Oh my goddess.
I watch entirely too many vintage audio videos on YouTube. They give me too many ideas.
A recent video reminded me of the very first—and probably best sounding if nearly forgotten—pair of high-end headphones I ever owned..
The backstory—something that is for some reason forever burned in my memory—revolves around auditioning a pair of electrostatic Stax Lambda Pro headphones in a LaBelle's Catalog Showroom in the late 70s. I even remember the record I listened to. Okay that's a lie. I don't remember exactly. It was either The Fantasy Film World of Bernard Herrmann or The Mysterious Film World of Bernard Herrmann. It was a Bernard Hermann LP in any case.
I fell in love.
Electrostatic anything was pretty rare back then (a set of Magnapans, the most sought after loudspeakers in the world at that time, could easily you back the price of a luxury sports car), so at $450 ($1620 in today's dollars), the price tag attached to those Stax headphones was also…prohibitive…on a high school student's income.
That doesn't mean I didn't lust after them.
But you know, sometimes the universe smiles upon you, and I soon learned (even though LaBelle's didn't carry them) that Stax also produced a much more affordable set of electret "earspeakers" as they were called, at about a quarter the cost. (Essentially one type needs a separate AC power supply to function, and the other is self-powered, even though both require a separate box hooked to the speaker outputs on your receiver/amplifier. Beyond that, the principle of how they function is very similar.*)
While my original pair of SR-44's were stolen out of the trunk of my car back in 1989 (don't ask what they were doing in there), over the years I've done a cursory search on Ebay now and then and was always disappointed to see them selling for an outrageous amount of money—or at least more than I was willing to spend. I'd all but forgotten about them until I saw them on a YouTube video a couple weeks ago and so I went searching again.
There were several available in varying condition. All were supposedly functional, but several looked as if they'd been through hell and back (much like a lot of the Technics 1200 turntables you see for sale). But then I ran across one that looked nearly new. The seller confirmed that everything was working, so I put in a bid, never expecting to actually win the auction.
Well, I did. They arrived yesterday.
Okay, keeping in mind that my high frequency sensitivity is shit compared to what it was when I first owned these cans back in 1979, they still sound amazingly good. Amazingly.
*Please correct me if I'm mistaken on this. I'm sorta working from memory here and we all know how unreliable that is.