Project M— Dissecting a Design: An Interview By ECT HK

Watch as DITA's founder Danny and our friends from ECT HK as they guide you through the stories behind the Project M's design!

Hello Hong Kong, thank you very much for having me. I am very very happy to be here. My friends in Hong Kong from ECT, all the way to some of the customers, you've all been really really great to us and I really appreciate it.

I'm very happy that finally we are able to put out a product that more of you will find interesting and I hope that this is a renewal of a relationship that we will have for many more years.

Q: What was the idea behind the Project M?

What we wanted to do with Project M was to interpret reinterpret a familiar design in a different way and for many audiophiiles or many musicians they know of the UIEM and the UIEM has has a traditional look for many years that encompasses many price points. $50 all the way to $5,000 even $10,000 USD.

It all kind of looks the same they all had a certain look for their custom
models and when you went to the shops to listen to it uh they had a universal custom that you could use to listen and see if you liked it before you place an order for a custom that became the look for many UIEMs.

And there is a reason for that look, it's comfortable, it's practical, I always felt like it wasn't a direction visually or aesthetically that we really, really liked. I felt there wasn't much space for us to work on.

So when we finally got the idea for how we felt like this look could be changed to make it a little bit more different, a little bit more attractive. Feel like that (the same) when you put it in your ear but still be very different when you first look at it so that was the idea behind Project M.

Q: What are some special features of the Project M?

Once we get a feeling on how we want to do that and we know that we have the technical capability to do that because we discovered a new way of measuring something or we discovered new material then we go ahead and we actually start
to design the product and the tuning.

The technical development for Project M is also a little bit different, it's a UIEM type look that still allows our original technical ideas to be presented because we put a metal chamber for controlling the Acoustics of our Dynamic driver uh into this
resting shell.

I'm a mechanical engineer, my strength in materials has always been Metals. we still needed to have some kind of a metallic chamber or some kind of a chamber to control the dynamic driver a little bit better.

When we put these things together we ended up with the Project M.

Q: What's the meaning behind the Project M?

One of my very very good buddies helped me with it to work on the
technical design and the acoustic design for Project M. His name is Michael so when we were working on it I decided that it would be a cool project to name after him. He was very young when he became a DITA fanboy at about 14 years old.

At the time we just started the company, it was in Shanghai, we were at an event at the audio show so he DIY-ed himself a headphone at 14 years old. He was running around the space visiting people.

Dr AJ Van Den Hul who made the cable for us at that time was at the show in Shanghai so this boy came up to Dr Van Den Hul and he said "oh look I made
this thing" and Dr Van Den Hul thought that this boy was really amazing and really talented and he loves the product so he introduced him to us and
from that day onwards this little boy started hanging out with us and learning how to build earphones alongside us and of course he did a lot of research himself

When it was time for him to go to university he asked me if he should go to the US or UK. I asked him what he wanted to study, he said he wanted to study something
related to audio. I asked him if he was sure and he responded that he really wanted to to that so I gave some advice.

I wrote him some recommendation letters and he went to the UK to study this and then he got accepted into their PHD program for the thesis that he wanted to write so he continued to do that.

When he came back from the UK we decided to do this you know and so he helped a lot with the technical development of this product-- that means he's been hanging around our company for the last 8 to 9 years already right so he
really knows the product, he knows my style and what we are going for.

Combining that with a little bit more science from the latest research he was doing uh we could develop a product we thought was a bit more interesting. That's why we called it the Project M.