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10-28-2010, 06:11 PM
With an increasingly low barrier of entry, the low-end market has exploded over the past few years. It caters to you—and everyone else who either needs to replace prepackaged MP3 player garbage, or craves something headphones (http://www.goodej2010.com/)less ugly to stick into the sides of their heads."The sub-$50 earbud market has become a completely commoditized space," says Seth Burgett, president and CEO of Yurbuds. One where everything from design to tooling is outsourced to handful of manufactures in China and the Far East.Here's how things generally work in the world of cheap earphones: Every fall, two enormous tradeshows take place inBose headphones (http://www.goodej2010.com/) Hong Kong: The Global Sources Fair and the Hong Kong Electronics Fair. Like CES and the Adult Entertainment Expo, they tend to overlap by a few days. And like CES and the AEE, there's a lot of cross-pollination between attendees.While neither event is limited to just headphones, the first focuses on parts. Here, you'll find the rubber grips guy, the knobs guy, the capacitive amplifier guy—the whole family. The second fair is all about finished goods; you can wander through row upon row of "finished" reference designs. For a lower-tier company,cheap headphones (http://www.goodej2010.com/) these events are heaven, and usually the basis of next year's line-up."You basically get spec sheets from these manufacturers and then a la carte what you'd like to see," says Burgett.