I got them in Dec, 2020 for 359$.

Soon after getting them I realized that they frequently are "falling asleep" if I don't play anything for a while; it takes about 3s to wake up and it's confusing when handling zoom, headphones, etc. And then I found that like many things, this annoyance is caused by a EU government directive. Also, I'm not located in the EU.

So I spent a rather long time using AI to write python scripts to quietly and inaudibly play sounds to trick it into staying awake all the time, which I could never get to really work.

But today, trying again, this time I asked from a farther-back perspective, allowing Claude to let me know that there is a procedure which actually fully solves this well:

So, they actually support this!

After asking the AI "WHERE is the KNOB" i realized to my shame that I'd missed the gigantic and useful fact that... this object I've used for years and moved with me through maybe 4 different places to live... has a large, visible and very useful volume knob on it. Doh. Many, many such cases. Look at your stuff, folks; your houses, your walls, look at your backpack (which you've hiked perhaps 1000 miles in) closely and see if you've really found everything. My list: I missed one huge pouch set into the way-back, for YEARS. I missed multiple sets of chest straps. I missed the overall bag thickness management parts for years. On and on... open your eyes a little bit more today!

And it was done very quickly from there. This is great.

And now I can use the knob, too!

Today's price: 360$ on Vanatoo's website. Wow, so, zero inflation for 5.5 years. Not what I expected!

This is the back - I've always thought this was VERY over-engineered - really crazy number of things going on here. But, it does work, so maybe I'm wrong. And it was made by TUVRheinland!