I HATE earspeakers!
they are legit the worst creation in the world of audio (besides diamond coated diamond dust snakeoil speaker cables or shit like that) and I will back this up by defininte proof:
in 1960, Stax dubbed it's first electrostatic headphone "the world first earspeaker" this is where the term came from, although the headphone looked essentially the same as current circumaural (or as referred to overheadphones, over the er, etc) headphones and it wouldn't be considered earspeaker by modern definitions. shame I guess? because it looks promising and beautiful for a headphone from 1960, not like the abominations that came after the earspeaker craze. it just looked well designed and nothing out of the ordinary.
pic.1: stax sr-1, world's first electrostatic headphone
the premise of this headphone is using electrostatic speaker technology that debuted earlier in the state of art british made speaker (quad esl 57) in a headphone, since the technology looked so revolutionary and made speakers only a couple of centimeters thin.
so it was more or less an idea to design a headphone like a speaker, others have picked up this pattern.
the problem was electrostatic speakers required special needs, like a transformer coupling, dc bias voltage for the diaphragm and other shit. the normal estat speaker requires like 300 fucking watts and those 300 watts come with a bias voltage of like 1 kilovolts. now these speakers come with their own amps (systems) attached to the back of the unit, even if you take one you will need to lower down the bias voltage not to blow up your estat, and thus stax gave you the invention of energizers. yet a new class of amplifiers that we didn't need.
pic.2: Jecklin floats worn by Jürg Jecklin
I'm not going to to critique this man and his designs, he passed away and to be honest I respect his ambition and motives, he in my opinion wanted success and wanted to make a headphone that stands out by performance, not looks. but this easily became the world's ugliest fucking headphone. it aced in ugliness. literally incel headphone and this picture became the biggest meme in the history of audio.
afaik, this got released in 1975 and the premise of this was making an electrostatic circumaural with a "chamber-like" design of soundwave dead material that doesn't reflect to reduce reflections and resonance from the wearer's head. I believe it could be that the man just wanted to make a bigger electrostats than the ones stax made for bigger headroom and soundstage and realized that making a headband strap was actually difficult to carry those drivers with the wiring and everything, but if it was really the first case then he was actually thinking ahead of his time because many headphones back then had little regard for resonance.
little did the designer realized that it would've been much better if he didn't try to replicate a speaker technology and go with dynamic drivers because ironically they would provide better soundstage, which is what he needed. it would've also cut down on the cost of making it.
pic.3: Pioneer se 700, world's first piezoelectric headphones
yeah you could say this headphone is normal looking, until you realize it's premise was also mimicking another speaker technology, yet another jap weeb like the ones who made stax picking up something and making another thing based on it, and spawning a horrific invention that sadly others will mimick as well.
in this case it was replicating the technology in the Electro-Voice SP12B piezo units made in 1958, which were not very popular choice for speaker drivers, only like five manufacturers chose piezoelectric materials for speakers. I assume it's the first one but it could be another product.
you would think this headphone is normal, until you realize it has an impedance of
5331.77 ohm. the designer probably thought
"I like my headphones when they have an electrical properties of a fucking piece of glass"
(btw, piezo elememts are literally ceramic like cyrstals or quartz crystals, this kind of reaction, whether be it impedance in ac circuits or resistance in dc to current flow should be expected and not be used to make a wide range of frequencies like 16 fucking octaves. it should be used for a range of four order harmonics, at best)
after this headphone it started to be a competition of who makes or replicates the weirder shit. and it went downhill from this.
in 1979, stax decided it was a good idea to make this
pic. 4: stax sr-lambda
I don't need to comment on how ugly it is, it is so ugly, probably as ugly as the floats.
but none of these, not even the lambdas, take the cake of being the most overrated, most annoying, most cocksucking, soycucking, reddit circlejerking piece of audio product ever made besides:
pic. 5: AKG K1000. are you seething yet?
Ahhhhh this piece of fugly overrated dogshit. you'd be surprised how many soyboys rave and drool over this despite the fact that it has an unbearable thd and a bass extension of a super tweeter. you like 0 subbass and lower bass? the akg k1000 is for you, you like muddy upper and mid bass? the k1000 is for you. you like gutter sonic performance and resonance everywhere on the frequency curve? you like having the hardest headphone to drive with a bullshit sensitivity of 74db/mw because fuck you? (literally needs something like a gsx or a speaker amp outputting 8 watts per channel) you like to look like a truecel and decrease your smv till reaching negative values? no worries. this headphone has it all in one shitty package for you.
pic. 6: AKG K1000 raw frequency response
If I had to tell a child to scribble some shit on a paper, it would be the frequency response of Taket h2+ (another dogshit earspeaker) and the frequency response of akg past 1khz.
imagine how bad the thd measurements. finished? it's worse than you imagined.
pic .7: AKG K1000 THD
here is the thd measurement of a hedphone that worths 4 times less by the same company and measured by the same equipment and the same guy:
pic. 8: AKG Q701 THD
this should give you a perspective about what kind of products are these. you are essentially strapping a low power speaker (think of a table speaker or something smaller than a bookshelf) to your ears. this headphone is still sought after and people believe it still outperforms modern headphones, not only in soundstage but sonically too. JFL at audiophiles.
after this headphone, many weird inventions have been spawned
brace yourself for this:
pic. 9: the infamous sennheiser surrounder
you have to give sennheiser credit for being no.1 in everything. including making the ugliest audio equipment of all time, beating the jecklin floats is no easy feat.
imagine wearing this in public and approaching foids.
pic. 10: taket h2+ piezeoelectric headphone
pic. 11: frequency response of the taket h2+
I have never seen anything more horrific than this fr graph. it looks like utter fucking shit. the only kind of people who enjoyed listening to this "earspeaker" are probably currently deaf, or dead.
Modern earspeakers: have modern technology changed earspeakers for the better?
pic. 12, from left to right: AKG K1000, RAAL REQUISITE SR1A, Mysphere 3
luckily earspeakers faded away, but we still got two contenders that are selling for a price point of $4000 dollars currently, intending to carry the earspeaker game in modern times:
mysphere 3 (3.1, 3.2 are only revisions of the same thing)which is the spiritual successor of the k1000 since it is made by the same guy that everyone jerks for heinz reiner.
the designer claimed this headphone will be easy to drive unlike the k1000, yet it has a sensitivity of 96db/mw. well I guess that's the best, most efficient figure in the world of earspeakers.
raal requisite sr1a, a ribbon "earspeaker" made by a company which makes and sells ribbon speakers.
now looking fugly like this, you guessed it, it requires a special amp to drive them, because of their extremely low impedance.
this one takes the cake from the k1000 for being the most piece of power wasting hot garbage ever, taking in a minimum of 100 watts to operate. sweet.
let's take a look at their sound clarity:
pic. 13: raal sr1a thd measurements
pic. 14: mysphere 3.1 thd measurements
as you can see, the answer is clearly no. infact they both look worse than a k1000 in terms of thd.
the problem is those people don't only rave about these products but they critique anything else that is high end and deem it "boring"
View: https://youtu.be/-ekDifMmnXg?feature=shared
watch this indian guy reviewing the k1000
he stated that the earspeakers are the state of art and modern products from focal or stax that aren't earspeakers sound boring
pic. 15: thd measurements of the "very boring" (according to earspeaker fans) sr-009s
pic. 16: thd measurements of the boring focal celestee, $3000 cheaper than those two modern earspeakers notice how it is better than raal sr1a and how the measurements of raal sr1a earspeaker, stax sr009 and focal celestee are done by the same guy.
ironically, this indian audiophile guy (aumkar chandan) started his own project (khaldas research) and made an electrostatic headphone that is completely the polar opposite of these "earspeakers" and more closely related to stax, focusing on clarity and resolution.
pic. 17: the "not earspeakers" khaldas research rr1 conquest designed by an earspeaker lover.
if he liked k1000 so much and thought it was the best sounding thing of all time, that new headphone he made should've been a large electrodynamic driver like the k1000 with the signature large soundstage.
well well, objectively speaking it doesn't matter how much time passes and how much more technology you incorporate , because when you make a headphone with very large inefficient drivers with a huge coefficient of openness for something much smaller than a speaker like a headphone, you are ought to get unwanted results like shit thd figures, attenuation, huge crosstalk (which takes away the intimate feeling of headphone imaging experience) etc etc.
and you also waste your money.
what is the premise of all this? the premise is the soundstage and headroom. all these large stupid looking headphones aim to achieve better speaker-like soundstage than controversial headphones.
does that soundstage gain worth sacrificing all of the tonal balance, accuracy, detail, clarity and the imaging and the intimate feeling of a headphone? because an electrostatic can still have better details than those three?
the logical answer is no. I wish that all these designers focused on making traditional dynamic drivers or orthodynamics sound better than making these abominations, these are just Frankensteins, they aren't speakers by any means.
now we come to the most important question, the question that determines the meaning of existence for these products:
do those achieve their purpose of giving you a speaker like experience and speaker soundstage?
the answer is have you ever listened to a good speaker? fuck no. speakers have atleast 70% more soundstage than these. it's like comparing your bookshelf speaker to a chant performed in an orthodox church. there is absolutely no comparison. these can only give you 50%-80% more soundstage than the average headphone
probably 30% more than something elite at their price level, and well made like the Sennheiser HD800 or baby orpheus/shangri-la jrs/ DCA expanse while having 50% of their clarity and resolution. that 30% more soundstage and 50% less clarity is at best btw.
there's nothing more need to be said or addressed, finally I need to thank the reader, this is a long post, if you read everything I hope you had a good read. thank you for reading.
they are legit the worst creation in the world of audio (besides diamond coated diamond dust snakeoil speaker cables or shit like that) and I will back this up by defininte proof:
in 1960, Stax dubbed it's first electrostatic headphone "the world first earspeaker" this is where the term came from, although the headphone looked essentially the same as current circumaural (or as referred to overheadphones, over the er, etc) headphones and it wouldn't be considered earspeaker by modern definitions. shame I guess? because it looks promising and beautiful for a headphone from 1960, not like the abominations that came after the earspeaker craze. it just looked well designed and nothing out of the ordinary.
pic.1: stax sr-1, world's first electrostatic headphone
the premise of this headphone is using electrostatic speaker technology that debuted earlier in the state of art british made speaker (quad esl 57) in a headphone, since the technology looked so revolutionary and made speakers only a couple of centimeters thin.
so it was more or less an idea to design a headphone like a speaker, others have picked up this pattern.
the problem was electrostatic speakers required special needs, like a transformer coupling, dc bias voltage for the diaphragm and other shit. the normal estat speaker requires like 300 fucking watts and those 300 watts come with a bias voltage of like 1 kilovolts. now these speakers come with their own amps (systems) attached to the back of the unit, even if you take one you will need to lower down the bias voltage not to blow up your estat, and thus stax gave you the invention of energizers. yet a new class of amplifiers that we didn't need.
pic.2: Jecklin floats worn by Jürg Jecklin
I'm not going to to critique this man and his designs, he passed away and to be honest I respect his ambition and motives, he in my opinion wanted success and wanted to make a headphone that stands out by performance, not looks. but this easily became the world's ugliest fucking headphone. it aced in ugliness. literally incel headphone and this picture became the biggest meme in the history of audio.
afaik, this got released in 1975 and the premise of this was making an electrostatic circumaural with a "chamber-like" design of soundwave dead material that doesn't reflect to reduce reflections and resonance from the wearer's head. I believe it could be that the man just wanted to make a bigger electrostats than the ones stax made for bigger headroom and soundstage and realized that making a headband strap was actually difficult to carry those drivers with the wiring and everything, but if it was really the first case then he was actually thinking ahead of his time because many headphones back then had little regard for resonance.
little did the designer realized that it would've been much better if he didn't try to replicate a speaker technology and go with dynamic drivers because ironically they would provide better soundstage, which is what he needed. it would've also cut down on the cost of making it.
pic.3: Pioneer se 700, world's first piezoelectric headphones
yeah you could say this headphone is normal looking, until you realize it's premise was also mimicking another speaker technology, yet another jap weeb like the ones who made stax picking up something and making another thing based on it, and spawning a horrific invention that sadly others will mimick as well.
in this case it was replicating the technology in the Electro-Voice SP12B piezo units made in 1958, which were not very popular choice for speaker drivers, only like five manufacturers chose piezoelectric materials for speakers. I assume it's the first one but it could be another product.
you would think this headphone is normal, until you realize it has an impedance of
5331.77 ohm. the designer probably thought
"I like my headphones when they have an electrical properties of a fucking piece of glass"
(btw, piezo elememts are literally ceramic like cyrstals or quartz crystals, this kind of reaction, whether be it impedance in ac circuits or resistance in dc to current flow should be expected and not be used to make a wide range of frequencies like 16 fucking octaves. it should be used for a range of four order harmonics, at best)
after this headphone it started to be a competition of who makes or replicates the weirder shit. and it went downhill from this.
in 1979, stax decided it was a good idea to make this
pic. 4: stax sr-lambda
I don't need to comment on how ugly it is, it is so ugly, probably as ugly as the floats.
but none of these, not even the lambdas, take the cake of being the most overrated, most annoying, most cocksucking, soycucking, reddit circlejerking piece of audio product ever made besides:
pic. 5: AKG K1000. are you seething yet?
Ahhhhh this piece of fugly overrated dogshit. you'd be surprised how many soyboys rave and drool over this despite the fact that it has an unbearable thd and a bass extension of a super tweeter. you like 0 subbass and lower bass? the akg k1000 is for you, you like muddy upper and mid bass? the k1000 is for you. you like gutter sonic performance and resonance everywhere on the frequency curve? you like having the hardest headphone to drive with a bullshit sensitivity of 74db/mw because fuck you? (literally needs something like a gsx or a speaker amp outputting 8 watts per channel) you like to look like a truecel and decrease your smv till reaching negative values? no worries. this headphone has it all in one shitty package for you.
pic. 6: AKG K1000 raw frequency response
If I had to tell a child to scribble some shit on a paper, it would be the frequency response of Taket h2+ (another dogshit earspeaker) and the frequency response of akg past 1khz.
imagine how bad the thd measurements. finished? it's worse than you imagined.
pic .7: AKG K1000 THD
here is the thd measurement of a hedphone that worths 4 times less by the same company and measured by the same equipment and the same guy:
pic. 8: AKG Q701 THD
this should give you a perspective about what kind of products are these. you are essentially strapping a low power speaker (think of a table speaker or something smaller than a bookshelf) to your ears. this headphone is still sought after and people believe it still outperforms modern headphones, not only in soundstage but sonically too. JFL at audiophiles.
after this headphone, many weird inventions have been spawned
brace yourself for this:
pic. 9: the infamous sennheiser surrounder
you have to give sennheiser credit for being no.1 in everything. including making the ugliest audio equipment of all time, beating the jecklin floats is no easy feat.
imagine wearing this in public and approaching foids.
pic. 10: taket h2+ piezeoelectric headphone
pic. 11: frequency response of the taket h2+
I have never seen anything more horrific than this fr graph. it looks like utter fucking shit. the only kind of people who enjoyed listening to this "earspeaker" are probably currently deaf, or dead.
Modern earspeakers: have modern technology changed earspeakers for the better?
pic. 12, from left to right: AKG K1000, RAAL REQUISITE SR1A, Mysphere 3
luckily earspeakers faded away, but we still got two contenders that are selling for a price point of $4000 dollars currently, intending to carry the earspeaker game in modern times:
mysphere 3 (3.1, 3.2 are only revisions of the same thing)which is the spiritual successor of the k1000 since it is made by the same guy that everyone jerks for heinz reiner.
the designer claimed this headphone will be easy to drive unlike the k1000, yet it has a sensitivity of 96db/mw. well I guess that's the best, most efficient figure in the world of earspeakers.
raal requisite sr1a, a ribbon "earspeaker" made by a company which makes and sells ribbon speakers.
now looking fugly like this, you guessed it, it requires a special amp to drive them, because of their extremely low impedance.
this one takes the cake from the k1000 for being the most piece of power wasting hot garbage ever, taking in a minimum of 100 watts to operate. sweet.
let's take a look at their sound clarity:
pic. 13: raal sr1a thd measurements
pic. 14: mysphere 3.1 thd measurements
as you can see, the answer is clearly no. infact they both look worse than a k1000 in terms of thd.
the problem is those people don't only rave about these products but they critique anything else that is high end and deem it "boring"
View: https://youtu.be/-ekDifMmnXg?feature=shared
watch this indian guy reviewing the k1000
he stated that the earspeakers are the state of art and modern products from focal or stax that aren't earspeakers sound boring
pic. 15: thd measurements of the "very boring" (according to earspeaker fans) sr-009s
pic. 16: thd measurements of the boring focal celestee, $3000 cheaper than those two modern earspeakers notice how it is better than raal sr1a and how the measurements of raal sr1a earspeaker, stax sr009 and focal celestee are done by the same guy.
ironically, this indian audiophile guy (aumkar chandan) started his own project (khaldas research) and made an electrostatic headphone that is completely the polar opposite of these "earspeakers" and more closely related to stax, focusing on clarity and resolution.
pic. 17: the "not earspeakers" khaldas research rr1 conquest designed by an earspeaker lover.
if he liked k1000 so much and thought it was the best sounding thing of all time, that new headphone he made should've been a large electrodynamic driver like the k1000 with the signature large soundstage.
well well, objectively speaking it doesn't matter how much time passes and how much more technology you incorporate , because when you make a headphone with very large inefficient drivers with a huge coefficient of openness for something much smaller than a speaker like a headphone, you are ought to get unwanted results like shit thd figures, attenuation, huge crosstalk (which takes away the intimate feeling of headphone imaging experience) etc etc.
and you also waste your money.
what is the premise of all this? the premise is the soundstage and headroom. all these large stupid looking headphones aim to achieve better speaker-like soundstage than controversial headphones.
does that soundstage gain worth sacrificing all of the tonal balance, accuracy, detail, clarity and the imaging and the intimate feeling of a headphone? because an electrostatic can still have better details than those three?
the logical answer is no. I wish that all these designers focused on making traditional dynamic drivers or orthodynamics sound better than making these abominations, these are just Frankensteins, they aren't speakers by any means.
now we come to the most important question, the question that determines the meaning of existence for these products:
do those achieve their purpose of giving you a speaker like experience and speaker soundstage?
the answer is have you ever listened to a good speaker? fuck no. speakers have atleast 70% more soundstage than these. it's like comparing your bookshelf speaker to a chant performed in an orthodox church. there is absolutely no comparison. these can only give you 50%-80% more soundstage than the average headphone
probably 30% more than something elite at their price level, and well made like the Sennheiser HD800 or baby orpheus/shangri-la jrs/ DCA expanse while having 50% of their clarity and resolution. that 30% more soundstage and 50% less clarity is at best btw.
there's nothing more need to be said or addressed, finally I need to thank the reader, this is a long post, if you read everything I hope you had a good read. thank you for reading.
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