It's 3 am and I've been wide awake for nearly an hour. It started with a trip to the bathroom but when I crawled back into bed my mind refused to shut back down.
Thirty five years ago I'd be awake at this hour on a Sunday morning as well—but I'd either be sitting in a Denny's surrounded by friends after a night of clubbing or—if I'd gotten lucky—busy with other things.
Tonight, however, I am neither enjoying a post-clubbing repast with friends nor am I involved any of those other things. My thoughts have simply refused to sit down and shut up and have taken me on a journey back to the mid 1970s and hanging out in the audio room of LaBelle's.
While the more economical equipment was displayed on shelves in the main part of the store, the listening room was reserved for the high-end equipment; stuff my friends and I could never afford but still coveted with an unbridled passion. To this day I can remember how the knobs of certain equipment felt, as well as the wonderful new-electronics smell of the room. I remember how rapt we were the first time we walked in and saw the blue glow from Pioneer's new "fluoroscan" meters. No more antiquated needles, no sir! Those pulsing blue displays were the future!
But Pioneer's blue glow was not the source of tonight's obsessive thoughts. Rather I focused on a single pair of headphones: the Stax SR-X Mark 3.
These were electrostatic headphones; something relatively new for home audio at the time and very expensive. The sound, however, was sublime. It was like nothing else I'd ever heard before—or since, for that matter. But they were totally out of reach for this high school boy. At $275 ($1280 in today's dollars) they were to forever remain just a dream.
(Stax is one of the few audio equipment companies from back in the day that is still in business, and their headphones are still ridiculously expensive. Even in the aftermarket they command a steep price.)
And what did I listen to through those headphones that day? The Fantasy Film World of Bernard Hermann, a recording that amazingly I still do not have in my collection.
Several years later I did manage to acquire a set of Stax headphones, although they were of the more economical electret (vs. full electrostatic) variety. These phones, while sounding almost as good as the SR-X, were substantially less expensive at $79 (about $275 in today's dollars). The SR-44s still required a separate "energizer" that was plugged directly into the speaker outputs of your receiver like the SR-X, but this box required no additional electrical connection to the mains in order to work.
The SR-44s were not especially comfortable. I ended up with "headphone fatique" after only an hour or so of listening, but the sound was worth the discomfort. Unfortunately, the cord that led from the headphone amp—as well as the cord that connected to the main amplifier—was very short, requiring that you sit right by your stereo if you wanted to listen. They were also very delicate. After only a year the connection on one side went out when the wire broke at the strain relief as it came out of the earspeaker, requiring more than a little bit of disassembly, wire-cutting, and soldering on my part to get it working again. This became a yearly ritual until I finally tired of it after the tenth or so time. They then somehow ended up in the trunk of a roommate's car in SF (probably to be taken to GoodWill) where they remained until were stolen when the car was broken into..