From Prototype to Product: The Invisible Wall Between Design and Manufacturing

In headphone development, prototyping offers almost unlimited freedom.

Custom parts, manual fine-tuning, and ad-hoc adjustments can easily lead to a prototype that “sounds great.”

But the challenge begins when we try to move from that singular success to a product that can be manufactured reliably and repeatedly.

Between design and production lies a structural wall—one built from tolerances, durability, assembly complexity, and repeatability.

At KuraDa, We haven’t yet reached the scale of producing thousands or tens of thousands of units.

But even at our current size, we treat manufacturability as a core part of the design process.

A prototype can tolerate patchwork structures, rough tolerances, and fragile one-off parts.

A finished product cannot.

To reach the user’s hands, a headphone must:

• withstand daily wear and transport

• be assembled without relying on artisan intuition

• maintain consistent performance across dozens or hundreds of units

Making a “great-sounding prototype” is not enough.

We aim to create structures that can deliver the same sonic experience—again and again—with precision and repeatability.

This means turning every subjective success into objective design:

• Translating hand-fit adjustments into millimeter-accurate CAD data

• Choosing materials that ensure consistent resonance and rigidity

• Engineering tolerances so that the final assembly never needs “feel” to sound right

Mass production is not just about cost efficiency.

It’s a test of whether your sound design can survive the real world—not just once, but 100 times.

At KuraDa, we don’t design for “one perfect unit.”

We design for consistency—so that the sound that moved us once, can move others again and again.