I have a reason or two but it mostly comes down to "big fish eat medium fish = not much really".I might be biased. First of all Sonova, a company that isn't intrested in hi-fi equipment, isn't likely to fund any department in sennheiser that will keep developing audio equipment. I am not so old that I saw many products drop in quality but even now, new sennheiser products aren't up to par with the older ones(mostly in longevity). When I buy something I usually want it to last a while. I still have my Stanley classics from 2005 and they are pretty much like new.

Everyone that I know who had a chance to buy the 600s still use their granite counter versions pretty much daily. The new gen 600 was already a drop in material quality and for the next version I don't have much hope for it to be produced let alone without half a kilo of plastic.

I don't necessarily think they will cut out the legs of senny, but public exchange companies are mostly just trying to boost up the share prices, and keeping sennheiser as a company that develops high quality headphones isn't really to their benefit.

Secondly the company vision seems to be "make everyone use wireless headphones duh" which doesn't sound good to me. Either way Phonak is carrying sonova on their back and Unitron is their main tech group. This just doesn't give me much hope for the future of sennheiser as it seems to just be a quick grab off the market that if it doesn't profit them, will just stay as a brand name while their researchers and engineers are distributed to other brands