 Hey, I'm Anfa, today I'm doing a review of the plupi headphones, I've made a short about them before, but that's not a review and I really wanted to give them a review, I think they deserve a review from me, let's go. Now I've written a lengthy script, but I have no time to actually read it out correctly from memory, so I think I'm gonna just use it as notes and talk from the top of my head instead. Sorry. Alright, so I've been to Sonoy 2023, that was in October, I've brought the headphones there, I've made a presentation about them, and I also let people try them out. When I've heard a good thing from people, they really liked the experience, people were testing these headphones there, I showed everything I knew about them, but I've learned a thing or two extra since then, so if you've seen that video, you will learn more, and if you haven't seen it, I will probably link it in the description, if not, poke me in the comments and I will do it. Right, so what the heck is this? First question, well these are headphones, so-called plupi headphones, plupi is a company made by two Canadian people and they make cool things, they make open hardware, I believe they started with keyboards and mice and truck balls and stuff, and all of their stuff is open source and open hardware so you can like take the production files and manufacture your own units, or you can buy stuff from them and then customize it because you can like freely print custom parts or something, because you have the files. I don't have a 3D printer, I have not tested that, but well, people exist who did. Yeah, so I've been using these headphones on and off for like half an hour now, half a year. On and off because I had a little bit of issue with PipeWire, I had an issue where PipeWire would not detect them, and like sometime later I realized, well the solution was to just restart PipeWire and that's it, and then they were detected fine. But I still was using them on Windows, so I've been using them on Windows at work for sound design, among other things, but also just for consuming media and playing games. I've been using them on Linux, actually I've been more using them on Linux for playing games than on Windows, but yeah, I've been listening to music, I've been making my own music, I've been talking to the developers about these headphones on the Discord of their company, which is open and they answered all my questions and they gave me explicit permission to quote them on things they wrote on Discord, which is nice. I don't think I'm going to use it though, because I just don't have the time. I really wanted to bring you this review. So, yeah. I also learned about various challenges that Design of the Headphones brought and like what are the limitations of them, I've had some issues and I fixed them. I found a single big issue with these headphones and I'm going to explain what it is, what are the consequences and why it's not a deal breaker for me. But maybe it will be for you. It entirely depends on what you want to do with these headphones. So, they are 3D printed. They are open back, over ear headphones with planar magnetic drivers. Planar drivers means that there is a little plane with a coil that is planar. It's not a circular coil and there is a planar mass, like planar magnet. It's like a couple of bars of neodymium magnets like stuck together, which form like a magnetic plane and the planar driver responds to that. So this is called planar magnetic drivers, planar magnet acoustic drivers, I don't know. Planar headphones, that's the big word. I'm told these are very expensive in the wild. So I'm getting ahead of myself. My notes, I've put some specific order of releasing all that information to you, which was expected to like build some tension and stuff, so I'm going to try to keep that. Also, I think I'm going to publish this script of mine, so you can just read it and also control F and find stuff, I'm going to put a link and you also can appreciate my awesome writing and how the video did not turn at all like the script. So oh, a big disclaimer, I marked this video as sponsored. And what that means is I've been compensated to make this video. I've been compensated how I got the headphones for free. I still had to pay customs, so I could receive them. And yeah, that's it. Ploopy told me that, hey, would you want to make a video about our headphones? And I said, yeah, sure. And they said, OK, we can send you a pair for free. And I'm like, cool. And that was pretty much it. I made the short video and I promised them I'm going to do a longer one. They didn't ask for two videos. I just wanted to do a longer one, a proper review. But I never found the energy and space time to do it. So now I'm doing it regardless. I'm like, I'm going to do whatever I can and I'm going to publish it because, heck, these headphones deserve it. Also, Ploopy deserves it as well. And the community very much deserves to know more about these headphones because I think they're worth thinking about checking out, buying, using, hacking. I don't know. So this video is sponsored, as in the headphones were sponsored to me. Nothing else was. Ploopy isn't paying me or telling me what to say or they don't really have any influence over me. They just answered my questions and that's was it. OK, so let's take a look at my journey. First thing is assembly. So I received a preassembled pair of Ploopy headphones. And the color red, which is what you see on the. Is it is it what you see on the page? No, I think they show black or maybe something else under discord. The red headphones are the icon of the server. That's what I thought. Yeah. So, yeah, and with a standard headband size, the pair arrived in a box in a bag in pieces. You might be wondering, like, how is this assembled? Well, there is also a kit you can assemble from scratch. And in that kit, you saw our things together. And I don't have skills to do that. I tried to move a zero arm resistor, an SMD zero arm resistor, and I ended up losing it in a blob of solder and then replacing it with another blob of solder. So I guess that it works. But I would not want to touch anything of. Her complexity with a. With my iron, big iron. So I can I can see like how getting the. Unassembled kit, it can be a lot of fun, you know, putting this all together. The circuit board and, you know, oh, crap. But, well, that's too much for me. And I also wanted to make sure the headphones like a representative of the quality that loopy provides. And if I built them myself from their parts, I could mess something up. And then I would complain that they sound bad and it would turn out that it was just me doing a shit job at assembling them. So I skipped that skit. I so I scared I skipped that that issue and just asked them to send me a preassembled pair. Holy crap, I'm spending a lot of time talking about this. It's not really important. Right. So in my case, putting them together was just taking the driver assemblies and sliding them into the headband, plucking them in, just like tweaking the size of that, connecting the cables together, connecting that to the DAC and then the back to the computer. And that was it. They show up as a. USB audio device, standard USB audio, nothing weird about them. Yeah, you have volume control and that's it. Or rather, it would be, but this is not an ordinary pair of headphones. Sorry. So you not only can like really print your own parts if you want, but you can also reprogram the custom DAC or digital to audio convert to digital to analogue converter. There is like the box, little box, let me grab it, just set up with my microphone here is really not super extra orderly going to make some nasty sounds. Right. So we have this thing. This is the DAC. And what sits in here is a Raspberry Pi microcontroller chip, which is overclocked the way. And it processes the audio process, the equalizer that is in here. And there is an open source program called plupi headphones toolbox, which you can run and configure that equalizer and also other parameters of this device, which is really cool because you can like, you can really mess with the sound of these headphones and you can also make presets and easily switch between them. There is supposedly an option to save your preset to the headphones so they don't like reset when you reconnect them. I haven't had luck with that. Or maybe I was using some other version of the software that doesn't support this saving. I don't know. Sorry, my chair is squeaking and creaking. I'm just constantly making noises. I hope it's not coming through on the mic. I should have made this as a live stream, really. And the quality of what I'm doing would be excusable, but now it isn't. So they come with this DAC and a nice USB-C cable as well. Let's go on with my notes. Ergonomics. Yeah, let's talk about the comfort. So these headphones I find very comfortable. They don't weigh and nothing. I mean, they weight something. They have they have a bit of heft. But they're like they are clamping force is by default very light. So if I like start shaking my head, you can see how they are like bouncing around. Yeah, like this is not something I normally do. So like it's not an issue. But the low clamping force for me, especially is a blessing. Especially since I started wearing glasses and, you know, wearing other headphones, I found that, like, for example, the let me pick another headphones I'm using regularly. If I put on a pair of HyperX Cloud 2, which do clamp quite a bit after sitting a whole day in them, I I feel like the glasses are like pressed into my skull. And I just get a headache. So that's not very good. And because the cloud HyperX Cloud is just pushing the, you know, my glasses frame into my head and that hurts over the long term. But cookies are so light in clamping that they don't do that. They sit comfortably over, over my ears and over the glasses as well. And like they're not falling out, they're not falling off unless I do something really violent and just try to drop them, which is very possible. But if I don't want them to fall off, they won't fall off, like, if you just keep a little bit of awareness that you need to like keep a little bit of inertia, like low pass filter, your velocity function, and you're good to go. And the headphones are going to drop. Yeah, I can sometimes forget I'm wearing them, especially since they are open back and they barely block any sound from the outside, which is great and terrible. I mean, it's what it is. It's great because I can like still talk to people without taking my headphones off, which is cool. I can just, you know, turn down the volume or mute something and I can talk to them immediately. I don't need to put down the headphones. Also, I think I suppose the openness affects the sound quality as well. But yeah, of course, the downside is you need a quiet listening environment or you're not going to be happy. You can't use them, you know, in a subway or, you know, in a car because you won't hear much. But they are not really meant to be carried around to think. But I'm going to get to that in a moment. Yeah. So that's ergonomic. Also, they came with two alternative sets of headband springs. So I would need to somehow take this apart. But there are two 3D printed springs in here and I could take this headband apart and replace those springs to get a harder clamping force. I haven't changed them. I don't really know how. Didn't want to break anything. And the default clamping force is just fine. But there are, you know, four springs, two of each size, like just symmetric. And you can place them, which is really cool. There's 3D printed springs, like it's crazy. By the way, the build quality of these headphones feels really solid. They're not super heavy, but the plastic is also like, they don't feel plastic, really. They're not really squeaking like a plastic thing. Because, yeah, I don't know. They're not clackety-clack. They have a little bit of heft. I really like the mechanical design of them. And also, like the ports from the front, at first I felt like that's really weird. Why aren't the ports facing downwards? This makes a lot of sense. Well, first, if they were facing downwards, it would be super easy to just pull the plugs off. But because they are pointing forward, I've never had this problem that I just, you know, accidentally pulled them out. But it also makes that the cables are sticking a little bit away from you. So they are a little bit less likely to just, you know, collide with your clothing. Maybe it's minor, but I think it's a good design choice. All right, let's talk about customizability. So these headphones are, as I said, open hardware. You can find the production files and print your own parts. You can also modify the firmware that runs on the DAC. You can reprogram this thing to do whatever you want. I mean, you don't want to blow your ears. That's one thing you don't want. But you can customize that. I really want to see someone really print these with extra places for RGB LEDs and wiring them around them, maybe adding some chip or something, maybe in the headband, that would like, you know, maybe leech over the audio signal and drive the LEDs to the music and have them in, like, semi-clear plastic and that would be really cool. I mean, you can't do anything like that with any other headphones. You can't do this with Bluetooth. If you have a pre-printer, a tinkerer mind and a crazy imagination, you can do that. And I want to see it, if you do. So please share that. Right. Sorry for clicking the mic. Yeah, this really should have been a live stream. I just, I wanted to get a decent video fidelity, so I'm going to upload this in 4K. I also have some Bureau that I'm going to try and put insert here and there so you can see some cool footage I shot when I was unboxing them originally, putting them together. And yeah, also like doing some beauty shots with lights and stuff. OK, so that's about the customizability. Aesthetics. Well, aesthetics are highly subjective. I think I like them. I like the skeletonized look. At first I thought they kind of look silly when you put them on because they're so large, but that notion got away. I'm no longer feeling this way. I like this design. I like how they designed, for example, the inner part here. You see that? This little pattern. I really like that. They have also tuned resonators in this chassis that are made to tone down a resonant frequency of them. I think that's, I think I written that in my script a little bit further down the road. Oh, no, I did. I didn't mention that in here. OK, aesthetics. Right. Let's talk about portability now. So these headphones are not meant to be carried around. They're not meant to be used during commutes on the go. Not really. They are best suited to using them in your studio or at home. You know, when you want to, I don't know. Close your eyes, lay on a couch and enjoy your music or sit in a chair or sit in and so far, whatever. Or you want to use them to make music or enjoy music as you work or, yeah, they're not really good for taking them out. And there's multiple reasons. One of them is that they're open back. So you, yeah, any noise outdoors will just make it impossible to enjoy any music with them. Because they don't prevent you from hearing any of that. But there's other reasons which I'm going to get to in a moment. Actually, very, very near moment. So, yeah, I've seen people made custom carry bags for this, maybe even like carry cases. I don't know. I haven't done any of that. I've been carrying them around by disassembling them and reassembling them. You can see this on the, on the sonoi, on this presentation when I show this around. But I'm going to demonstrate now, maybe. Let's see. Let's see if I'm, if I can still do this. Right. I unplugged the, I unplugged the cables. So now putting this into your backpack is not a good idea. Like this is going to like lots of strain. This shape doesn't want to like conform to anything. But to lay them flat, we need to like take them apart. How do we do that? It just so happens that underneath here, there are two springs. Or rather, if I pull this out, now there is a latch. And if I press on this latch and pull, I can pull this out. You can see the latch now. We'll focus. Okay. There is the latch. So, if you just open it up all the way, let me show you more like this, all the way. Clack, press here and pull. So like, put your finger down here and press and pull. And, you know, for one of them, it's easy. For the other, it's ball bustingly hard. And like, I bruised my finger nail. Trying to do this. Like thumbnail. Actually, I think I got a tool. I use that to push down this little latch. And that worked, I think. Okay. I'm not going to do it now because I think I'm just going to take too long. You see, I mean, that's one problem that there is a little bit of mechanical inconsistency because, you know, one of these latches is easy to deal with. The other one is impossible. At least for me. Maybe you just, I'm just built different. I don't know. Okay, I managed. Oh, it hurts. All right. I freed it. All right. So now I have these three parts, which is much easier to fit this into your backpack. But what I did is I put it into a bag and actually it's the same bag. I got them in. Actually, this is how they arrived in these three pieces, the three pieces plus cables. So this is it. You add, you add your cables, you add your back and you're good to go. And then when you want to assemble them, let's do it again. I mean, this is how much assembly I had to do when they arrived. The headband is perfectly symmetrical. It doesn't matter which way. So just insert, insert. And there you go. It took a little bit of force to insert one of these, I think, or like change it. I'm a little bit afraid I'm going to break something, but nothing did break. Right. And then you just play, plug in the cables. Okay. So you can move them around like I put them in a backpack, lied with them and said, et cetera. But there is another reason why you don't want to use them outside. And that's the quiet problem. So the BlueBee headphones have one big issue that determines a lot about them. And that is where all the shortcomings of these headphones come from. And that is they consume a lot of power. This is why I think they needed the DAC in the first place is that they just wouldn't work if you just plug them into any normal headphone jack. So also they needed the DAC to use the EQ to actually balance the sound. But because they take so much power and I mean, they can take upwards of one amp, one amp at five volts, one amp going into your ears. No, actually it's not because you see they don't emit as much sound as one amp would suggest. Because they have very low sensitivity, especially in the high frequencies. In the low frequencies, they are easier to drive. So less voltage is required to push them around. They naturally have a very large resonance in the lower bass, like 50 hertz or 30, I think. Which has some very interesting consequences because with the EQ you can make them the bass is crazy. It's awesome. Okay, I'm getting ahead of myself again. Right, so they consume a lot of power because they are inefficient. That's really it. And the amplifier slash digital analog converter slash equalizer box. It runs on an overclocked Raspberry Pi microcontroller chip. And this box is always hot. If I have this plugged into my computer, it's always hot to the touch. I mean, not horrifyingly hot, but it's very warm, I would say. It's always very warm. One idea I had for a mod is to add a radiator to this chip. I actually bought tiny aluminum radiators that would fit, but I don't want to cut a hole into this. Plus I don't have the tools. I don't want to destroy this beautiful thing. All this wooden logo there's really cool. You should see more of that in the B-roll because I shot a lot of B-roll. Hopefully I'm using it now when I'm editing this. Right, so they can take five watts of power because one amp at five volts. It's a lot. And I first found out when I started having issues where I would plug them in and listen to stuff and then I would turn up the volume and something loud would play and then they would go silent. I unplugged them, plugged them in. They work again and something loud happens and they go silent again. Turned out they were shutting down because they were getting too little power from the USB port I've plugged them into. Which was I believe a USB port on the front of my PC chassis. These usually take a long road so they don't carry that much power. So when I plugged them into the back of my computer that problem went away. But it is always warm. So this is a hand warmer. You can just grab this. You're gonna have your hands be hotter. Oh, I wonder if I disconnected this as a device. I wonder if OBS that is recording things here did not get crazy about it. Oh no, I think it works. Perfect, good. Wunderbar. Right, so this is why you wouldn't want to use them with a phone or a tablet. They would just drain your battery real fast. I think I did try it a bit and no, no, no. I mean you can't do it with a laptop. If you're not like constrained with battery life and you have a long lasting battery or something. Then I think it's gonna be fine. I left people with my laptop plugged into these plugged into them and they were testing it. It was on AC sometime but not always like it was fine. But with a phone not really a good idea. Unless you want to carry on a power brick with you at all times. That's not very handy, is it? Yeah, and this low sensitivity also causes a problem. Which is like my only gripe with the sound quality. Have I talked about the sound quality yet? No, it's still a couple paragraphs later. I mean actually I hope, yeah. I'm still getting ahead of myself. Yeah, they have a volume limit. Which is a bit lower than I would like. Basically getting them to play stupidly loud is really hard. Unless you want to run a limiter before you send signal to them. For which you would actually need to... There's a ridiculously silly way you could drive these headphones. Ridiculous volumes, I think. Haven't tried it but you would need to reproduce the necessary EQ curve in software of your choice. And you would need to apply that to the signal and then... I don't know, multi-band limit it. Do something to it, squash it. Then disable the EQ in this little box. And have it just push the raw audio. And then I think you could get the maximum volume out of that. But it would be with dynamic range compression. Without that you can't really get stupid volumes. You're gonna get distortion. And digital distortion of that. So you can get analog distortion as well. I found a way to have them distort in an analog way. Physically distort, which was also fun. I did some experiments with bespoke synth and oscillator. And different frequencies. And boosting the volume to ridiculous volumes. And playing with EQ and bass and stuff. Pretty fun thing. I highly recommend playing with that. These headphones are a lot of fun to play with this way. So I mean, these headphones can produce a lot of sound. But it might take some tweaking. You might hear some distortion when trying to achieve that. The simplest way to go beyond 100% volume is in KDE Plasma 6 or 5. There's an option to make the volume sliders go above 100%. And then you can go to 150%. I think this makes PipeWire just apply gain to the digital signal before it gets sent out. Because otherwise I don't know how it would be done. I don't know if it applies on any emitting or something. So that's the easy way to turn up things when there's too quiet. Because a big problem with this is they don't have enough headroom. So if you turn things up too loud they're gonna distort. So you really need to turn things up. But then in your system properties have things turned down. But this is also really... This is also silly because of how the gain staging works. You have a volume control in your system. What that does is it controls the analog gain stage in here. Which is the last thing. You're tweaking analog gain with the volume control. This means that if you cause distortion in the digital domain first you are not gonna get rid of that distortion by turning down the volume. You get me? This is why it's stupid. I mean I don't know really what would be the solution here. I don't know. Maybe all gain staging should be done in digital. And just leave the amplifier full blast all the all times. I don't know. Of course that would hurt fidelity because you have 16-bit audio. 16-bit audio here. I think you can flash custom firmware which makes it 24-bit. Don't quote me on that. I don't remember. But of course you would maybe hear a little bit of noise floor if you turn things down very quietly at 16-bit. So vinyl recordings have been pressed using 13-bit PCM and no one ever heard that. Partially because we really don't need that much fidelity to convey a lot. Musically. Okay hot takes over. Yeah the gain staging is a little bit puzzling. So actually what makes most sense I think is the KDE Plasma's extra gain because that must be applied to the digital audio which means then the digital audio goes through the USB-C then it gets processed with the DSP processor in their DSP code running on this Raspberry Pi overclocked microcontroller chip then there is like pre-gain digital digital pre-gain EQ all the filters are processed and then there is post gain after the EQ. It's a bit weird you have pre and post gain but both are actually happening in the digital domain before the signal actually goes into the amplifier. So if you go to the Plupi headphones toolbox none of the sliders there at the top called gain actually touch the amplifier part. They touch the digital processing parts only. Yeah so you can get a lot of volume it's tricky. I would usually do it with the pre-amplifier gain. So I have some presets one is called even louder and what I do is I have actually have EQ post gain at maximum plus nine decibels EQ pre-gain at negative two. The default preset is negative 4.1 on pre-gain on pre EQ gain and three decibels at post EQ gain. I don't touch the EQ curve at all though. I have a preset called extra bass though where I also add 18 decibels at 24 hertz. Yeah it's really fun. Right so gain staging is a little bit of a problem because if you turn up the pre EQ gain staging too much you're going to have everything distorted and then what you need to do is turn down the source the digital source like if you're playing a video on YouTube or a music track on YouTube or on your browser or anything you need to turn down in the player not in the system control because the system control is only doing it after the distortion already happened. So really the system volume control is only there to turn things down that are nice and loud but could be a little quieter. I don't know it's kind of weird. It takes some time to get the feel for it and figure it out but I got to feel comfortable with it and I'm fine I'm using them I like them. Oh the chip is called Raspberry Pi 2040 by the way they even say that in the loopy headphones toolbox and there's a PCM 3060 Kodak chip by Texas Instruments used digital to help converter. Yeah and there's some extra configuration like over sampling. Crazy stuff. Wicked crazy stuff. I mean if you're a thinker if you're an audio person like I guess most people who view my channel are interested in audio in some way making music probably. Yeah they are they are fun. All right I think I've explained the problem. So yeah and because of their like natural EQ response they have this resonance in the bass and they have troughs in the higher upper mids and high frequencies or lower highs. Because of that the default EQ reduces bass and boosts our highs. And like remember all of this stuff happens in a fixed point you know 16-bit integer audio stream. We are taking the bass out but boosting highs and if we're gonna boost the bass a lot we can start pushing the highs the peaks of highs into distortion territory. And unfortunately it's gonna be nasty digital clipping distortion. Not gonna be soft warm soft clipping unfortunately because it's not happening in the analog domain. Ideally we would build a limiter pass into the firmware. You know this is open source you can do that. You can take this thing and figure out how to make it gain without clipping to get more volume. I don't know they squeezed quite a lot of out of this chip and they're really pushing it hard. And they have like 15 gain oh sorry 15 bands of EQ parametric EQ we can even do like custom filters like entering some coefficients or something like. It's dangerous. I don't touch this I'm told you can blast your ears off if you're not careful with that. So you might think okay so the headphones are a little bit quiet is that it? Well kind of yes. But it's a bit more nuanced. I found that it's a really difficult problem to solve. This is actually really freaking difficult. Turns out designing headphones is hard as heck. And this is my speculation but I think and maybe we don't see open source headphones more. I haven't seen any at least is because companies that did invest in research and development to design headphones that are like highly sensitive and have a flat like a desirable response and stuff. They don't want to share that information because it's difficult to obtain and very costly to obtain. But you know we have the first pair of open source headphones and what I hope is we're going to see crazy ideas from the community iterating on this design you know printing different parts modifying the software that runs on the DAC. Doing crazy things I don't know. These are definitely fun for tinkerers. If you're not a tinkerer you probably will find their limitations very frustrating if you happen to like hit them because you might not never hit it. You might never actually feel like oh I can't turn them up enough. Maybe you'll never going to happen. Maybe it's not going to happen to you. It does happen to me. Sometimes there's like a YouTube video where someone talks and it's just not mastered properly and it's very quiet and I can't turn it up enough. But I found ways. I made some presets. Maybe I'll share the presets on CodeBurg or something. These are JSON files you can load into the Poopy Headphones toolbox and have an EQ curve that someone else made. So yeah it's really hard to make this headphones sensitive. Poopy have found a solution. They built a DAC and a dedicated amplifier with a dedicated EQ to make the frequency response as good as possible and it's exceptional. But it also comes at a cost. They take a lot of power. They're not efficient. And they can't go as hot as maybe you'd want to at times. But the bass absolutely can. Is that problem a deal breaker? It's hard to tell because I didn't pay for them. I'm paying for them with my hard work doing this video. Or maybe I already did pay. I don't even know if Poopy thinks I owe them this video. I think I owe them this video. I promised them this video. So I'm making it after half a year. Maybe it's better. Maybe I learned a lot about these headphones. I don't know. Yeah. I think they're... It's an issue. It's a big one. It's something we can't jump over easily. But they're still really cool and really fun. And I don't think it really makes them not worth checking out or trying on using. After you learn how to wrestle with it, how to deal with that loudness, volume issue, you'll be fine. Okay. There's one more issue I want to talk about when we go into sound quality. And it's a thing unrelated to the thing I said previously. The issue I want to talk about is about the cable. So let's try to do this without tipping over any thing. So you get a cable with two ends. Each of these plugs into one of the headphones. You can actually find these are a little bit off-center. They are a little bit bent. But there is a little rubber thing that makes sure this braiding isn't like putting tension on this. That's good. That's good. The problem is this cable needed something like that on the other end as well. Let me show you. Man, I have such a mess in my desk. Oh, I did not prepare to do that. Okay. There we go. Right. So the other end of this cable, it's also twisted, right? But by default, this thing was not there. And this braiding came over here and it was doing things like that all the time. And it deformed these plugs. I realized this when I heard some crackling sometime and I lost sound in one of the headphones. And I was like, oh, what the heck? I played around, rotated this a bit and I found, oh, it's the connector. If I unplug this, you will see that they are indeed crooked. See? They aren't straight. So what I found is needed is just clamping this cable here or like tying it together so that the spirally thingy, double helix isn't putting tension on these connectors. After I did that, the thing stopped really bothering me. Also a funny little detail. In the headphones toolbox, there is an option at the top called Reverse Stereo and it's checked on by default. This is because they made a mistake when soldering something, I think, or when designing something, some connector. I don't know if they soldered channels left and right in reverse in here, something silly like that. So yeah, that was fixed in software. Which is really funny. By the way, your advice to never plug anything into this DAC other than the Plupi headphones. And I think it's because this feeds unusually high-volume voltage and probably, yeah. I think it will burn anything if you plug it in. If you try to run, if I plug these HyperX clouds too into this DAC, and then turn up the volume, I think it will burn these. Now I'm gonna need to test which one is left or right because I don't have the cables marked. They are all identical. It's not like one has blue, one has yellow things or a green. I'll need to just check the volume. I think it's reverse. Maybe not. I'll check it later. Right, so I'm coming closer and closer to a conclusion of this video. And that is... Yeah, so if you get these headphones, make sure to clamp the cable on the other end so it doesn't strain the connectors. Bend them, break them. Okay, right. Let's talk about sound quality. So note that I'm not an audiophile. I don't claim to have golden ears. I know my limitations. I know I can't hear crap about 16K. About 15K if it's really loud. So, you know, I'm 33. Maybe I'm 34. I don't know. I never remember. I'm always like, I'm off by a year. I'm definitely not 32. I'm 33 probably. So, yeah. I do have a very good musical hearing that was measured objectively. I think I have an okay technical hearing, but I have a friend who is like... He's completely musically deaf, but technically his technical hearing is incredible. And I think he's one of the few people who could maybe hear up to 19KHz, or maybe 20KHz even. He hears things that I am not able to perceive at all. So, I also don't own like a huge library of a collection of expensive headphones sets to, you know, as compared to. What I do have is ears of experience using Audio Technica 50xBT's until they broke. These were good while they lasted, but they fell off my head one too many times and broke a hinge. And I'm told, it's not repairable. There are no spare parts. So, I'm sad. I'm still not sure what to do with them, but... I mean, they're kind of usable. Actually, the hot glue made them usable, but I also started wearing glasses and it doesn't really work well. Actually, glasses are a really difficult thing. You can't really wear clothes like headphones because they also need to clamp. It's difficult. Challenges, man. Right. Another piece of kit I'm using, the HyperX Cloud 2 headphones. I think they're exceptionally good for their price. Really? They are not terribly expensive. Of course, they're like... It never depends on what would you think it's expensive about headphones, but if you're interested in music production, you probably have a little bit of a more budget than, you know, like $5 for headphones. Because they aren't $5. And the other piece of kit I'm using is Beringer's next K8 monitors. A pair of them. I've been using them for, man. Oh, a lot. Like, eight years. Maybe a decade now. I think they're really nice. I also worked a little bit on Rockets 5... 5-inch Rockets R5 or whatever they're called. And the guy... The guy who founded KRK, he also designed these monitors for Beringer. And I think they sound excellent. So that's my reference. I have lots of experience producing music. I've also experienced designing sound. I'm professionally doing some of that. Yeah. And I think this Plippy headphones sound really good. I don't have any issues with them other than the volume and the clipping, which can sometimes happen because of the volume. But the sound, I think, is exceptionally good. I think they... You know, I might be hallucinating. I'm also totally biased. But I think that when I started, like, listening to music on them, I started realizing things like small details that I haven't seen before. It's like someone gave me glasses and things that were kind of blurry and blended together. I put them on and suddenly I felt like I can actually tell what's there. And that was a nice feeling. It is a nice feeling. Also, they have a very nice bass, which goes deep. And it feels very, like, punchy, but soft and very well controlled. So when you plug them in, there is a little click and the bass is ringing. You can hear, like, a little bit of, you know, aftermath of that click. But that's because the click is not going for the EQ. It's an analog pulse. It's just probably released from the DAC or the amplifier when they power on. So that is the, like, the raw frequency response of the headphones ringing out. But that's not happening when I listen to music on them or anything else. The bass doesn't ring. Like, I don't hear, like, a cascading bass tone after things. It sounds well controlled. I also think the stereo field is somehow it feels wider. I don't know why. People tell me it's because of their own, because they are open-back. And I don't really use open-back headphones much. I mean, I haven't used open-back headphones before I started using these. Well, the last open-back headphones I actually used were... Oh, no, they're not here. The porta-prose. That was the last pair of open-back headphones I've actually used. I bought them specifically for wearing them under a biking helmet. And I, like, blasted drone-based to going to work at, like, 6 a.m. Oh, man, that was incredible. Incredible memories. I'm happy I'm not there anymore. Yeah. So... And also, like, these are the first planner-magnetic drivers I've ever listened to. All the headphones I have are standard coil drivers. Like... Coil as in... coil. I don't know. If you look up planner headphones, planner as in plane, you will find why. I think they sound very good. I don't really have any complaints. I like the sound. I like the bass. I like how crazy the bass can be if you play with the EQ. Really fun. Really fun stuff. I don't think there are any other headphones on the market that can give you an experience, like, as if you're, like, attending a live concert. Or, like, and standing next, you know, near the stage. Because when you just give 20 decibel gain to, like, 20 Hertz, let that roll off, you know? A bell curve. They start dancing on your head. You're almost feeling it in your chest. That's my sensation, at least. And it... Like, I've been listening to some, you know, EDM bangers this way. It's so much fun, you know? Really. That's incredible. I don't think there's a lot of headphones that could give this experience. And I think... It's... This thing alone might be worth the money if you're, you know, if you're kind of a person that likes this kind of interesting experiences and novelty. If that's not your thing, I think there's still solid headphones. Very interesting. They have this limitation of volume. It might or might not be a problem for you. I think a lot of people might not discover even that there is a limitation. But I've seen people complain about that, and I did complain myself, and we talked about this, why and how and what. Yeah, so it just turns out the amplifier in the DAC box is just maxed out. The chip just can't... Can't produce more power. So yeah, the only way to squeeze more volume would be to implement a limiter after the EQ in the DAC. But I have no idea how to program in, I don't know, what it's C? Assembly? I don't know. I think C. And I would not dare put on my head stuff that I programmed and experiment. People lost hearing because of Dragonfly Reverb bugs. I don't want to add any more of that to the world. Rep. Let's talk about cost. The preassembled kit costs 255 Canadian dollars. The preassembled kit is what I got. That is... translates roughly to $189 US and 173 Euro as of today. And the kit for self-assembly where you solder all the pieces you build the DAC board yourself from components and stuff that costs $135 Canadian dollars. So $255 Canadian dollars versus $135. Quite a substantial difference. It's 80% cheaper or something. I don't know. And that would translate to $150 US or 105 Euros. So around 100 Euros you can get the assembly kit if you are a DIY electronics person excluding shipping from Canada. So if you're abroad you need to factor in shipping cost and the base price is in Canadian coins things might change because are the headphones worth the money? Testimonials I read online said that they are actually a very good deal for the sound quality and the source for that is that up to I think the cheapest planner magnetic driver headphones right now are like $400 or something or at least they were six months ago when I was doing research or more but it's like it's like a very new thing that they are so cheap and the next thing is like a hundred $1000 US dollars and I've read people who were like they were like testing comparing these headphones that costed you now $20,000 or $30,000 and comparing them to loopies and they gave very favorable reviews which I think is quite insane and the shortcoming of the volume and that they need their own power they need their own brick I think it's a worthy suck if you want planner magnetic driver headphones this is the cheapest way you can get them I think if that's your thing I didn't know it was a thing until I learned about these I have no idea how does work differently I don't know I just like their sound they're really cool so I suppose they are pretty much worth it for the sound I can't judge it I'm not an audiophile not even close yeah and that is all I have for you today I think Poopy is a really cool company I've been talking to the guys mainly Phil who was like my contact for for this whole this whole thing I'm really thankful that they sent me the headphones and that I could do a video about them I did the short that was like six months ago now I'm doing the review I'm kind of sad that I can't really do this review like better technically because I just can't afford to spend a month editing this video but yeah I think I think this is a very interesting product to check out and also like they have all their mice and cables and keyboards so you might find something else that they make that you also like check them out at Poopy.co thanks for watching take care holy crap holy crap oh this thing is hot oh this light is hot lots of watts lots of watts oh I could record videos like this welcome in the unboxing now I try to do this with a color prompter which I made out of cardboard it didn't work out because I don't have a transparent enough plastic sheet