CrunchGear

Smoke Up: An Interview With The Creator Of The Ultracool Pax Vaporizer

Posted: 17 Jun 2012 10:07 PM PDT

If you enjoy smoking fine botanical products, including, but not limited to, tobacco, you owe it to yourself to check out the Pax by Ploom, a compact vaporizer with a spacious oven and a few features that make the experience of lighting up quite a treat.

The guys at Ploom have been working on vaporizers for a while, introducing the Ploom ModelOne in 2010. This small e-cigarette used small pods to release fragrant smoke. The Pax, however, uses electricity versus butane and can burn almost anything.

I talked to James Monsees, CEO and Creative Director, about the new product and his vision for taking vaporizers – and their owners – to the next level.

TC: Tell me about yourself. Who are you?

James: Adam and I met in the graduate product design program at Stanford, the Joint Program in Design. The JPD has an amazing space in the middle of campus called the Design Loft where everyone effectively lives for a period of 2-3 years. So naturally, we spent a lot of time together and realized that we both had similar interests. Both of us have Physics undergraduate degrees and we both have a high level of interest in art as well. I had a bit of a background in industrial design and mechanical design, and Adam had been interested for a long time in electronics and high tech and had been doing IT infrastructure work in the Valley for a few years before we met. Interestingly enough, it was a completely unrelated conversation about smoking that steered us in a radically different direction than we would have assumed our careers were headed.

TC: How long did this take? What was the process?

James: Adam and I started Ploom as a Masters thesis, which was presented in the spring of 2005. Ploom was really just a concept at that point, but we had done some initial patent research, made initial early prototypes, and had received an incredible amount of interest from people that we interviewed and worked with, enough so that we felt like Ploom was really worth pursuing. So the next year, when I was a Fellow at the d.school on campus, Adam was living in a house with some friends on an old apple orchard at the edge of Palo Alto. We took over a room and continued prototyping, researching and further developing a cohesive business plan.

Tobacco isn't the easiest, most straightforward category for which to seek investment in Silicon Valley, so we met with probably at least 100 VCs and Angels in and around the technology space before we really understood how things worked. In the summer of 2006 some friends offered for us to occupy a desk in the corner of their office in San Francisco in exchange for two hours of brainstorming a week. The next year we raised our initial seed capital from two Angel groups and incorporated, and though we're on our fifth office space, we're still in
that same building in SF.

TC: Why did you guys develop a vaporizer? Why not an iPod case? Why not a mouse?

James: I would argue that there are no other markets this size where so little consumer-visible technology has changed in multiple decades. Simply put, the tobacco space is a huge opportunity where we thought we could make a meaningful impact. There is obviously a large opportunity for the business to exist, but more importantly there is an incredible swell of consumer demand that really needs to be met. Though tobacco product offerings weren't really changing, consumer tobacco product demands really have been, and our view was that traditional tobacco companies were not going to meet those needs on their own. Adam and I really enjoy tobacco but always felt conflicted about being smokers, or social smokers. We saw a personal need for a product of this kind to exist, and found that upon further research others voiced this need as well.

TC: What was the hardest thing you came up against in designing the device?

James: Our technological curiosity has no bounds. Taking technology and pushing it to new limits is exciting to us. The biggest obstacle is deciding where to best channel Ploom's abilities in the complex tobacco market that best positions Ploom as a new, trustworthy brand in the tobacco space. We are really proud of PAX.

There's a lot more yet to come.

TC: What was your design inspiration?

James: The consumer. Other products in the vaporizer space seem to be designed as gizmos where people feel a sense of achievement when they figure out how to use them. Functionality doesn't just mean that something turns on or heats up or produces vapor. Functionality means that components fit their human interface, that buttons are obvious in their functionality or just plain not there, that knobs and indicators are taken to the absolute level of simplicity and necessity, and all this is done while pushing the bounds of what is possible from an engineering perspective.

That is what we have achieved with PAX. At the end of the day, we feel any product in this space should be a luxury good. We wanted PAX to exude elegance. There should be a pride in carrying PAX around and a visceral satisfaction in using it.

TC: How hard is it to make hardware these days? What’s needed?

James: Hardware is really tough in the Valley these days. Software seems to be truly in vogue, though my personal perspective is that while most software startups eschew dollars and cents for theoretical return, hardware will always have an intrinsic value to consumers and is hence satisfying to me in a way that software seldom is. Anyone who wants to work in hardware needs to be ready for a rough ride. There are capital requirements, substantial business planning, and heavy market analysis needs that require a wide breadth of knowledge and a willingness to work insanely long hours, especially at the earliest stages.

TC: Have things changed in the hardware space recently? Are there new tools you’ve discovered?

James: We make a lot of SLA (stereolithography) prototypes because we're often dealing with high-temperature components. Years ago we discovered some cool new ceramic-based SLA resins that when properly cured and handled can help cut the development time for a serious prototype by a large margin. Getting things in people's hands is always high priority for us so we maintain a small on-site machine shop where we regularly hack things out in the brainstorming stage, often as simple as foam core or cardboard.

TC: Do you guys enjoy using the vaporizer, now and again, for recreational purposes?

James: We love the ritual and elegance that smoking was once all about. I like to think we've moved beyond burning things and into an era where sophisticated enjoyment of tobacco has really arrived. Then again, we're always looking forward to what's next.

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$200 Headphone Review Battle! Bowers & Wilkins P3 Vs Beats By Dr. Dre Solo

Posted: 17 Jun 2012 06:00 AM PDT

Two gadgets enter, one leaves. It's that simple. Welcome to the TC Gadget Review Battle where two competing products are pitted against each other. No wishy-washy conclusion based on an arbitrary numbering system, just a reliable buying recommendation.

Bowers & Wilkins is making a smart play for consumer electronics. The 50-year-old British audio company just released the $200 P3 headphones, joining the $550 over-the-ear P5 and the $179 C5 in-ear headphones. The new set promises much of what the P5 offers for more than half the price. It is, in a sense, a headphone for the MP3 crowd. This new set hits a crowded market dominated by several big brands. This includes Beats By Dr. Dre, which also has a very similar $200 set of headphones, the Beats by Dr. Dre Solo HD.

So which one is better? Which one is worth your money? That’s the goal of the TC Gadget Review Battle. Only one can get our recommendation. Can the new comer best the market leader?

Construction

Bowers & Wilkins jumped on the retro bandwagon with the P5s last year. The brand new P3s are more of the same. They employ a 30mm driver (the P5 uses a 40mm drive) in a retro-style surround constructed out of soft touch plastic and fabric. B&W lists the P3s with a sensitivity of 111dB/V at 1kHz. They are comfortable on the head but do not provide much of any noise cancellation. Despite their almost dainty looks, they seem rather durable in realty. The construction is solid, properly conveying B&W’s trademark tradition to high-end audio.

The Beats by Dre. Dre Solo should be rather familiar. The design is a staple within the headphone world now. It’s made of mostly shiny plastic and can withstand a fair amount of abuse with the notable exception of the ear surrounds, which have known to separate at the seams. The unibody design grips the ears very tight, cutting out a lot more ambient noise than the P3s. The plastic ear surrounds hold drivers of unlisted size and technical specs.

Both headphones ship with a travel case and feature folding designs. They both also have in-line audio controls but the Beats Solo HD feature a microphone that’s only compatible with iPods and iPhones.

Music

These headphones are arguably not geared toward audiophiles. Neither Beats or Bowers & Wilkins designed their respective headphones for serious listeners, but rather people looking for higher quality audio on the go. These are high-end headphones designed with portability as their main selling point.

That said, testing these headphones through streaming media like Rdio or Pandora is not especially fair. The low-bit rate music will not properly demonstrate the headphone’s range. I always turn to the same selection of music for testing headphones: CD’s of Outkast’s 1998 Aquemini album and Muse, The Resistance. Then, for good measure, I also throw Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon on the turntable.

I always turn to Outkast’s Aquemini album for a number of reasons. In the very beginning of track 5, Rosa Parks, has a very faint hidden melody that only the top headphones can reproduce. It’s not audible on either of these headphones. This track, and most of the album, also features very heavy LFE tracks. True to their name, the Beats Solo reproduces the bass better than the B&W P3 headphones. However, this is done at the sacrifice of the overall sound quality. The Beats are very bass heavy to the point that there’s almost a constant strong hum that drowns out the mid tones. While the P3 fails to pound, it provides a better overall sound with enough bass to satisfy most but while producing acceptable high and mid tones.

Muse’s Exogenesis is particularly great for headphone testing. It’s a three-part track with a huge range, which often separates good headphones from the best. Again, the Beats Solos produce a very pleasing tone when reproducing the piano’s lower octave but the mids are muffled to the point of suffocation. On track 11, Symphony Part 3 (Redemption), there is a strong overlying low tone during the piano into. The distinctive highs hit with force at the 1:35 mark but the headphones seemingly cannot handle the vocals that come in ten seconds later; the headphones mush everything together once Matthew Bellamy begins his vocals. Unfortunately the B&W P3s do not fare much better.

Like the Beats Solo I found the Bowers & Wilkins P3 headphones to not be able to reproduce the huge range of these three tracks. However, the larger range of the P3s afford a more pleasing tone. While unable to produce a truly clear tone during the most stressful parts, the highs and lows are very clear. There is not a subtle hum assisting the LFE tracks in the B&W like in the Beats Solo HD. That said, I wouldn’t deem the P3′s victory absolute but rather a minor win.

Pink Floyd’s The Great Gig In The Sky plays beautifully on the P3s. The melody silks along with fine attention to detail. The headphone’s clarity assists with the stereo imaging on Money. The vocals are clearly set in the middle of the sound stage with instruments flanking on either side. The Beats Solo fail to live up to the clarity of The Great Gig In The Sky or the imaging on Money.

Gaming

There’s a good chance that both of the headphones could be used for gaming due to their portable design. Owners could whip them out for a bit of gaming on their smartphone, 3DS or PS Vita and for me it’s Wipeout on the Vita. I’m currently addicted to this classic PlayStation racing title and with gaming, the headphones with the best imaging win — at least generally.

After the P3 wiped the floor with the Beats Solo in nearly every music test, I was sure the same would happen when tested with games. After all the P3 had a larger soundstage, which in theory, would provide a better effect for gaming. And while that turned out to be true — the P3 has a bit more detailed sound placement — the Beats Solos were a lot more enjoyable while gaming.

It’s strange. When the experiment is dissected, the Beats Solo fails on almost every individual test. The Beats Solo produces a more muffled tone, the imaging isn’t as good, and they’re not as comfortable on the head. Yet I ended up preferring the Beats Solo for use in gaming after a dozen A/B tests. The Beats’ superior lower end capabilities won me over. With deeper bass, the gaming experience is more immersive. You can turn up the volume and dive into the game. The P3s are completely acceptable for gaming, but the Beats Solo provide a better experience.

Conclusion

After living with both sets for several weeks I used the Bowers & Wilkins P3 more than the Beats Solo. The clarity was the deciding factor. The Beats Solo HD produces a strong tone, but that’s it’s only claim to fame. The Beats Solo HD’s imaging is not as good and the over tone is far inferior than that of the B&W P3. Since both cost the same at $200 it’s easy to give the nod to B&W’s headphones. They’re fantastic headphones for the money. Buy the Bowers & Wilkins P3.

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Construction

Music

Gaming

Conclusion

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