Plugged Inc Headphones Thread *LAUNCHED* NT DISCOUNT & GIVEAWAY Details Inside

[memphisboi55]

Dang

forgot about these

I ended up copping some Sol Republics and V-Moda's in the past few weeks

Sending the Sol Republics back though.

Still want these if more colors coming tho bro!

 

[poindexter]

 got 2 new models up on PluggedInc.com for pre-order, $90 with discount ($10 off & free ship, code "YOUMATTEBRO"), def more my style with the low-key colorway

in for the Phantoms (black/gray), gotta support NT fam

...let y'all know what I think when they come in

 

[fraij da 5 11]

See, now that I can rock with.

 

[glasses]

 

[ciph4]

 got 2 new models up on PluggedInc.com for pre-order, $90 with discount ($10 off & free ship, code "YOUMATTEBRO"), def more my style with the low-key colorway










in for the Phantoms (black/gray), gotta support NT fam

...let y'all know what I think when they come in

let me/us know what you think.

 

[ao17]

Whoa!
The Phantom will be copped very soon.

 

[boredone1]

Quality at a lower price point? I'm down. Def followed on everything.
Respect the ambition! Keep grinding!

 

[Nawzlew]

 got 2 new models up on PluggedInc.com for pre-order, $90 with discount ($10 off & free ship, code "YOUMATTEBRO"), def more my style with the low-key colorway










in for the Phantoms (black/gray), gotta support NT fam

...let y'all know what I think when they come in

let me/us know what you think.

yo i just might have to :x

 

[ciph4]

running a special for Black Friday, be sure to check out http://www.pluggedinc.com tomorrow

 

[ciph4]

 

[ao17]

When is the Phantom colorway releasing?

 

[ciph4]

When is the Phantom colorway releasing?

shipping out 12/16, in time for Christmas

 

[ciph4]

launched our new site so we can premiere new content vs the old e-shop only site we had previously. looking to work w/ artists to sponsor videos, tapes, etc in the near future so PM if you're interested.

sold out of our first 3 orders of headphones and currently in the process of getting out 3rd collection out. the feedback we've received in this thread and elsewhere are definitely being put into consideration

if you'll be out in Austin and follow @FreeatSXSW, we'll be giving away headphones all week. we'll also be out at Hard Knock TV's Hard Knock Hoops tournament next Sat, Teams include: include: Wale, Problem, Def Jam, Hip Hop DX, Nice Kicks, Hard Knock, Trinidad James, Dizzy Wright, Drumma Boy, Chuck Inglish, Thurz, Pac Div, Eric Bellinger + more.

 

[calypso chanta]

good stuff man.

I do think that you guys need to hire a designer to go over your website.


There is a hierarchy issue with the overload of you're branding everywhere. Selectively placing it at key points makes it more distinct and stand out more.

You have serif fonts in your identity and your design style of headphones is modern but you have traditional fonts in there--my eye thinks either baskerville or times--which illicit more of a classic feel. So there needs to be clarity as far as the identity of your company.

In your "Story" page on the website, the line length of the sentences are too long. With the subheads, the all caps is a little clunky, you can try just keeping them the same font (no all caps) and just altering the color and see if thats better.

i could go more in depth, but I don't wanna seem like I'm ragging on it. Just a respectful crit. If you look 100%, then people take you and business more seriously and your profit margin increases. Keep doing your thing.

 

[ciph4]

We sold out of our first three runs of cements -- deciding on our next few colorways right now. Definitely keeping input in this thread in mind so let us know what you think.

We'll be out at SXSW. Sponsoring the Hard Knock Hoops Basketball tournament that will have teams from Wale, Problem, Def Jam, Hip Hop DX, Nice Kicks, Hard Knock, Trinidad James, Dizzy Wright, Drumma Boy, Chuck Inglish, Thurz, Pac Div, Eric Bellinger + more. Let us know if you'll be out there @PluggedInc. We'll be giving away pairs all week with @FreeAtSXW

good stuff man.

I do think that you guys need to hire a designer to go over your website.


There is a hierarchy issue with the overload of you're branding everywhere. Selectively placing it at key points makes it more distinct and stand out more.

You have serif fonts in your identity and your design style of headphones is modern but you have traditional fonts in there--my eye thinks either baskerville or times--which illicit more of a classic feel. So there needs to be clarity as far as the identity of your company.

In your "Story" page on the website, the line length of the sentences are too long. With the subheads, the all caps is a little clunky, you can try just keeping them the same font (no all caps) and just altering the color and see if thats better.

i could go more in depth, but I don't wanna seem like I'm ragging on it. Just a respectful crit. If you look 100%, then people take you and business more seriously and your profit margin increases. Keep doing your thing.

thanks for the critique/feedback, someone from plugged will be sending you an email shortly.

 

[calypso chanta]

thanks for the critique/feedback, someone from plugged will be sending you an email shortly.

Sure, look forward to it. Haven't gotten one yet tho. @ciph4  

 

[ciph4]

I wanted to give an update on everything that’s been happening with the brand, we’re still here and working hard every single day. I’ll do a lot better updating those that are interested on our progress and the brand itself as well - starting today.
To date we’ve sold many units and revised the product 2 times based on the great feedback our customers have given us on the previous models. Our current Generation 3 of the Plugged Crown series has gone through a mold re-tooling to make the product even stronger than before and we’ve replaced the leather on the ear cups with a more premium leather filled with memory foam. This is so the headphones can be worn comfortably for extended periods of time.

This summer we were also able to bring on board investors and key advisors that believe in our vision of the Plugged brand. Right now we’re in the midst of launching a new marketing strategy for the brand as well as planning out what we hope to be a huge 2015. We’ve worked on music videos with artists including Sebastian Mikael & Bobby Grant, which will be dropping in the next few months and we have a bunch of other content pieces/plans in the works for 2015.

Gen 3 Crown headphones can now be found on our website & Amazon. Use NT20 for $20 off each pair through our website.

Sometime soon once I get a chance to catch up on a few things I’ll update the thread on our story behind Plugged and why we've been working so hard on it. Stay tuned.

Buy Phantom

Buy Ghost

 

[Nawzlew]

Bump!

In the market for some new headphones.

Are these over ear or on ear?

That 20 code still work?

 

[iDon’tRead]

Quality?

 

[ciph4]

For a couple of years now Plugged has been building momentum and we've been posting to NT with updates here and there. Since the end of last summer everything has been accelerating rapidly and we're getting ready to start throwing rocks at the big players in this industry. We enjoyed the benefit of older heads sharing their stories and answering questions about their experiences in these forums - now we want to do the same. From product design to raising money to patenting our inventions, we've seen a lot in just a few years. Hopefully at least one person on here can learn something that motivates them to chase a dream and one day come back on here and do the same for the next wave.

Gonna be posting these updates on here as we roll them out on our website and launch our new product.

pluggedinc.com

--

Why Another Audio Company?

Music. There isn’t a more personal expression of identity. No one lyric, beat or hook means exactly the same thing to any two people. At the same time, nothing brings people together like music. Whether vibing or wilding, music connects on a primal level. The effect is so profound, the part of our brains stimulated when listening to a favorite song shows similar activity when imagining the music – just thinking about the song can trigger a rush. Of course, we prefer actually listening.

But every listening experience is not the same. Tuning a speaker with just the right combination of emotion and accuracy is an exercise in tweaking by degrees the “voice”, or sound profile, with changes in driver size and material, cavity volume, cross-over, membrane rigidity and more. To most people, these technical arguments mean nothing if the result doesn’t move them the way that music can and should. Some of the old-guard in audio have sucked the emotion out of the experience by reducing it to an equation.

Neither is barraging listeners with sloppy bass to force a played-out reaction the right approach. Everyone isn’t just fist-pumping all the time. How can you be about delivering music with all the same care and effort that the artist took in crafting it - “the way it’s supposed to be heard” - when your philosophy on sound seems to be “just force it”? Maybe that was enough in the early days of the current wave of renewed passion for sound but we can do better now.

When push comes to shove, accounting perfectly for an infinite combination of musical styles and the varied audio perception of each individual person is an impossible task. Sound, like any art, is about choices. Does the execution embody an appreciation for heritage? A deep understanding of technology? Insight into what gets people to really feel something? Do the choices reflect a genuine respect - even veneration - for the experience? Like you, I’ve been left feeling short-changed and wanting more from the products I’ve owned in the past.

Incredible sound isn’t enough though. Beautiful design is a non-negotiable requirement. This is usually the part where someone will say something to the effect of, “I don’t care what it looks like, as long as it sounds good”. But we know that’s not true. Now, if what you’re saying is you refuse to be ripped-off by gaudy looking, crummy sounding products at obscene prices – products more the result of a marketing meeting than a love for music - we’re on exactly the same page. But I don’t look at it as form vs function. There is beauty in superior technical performance and the satisfaction experienced from that performance is increased by aesthetic beauty. All of this at a reasonable price is not too much to ask.

So why another audio company? That’s not what Plugged is. We’re a music company and we’re setting out to help you do just one thing: Find Your Anthem.

 

[ciph4]

We get a lot of questions around how we came up with the $$$ to fund a headphone company so we wanted to give a little more insight into the process behind getting our/a company funded.

--

Shaz, Ash and I started Plugged in 2011 in Austin, Texas. We originally set out to sell a stripped-down headphone with a popular sound for a fraction of the competition’s price. At that time the Beats-Monster divorce was about to get started and Skullcandy was gearing up to go public. Market data suggested that the $342 million US market in premium headphones (any priced over $100) was primed to explode as the gale-force tailwind of smartphone penetration was really picking up. Basically, more people with iPhones and Androids meant more mobile streaming of music and videos and growing demand for the accessories needed to consume that content on a train or in the library.
For the first year and half we were in the lab creating and re-creating prototypes until we had something that we knew was a great value – our first Crown headphone. With simple, minimal styling and solid sound at the price point, Crown was our first foray into the marketplace – and we had a lot to learn. Consumer electronics is flooded at the bottom. There is an endless supply of no-name, low-quality, commodity-grade garbage floating around in the entry-level segment of audio. But that bucket of products wasn’t really our competition because we knew the customer we wanted – the customer we ourselves are - would never seriously consider buying any of those headphones. We aimed to go toe-to-toe with the Beats and Skullcandys of the world. While the first Crown headphone was solid-footing on which to start building a reputation for quality and value, it was going to take an infusion of capital to really give the market-share leaders a run.

The venture capital game can roughly be split into to two camps: technology and consumer products. The technology camp gets all of the press – this is where the likes of Peter Thiel, Ben Horowitz and Fred Wilson invest in companies like Snapchat, Uber and Instagram. On the other hand, the vastly smaller consumer products venture capital camp if often looking for consumer packaged goods, like Vitamin Water, Chobani Greek Yogurt and Ben & Jerry’s Ice-cream – successful brands in categories with high customer lifetime values because they’ll come back and buy over and over again. Plugged straddles the fence between these worlds, very much a technology company but one that sells physical hardware and a lifestyle brand. The VCs we approached early on had a hard-time shifting gears from their normal thinking to wrap their heads around what Plugged could be. What was always an easy sell, however, was the global market opportunity in this category. This got even easier and proved decisive for our fundraising efforts when Apple bought Beats.

Pitching for funding is always about getting the investor to see your version of the future and believe in your plan to make it so. As convincing as my team and I could be, when the world’s foremost technology company, Apple, shelled out $3.2 Billion for a competitor, it verified our claims of the opportunity in an incredibly strong way. Within a few months of the Beats deal closing, we closed our first seed round of $250,000.

 

[ciph4]

Genesis of a Headphone (Pt. 1)

Consumer electronics, especially in music, are a unique and challenging beast to tackle. Between killer performance, dope design and a brand message people care about – delivered on-budget and on-time – what we’ve set out to do is a tall order. Headphones complicate matters by bringing to the table ergonomics and portability. Here’s how we designed the next homerun product in this category.

Every globally recognizable brand has at least one visual element that they own. Sometimes it’s a logo like the McDonalds golden arches but it can even be a color, like Ferrari red. Attempting to follow the success of Beats, our competitors focused on loud hues and large branding – and not a single interesting or worthwhile alternative to Beats was created. While a clean and memorable logo would go a long way towards brand recognition, we knew developing and iconic design language in our products that customers could come to know us by and rely on would be a much more solid foundation. We wanted something anyone could recognize from across the street as a Plugged product.

We spent weeks with our design team looking at all kinds of products, from cars to clothes, which we thought did something very right at a visceral level. These were products that produced a gut-reaction – less mass-produced tech-stuff and more expert craftsmanship. For better or worse, Apple’s success has spawned a whole industry of copy-cats attempting to execute their profound minimalism but that end up with sterile, soulless objects. Music deserves products that, when you see them for the first time, before knowing anything about sound or price, make you think “damn, that’s the one”.

Our designers went away for 6 weeks to bring together all of our ideas into a single concept and came back with something that we knew was a winner the moment we saw it. Crown marries classic with clean in its form and line while offering an entirely new design thinking in audio products. The premium materials and subtle branding are a nod to a heritage of hi-fi gear and a salute to a user deserving of the respect not to be treated as a billboard. There would still be months of development ahead but we saw then that this design was an aesthetic and philosophy on which we could build an authentic experience.

 

[ciph4]

(Genesis of a Headphone Pt. 2)

A strong industrial design (ID) concept is the foundation of any product. But, the gulf between beautiful ID and a well-executed, functional, finished creation is huge. Pie in the sky designs with little regard for manufacturability yield only frustration as little by little the practicalities of production strip away the original design intent. Further, the most precarious resource for almost any start-up is time; without careful attention to the manufacturability consequences of every tweak and refinement to Crown, we risked wasting much of it scrambling to implement revisions later on. For these reasons, our design and engineering people were in collaboration from day one. Our objective was to create a set of detailed instructions so that our factory could understand exactly our requirements for Crown.

In the first phase of development, as we kicked around variations of our hero design concept, we were mostly looking at computer-aided design (CAD) renderings, specifically in STEP (Standard for The Exchange of Product model data). STEP is a global standard for representing 3D objects in CAD. At this stage the goal was to dial-in a refined vision of the product and engineering input helped to keep development within the bounds of manufacturability. Their inclusion in these discussions also gave us a jump on thinking about parts and mechanics. It’s one thing to draw up an idea for a product; it’s quite another to specify how that product breaks up into component parts, how those parts are made and how they can be effectively assembled in an efficient production setting.

With STEP in hand, engineering turned first to generating a map of parts and how they fit together (think Lego instructions) and then to creating dimensions, material requirements and mechanical functions, which we deliver in a software called Pro/Engineering. The Pro/E package of files is especially important because that’s the set of designs and instructions we send over to the factory to design the next important phase in the development lifecycle: tooling.

Note: The design and engineering of the ear cups is vital to achieving acoustic performance. I’ll cover that process in a separate post on acoustics.

 

[ciph4]

Sound & Music

I refuse to have a conversation about sound that’s divorced from music. The things we at Plugged make let you make music yours and the most meaningful choice we make answers this question: what moves a person? Technical acoustic expertise is a fundamental requirement but it isn’t enough; we believe the only way to create worthwhile experiences is to live and breathe the music that these products are entrusted to deliver.

Three waves – one old, one young and one new - are setting the agenda in music today. The first is really just the continuation of an obvious but too often overlooked attraction of music in the first place - incredible voices. Ed Sheeran, Sam Smith, The Weeknd – demand for these R&B-influenced crooners is exploding, as evidenced by Sheeran’s 860 million Spotify listens in 2014, Sam Smith’s 4 Grammys in that same year and The Weeknd’s 3 songs in the current Billboard weekly Hot 100 top 20 . Of course, talented vocalists have always been rare and sought after and the music these artists are producing today is demanding more attention and dollars from the masses. This shift could in part be a response to changes in the distribution model of the music industry. Physical media barely has a pulse and we’re still working through the economics of sustainable digital distribution. Live performance is driving earnings in the industry and who is better suited to shine live and sell tickets than singers? Global tours pour huge resources into local radio play and other kinds of promotion and it follows that enhanced exposure has a real effect on tastes.

Second is the entry of rap & hip-hop to the mainstream of music over the past decade or so. Maybe the only evidence you need for this is the fact that Juicy J has an Academy Award. The average radio listener or Spotify streamer might not play rap exclusively but you’d be hard pressed to find any music lover who doesn’t have some Kanye or Drake in rotation. And production in rap is embracing new sounds as well. A heavy dose of synthetic bass still hits the spot at times (think, the opening to Fabolous’ Can’t Deny It) but from the tribal drum effects of 808s & Heartbreak to the g-funk melodies of To Pimp A Butterfly, rap is all over the map musically – and it’s never been more popular.

The third trend we’re watching is the permanence of electronic music. Producers in this genre have flirted with mainstream success for years, consistently on the cusp of crossing over. Recently though, evidence is mounting that electronic music is more than just a niche genre or fad. The key development has been collaboration between these producers and mainstream musical talents. Since 2010, artists like David Guetta and Calvin Harris have charted Billboard Hot 100 Hits on singles working with the likes of Rihanna and Nikki Minaj. But the tipping point of this trend may have been the Grammy success of Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories in 2014, especially the Pharrell-featured single Get Lucky, and its launch of electronic music into the mainstream spotlight. As of this moment, Diplo, Skrillex, Afrojack, David Guetta, DJ Snake and Major Lazer are all charting top 100 hits at 25 or better.

These shifts impact the requirements for any great sound. The obvious takeaway is that the bass and sub-bass frequencies (0 – 250 Hz) have to hit in virtually all forms of popular music and especially rap & hip-hop and electronic. With that shallow insight, some of our competitors have built a bunch of bass toys expecting you to be satisfied with a boring, and frankly insulting, sound. But too much energy in the low-end response and the neighboring midrange (250 – 4000 Hz), where the majority of vocals live, is at risk of being drowned out. At a time when voices matter more than ever, clean, tight bass that hits just the right vibe without overtaking vocals is a must. Further, putting rap & hip-hop and electronic music in the "all you need is bass" bucket and calling it a day is just lazy. New and hybrid sounds in those genres demand performance across the frequency range. Production with vocal samples, live instruments, synthesized effects and drum machines is resulting in more dynamic, genre-bending sounds - you've got to have more than just bass. Designing for sound is like painting - you wouldn't only use red all the time, would you?

While I’m confident that any person could hear and appreciate the difference between a dumb bass toy and a smarter sound, I’m not so naïve that I expect opinions of our products to be formed solely on objective, individual review. We’re building beautiful products and a brand that stands for values that are important to us out of a passion for great design that enhances every facet of owning a Plugged product. With that objective in mind, we define great design as anything that accelerates adoption. At the end of the day, if our ideas of what constitutes beauty and meaningful values also moves tastes for sound towards a richer experience, I’m just fine with that too.