Many Tom’s Hardware Many readers are familiar with the basics of building PCs, customizing keyboards or printing parts. Canada’s Ploopy would like to catch a ride on this adventurous tech DIY trend, and for audiophiles to enjoy headphones based on its open-source designs promising “studio monitor frequency response, out of the box.”
You can now purchase the amusingly named cans in many forms at the Ploopy shop. A complete kit of components costs CAD $150. Or you can buy a set of headphones that are fully assembled for CAD $300. A headphone refresh kit includes new padding pieces that will be helpful for maintenance. (All products sold by Headphones are subject to pre-order.
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Importantly, as befits an open source community driven project like this, you don’t need to buy anything. Ploopy provides links to source code, documentation, and all instructions – so you can build upon the Ploopy design and firmly embrace the DIY and maker philosophy.
This will require patience. It will take patience to do it correctly the first time.
So what are you going to get if these headphones are made or bought? Ploopy is confident in its claims of being an audiophile. This may be due to the support from the Reddit audiophile community that helped propel the project forward from conception to realization. The open-back, planar magnetic-design headphones can deliver studio-quality audio. This claim is based on the 3D-printed metamaterials as well as digital signal processing provided through the PCM3060 DAC. The RP2040 controller and DAC work together to provide 24-bit audio at 192kHz and 24-bit sampling with up to six digital filter options.
Is Ploopy’s first headphones product the audio equivalent of the IBM PC standard? Probably not, but it isn’t a bad path to wander down with a 3D printer. Moreover, if you like the Ploopy’s implementation of this open source headphones project, it may be worth a look at its multiple trackball and mouse projects.