I’d be careful here … too much potential misinterpretation of terms and how they’re used. You’ve got different areas that could all be reasonably interpreted as “build quality”.
Is the SR1 luxurious in its build and finish?
No.
You don’t have the beautifully finished full-grain leather, sumptuous, rich, lamb-skin pads, bead-blasted metals and aesthetic design of something like the Focal Utopia or Stellia. Nor do you have the hand-figured, polished and chosen woods, with rich stains, coupled to more bead-blasted metals, and soft supple leathers you get with a ZMF product.
Is it durable?
Hard to say without actual data, but while it feels somewhat insubstantial I think this is primarily due to the very flexible skeletal-spring-steel, headband, I think you’d be very hard pressed to get anything to fail or break on it, short of poking things into the drivers or otherwise deliberately trying to cause a failure.
The whole build is carbon fiber, metal and leather. Spring steel is incredibly resilient (no way it’ll deform or break in an impact unless it was hard enough to shatter everything else first … you’d literally have to throw it hard against a wall), the carbon fiber is far more substantial than it needs to be, the covers on the ribbons look thin but they don’t flex when you press on them very firmly.
It’s built and feels more like a high-tech tool than a luxury consumer product.
It’s built to do a job, at length, without issue, and be user-fixable in the event you manage to manhandle it to death or something wears out. Materials are totally up to par for this role in my opinion.
If the headband were more conventional and rigid it’ll give off a different, if still tool-like, impression in terms of the build. But it’s flexible and spring by design.
The biggest executional weakness is in how, and how much, they can be adjusted. That’ll be a big problem for some, and a non-issue for others.
…
The HiFiMAN stuff looks better finished, but is far less substantial and has a history of “interesting” materials choices and assembly, and poor initial QC. HiFiMAN remain the only brand where I’ve seen headbands/yokes simply snap when someone was putting them on, and that’s just one issue I’ve experienced directly.