Kickstarter

Hello Everyone,

This project has been back-burnered while we work out the glue issues and 6 piece unit production, but thought you might want to see it.  

This is the design for a dual-driver earphone assembly.  It has separate 6mm and 10mm drivers and I am told the prototype sounds fantastic.  They can be used with your existing cable harness (advantage: modularity!).

Feel free to send us comments.  By the way, dual driver earbuds are pretty expensive ($50 to $200).  Ours will probably be $30-$40.

Thanks, The folks at Acoustic Forge

Hello Everyone,

Due to numerous failures of our first generation IRONbuds, we have sent our remaining stock back to the manufacturer for rebuilding. The issue is simple...something was not done properly with the gluing of the earbud wooden rear housing to the front spun aluminum housing.  Virtually all earbuds use glue of some sort so this is not a design problem; its a manufacturing problem. The turnaround time shouldn't be too long and we will keep you in the loop.

We made a decision some time ago to make an all metal earphone housing for our second generation of earbuds.  It has been a major embarrassment that our product is supposed to be ultra-durable (and is called "IRONbuds") have failed so quickly for some of you.  Accordingly, the second generation of IRONbuds will be designed with a spun aluminum case that has a mechanical "snap-lock".  These will be also glued with a two part epoxy and should be ultra-rugged.  (Please see the image below.)  I can tell you that we are going to test the h**l out of them.

We are also working on an upgraded cable harness that will be some 50% thicker than before.  We haven't had many failures of the harness (maybe 2-3) but our intention is to have these last for years so we are simply making them more robust.

As usual, we are making our way through all your emails and responding as quickly as we can.  Thanks for your patience.

Best, Everyone at Acoustic Forge

Hello Everyone,

As you probably know, we are dealing with multiple points of contact, different user names, address changes and a disturbingly large amount of IRONbuds lost in the mail.  The result is that many people aren't getting messages returned and their first set of IRONbuds. We are trying to get this all undercontrol.

At some point soon, we are going to ask that everyone abandon any the Kickstarter methods of contact because there are so many variations.  In the meantime, anyone who is waiting for your complementary 3 piece IRONbuds, please let us know by answering this message.  We will cross reference this our database and see if we can get this sea of data under control.

Thanks!

OK Everyone,

This has been in the works for sometime and we can finally show you prototypes.  We, of course, are extremely upset about the reliability of the wooden-backed earbuds that we have been shipping.  Too many of them have come apart during normal use.  Far too many!

We hope these photos illustrate that we are taking this quite seriously and we now have prototypes of genuine "Iron" IRONbuds.  These prototypes have not been evaluated yet so hang tight on the final design. What we do know is that these are going to be tested with hammers this time (seriously).  

Thanks again for everyone's patience while we get this product engineered to be what we originally asked for funding for...earphones that are "Rugged, Reliable and Responsible".

Thanks to you all we are getting real close.

Hello Iron Elite,

I've had an illness take me out of the loop for a while.  As I hope you can understand, the pressures of maintaining a day job and a start-up company at the same time are quite intense. It takes its toll after a while.

However, illness aside, we promised all our pledgers to start a business that will make affordable, repairable earphones and we will soldier on until that business is established. This is an update on what we have planned for the next few months.

1) Earphones: We are pleased with the reliability of the 2mm disconnects on the earphones. This was the "weakest link" in the original design. As many of you probably remember, it took us almost 4 months to test and then source those 2mm connectors. However, we are very unhappy with the application of the glue on the earphones. This is the glue that holds the rear wooden section to the aluminum front housing. Some of these have proven solid, others have failed within a few weeks. This is obviously unacceptable. We are deep in the design of the second generation of the earphones and are looking at designs that are mechanically secure (snap-fit, screw-on) without glue needed.  Good Lord, we call these things IRONbuds, we can't have glue failures causing problems!

2) Cables:  In general these have worked out well.  Maybe a few dozen failures from what sounds like somewhat rugged use plus a few manufacturer's defects.  We are looking at making a beefier cable for "extreme use". Maybe three different grades, the strongest one being particularly strong. Like "rope" as one person here has stated.

3) Sound Quality: From years of experience in the audio business, we know that what people "hear" is extremely variable. Overall I think we hit the sweet spot well with the choice of transducer and voicing of this first generation of earphones.  I'd say the feedback is some 90/10, 90% of users like the sound, and 10% find it below-par. This is actually pretty good in our experience.  By the way, we are going to be offering various frequency curves in the future for those that want different sound.

OK, I'll be at the emails this evening and try and catch up as quickly as possible.

Thanks from Acoustic Forge.