14 DAY TRIAL // It can be fun to hear about technological leaps that can completely change our lives overnight, but seeing a technology slowly come into its own, bit by bit, comes with its own sort of excitement.
3D printing is one such technology, if I do say so myself. Having steadily been evolving over the past 30 years, 3D printing now has enough consumer applications that everyone who's anyone in the tech field has at least examined its possibilities.
AudioQuest has done more than examine. The company decided that it could use 3D printing tech to make its latest headphones a fair bit less common than they otherwise could be.
More precisely, it used the technology to create the grilles. Biomimetic grilles in the semi-open-back design.
The grilles mimic a butterfly's wing structure and have a complex lattice construction that diffuses sound, in addition to looking great and unique (the design would have been impossible five years ago).
Sculpteo, a well-established 3D printing expert helped with the NightHawk's design. The piece was printed on an SLS-based printer from plastic. The weight is of 0.9 g/cm3.
The product hasn't been priced yet, since the release won't happen until 2015. But the AudioQuest NightHawk headphones have already earned 2015 CES Innovation Awards Best of Innovations Awards (Eco-Design and Sustainable Technologies), so they're bound to have prospective buyers even if they aren't the cheapest on the block.
