a mechanical equalizer on the front surface of the diaphragm, a large whole in the back of the driver unit and a space between the housing and the user’s auditory canal.
So the required shape for Lab II earphones must be 3D-printed. Indeed, the equalizers appears to be extremely thin, in order to obtain unparalleled quality of sound, while preserving the earphones from the 3D process heat radiations.
Made with titanium, but steel very smooth
You can ask if the use of titanium with Lab II earphones is not uncomfortable for the ears. There again, designers have anticipated the problem avoiding the surface roughness! So the titanium powder grains used in this fabrication process are extremely thins, but the equalizers remain rough enough to deliver a perfect quality of sound. So, the outer aspect of titanium remains smooth, while the inner aspect remains rigid and roughs enough thanks to chemical treatments. So Lab II earphones can be considered as ultra sophisticated, and the smoothest in the world of titanium forms shaped by 3D printers.
More ultra precise technics were used to design Lab II earphones, such as mechanical equalizers in front of the diaphragm that apply just the right amount of pressure to improve the sound resonance. Then, the earphones aperture is thinner and as we said earlier a 2.0mm gap was created between the earphones and the user’s auditory canal, allowing an ideal aperture for the sound delivery in your ears.
Concerning the Lab II earphones wires, S-Next used pure iron for the yoke and the pole piece, a material that allows a perfect management of the magnetic flux into them. The yoke is large and curved, an absolutely unique form that supresses unnecessary vibrations. In the end, Lab II earphones appear to be extremely lightweight and comfortable to wear. And to wear them, it will be necessary at the beginning to adjust the earphones correctly in your ears before finding the ideal position between these ones and your auditory canal. But don’t worry, the designers placed Right and Left indicators to help you to recognize the right earphone in obscurity.
Then, you should know that only 200 units of Lab II earphones will be sold for the amout of 4.300$, if only these ones will be commercialize outside the Japanese market!
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