Fun hobby, and there are many curiosities from the various periods over the last 35 years when suddenly a bunch of designers would get crazy ideas about headphones and there'd be a big spurt of Headphonia. Some of these sold so poorly that they'll be hard to find but worth the effort.
I'll rattle off a random list, strictly off the top of my head, based on whether they were interesting technically in some way, or perhaps based on how different they were from the standard of the '70s, the Koss Pro 4AA. You should get a pair of those just to have something to compare all the others to.
In the category of Nice Try / What Were They Thinking, there were:
ESS AMT Mark 1. That's right, a tiny Heil tweeter driven full range, heavy magnets and all, in a headphone. No bass, but fantastic treble detail. One of the grandfathers of the present-day hyperexpensive piezo-based modified-Heil-driver
TakeT HR-2 and father to the
Ergo AMT much beloved of HF member Duggeh (see his review).
Stanton/Pickering Isophase electrostatic. Very lightweight, not to say flimsy, and wild '50s/'60s styling. Stuck out about 6 inches from your ears in either direction. Sounded terrible (no bass, wouldn't play above normal speaking levels before tripping their breakers), but a nice try at a lightweight electrostat-- many of the time were so heavy they were impossible to wear. In fact, why not hunt down a pair of the heaviest headphones ever, the Koss ESP-6 electrostat-- has its step-up transformers built into each earcup! Smashing! Literally.
Superex ST-Pro B VI dynamic. Not much unusual except the 2-way design.. with a port! Very common in the mid '70s. Made in Yonkers, NY, near NYC.
Sharpe dynamic headphones, any model. Lousy sound, but almost anechoic isolation from surroundings with fluid-filled earpads. Not Sharp of Japan but Sharpe by Scintrex of NYC. You could use these to protect your ears while blowing your sidewalk clean, that's how much they isolated. Could you find any that still have fluid in their earpads? Doubtful. But you can inject mineral oil into old intact pads.
Pioneer SE-700, SE-500, SE-300. These used
PVDF piezoelectric film and transformed electricity directly into sound. Not much bass and not very flat, but the SE-700 is one of the most beautiful headphones ever made and they're all technically fascinating because of the utter simplicity of the operating principle. Many SE-700s sadly have multiple breaks in their cables. Owned by a surprising number of Head-Fiers. The
other grandfathers of the TakeT HR-2.
Wharfedale Isodynamic. More than just a nice try, this was the first isodynamic/orthodynamic on the world market, and the cheapest. And one of the best. Used flexible plastic magnets, basically upgraded refrigerator magnets (!) to power a unique swinging diaphragm. Amazing down-and-dirty essence-level engineering on a par with the original Austin Mini, IMHO. Only the British.
Very inefficient and not much power handling, but with some restoration one of the best-sounding isodynamic-type headphones. Still amazing when you consider they first sold for only 20 pounds in 1972. Time has not been kind to the very-inexpensive materials used in their construction, but they're worth pursuing.
Koss Pro 4AA dynamic. When you consider that this was the mainest of the mainstream 'phones, the 4AA turns bizarre. They weighed a ton, sounded very dark and murky with a big dollop of tizz on top, made the whole side of your head sweat, and the rugged-looking coiled cord was in reality fragile. Had an aluminum (to save weight!) microphone boom anchor on the left earcup (looks like a volume control or the cap to a camp stove). But everybody seemed to own one, and radio stations used them extensively. A classic stylewise, it was a perennial in spite of itself, and for better or worse the headphone sound quality standard of its day. Every other headphone was inevitably compared to this one.
Now, a random collection of significant and listenable headphones. You may not like the way they sound, but for their day, they were special and may still sound "right" to some listeners. Not surprisingly, many are electrostats. Moving coil ("dynamic") headphones got better over the decades with help from computer modeling, advances in materials science, automated assembly and sheer dogged tinkering, but that took a lot of time and money (what you might call "futurizing", the investment of time and effort to stave off obsolescence, didn't often happen back in the '70s), so not many dynamics of the socalled vintage era reached far enough into the future performancewise to be listenable today. I've restricted the list to 'phones a casual eBayer will actually have a prayer of finding (and because of that last part, the Wharfedales, which deserve to be here, will have to stay in the first group, at least for those of us in the US).
Sennheiser HD 414 dynamic, already mentioned. Started in production in 1968 and hit its stride in the US market around 1973. The first open-back headphone I know of by anyone, and astonishingly lightweight for its day. Showed out-of-head imaging for the first time; proved you didn't need heavy closed cups to get decent bass. The runaway success of the Sony Walkman and the headphone revolution that followed would never have happened were it not for the HD 414. The first generation had a viselike, ear-crushing headband and a very fragile copper cord (replaced by a steel cord around 1975), but all parts were detachable and user-replaceable, another radical innovation for the time. 2000 ohm impedance (not a typo) allowed you to plug in to a good line-level output without loading it down. Smoother than just about any headphone of the time save the electrostats, they nonetheless had a big peak at 2kHz in their frequency response curve that would scour your ears clean at high levels (they claimed that their research showed this peak to be necessary, and subsequent models had it too). Nearly indestructible with the steel cord. You could run over them with your office chair, tear them from your head and throw them as hard as you could at a hated program director or equally stupid cement-block wall and they'd simply keep on working. Stunning. Unique. Inexpensive (at least in the early '70s). Historically significant. Kinda goofy looking. A
gesamtkunstwerk.
Koss HV-1 dynamic. Koss tries to build a Sennheiser HD 414. Not bad, but it was heavier (natch), more fragile, less comfortable.
Sennheiser HD 44. Not a typo. A bizarre-looking orange stethoscopic-style headphone with tiny drivers and tiny diaphragms, showing that a dynamic driver could have some of the detail of an electrostat if you made it small and lightweight enough. Not much bass due to the loose seal, but a great "distortion sniffer" and a portent of canalbuds and IEMs to come. Rare. I mention them because nobody else ever does and they're just too significant to keep secret.
Signet (luxury division of Audio-Technica for the US market)
TK33 electret electrostatic. First appeared in the late '70s. Lightest, thinnest (2 microns) diaphragm of any electret headphone (except the very obscure Toshiba HR series) due to unusual back-electret design. Not expensive on eBay and not terribly rare. Two-stage sensitivity control (probably an extra tap on the stepup transformers), useful LED level meters, smooth sound, but not a lot of bass. Very open backs. Comfortable. Very lightweight. Timeless styling. Modding potential. If only it had bass!
Sony ECR-500 electret electrostatic. Dorky looking, making it one of the most surprising headphones ever when you stop laughing at it and put it on. Amazing out-of-head imaging, perfect for binaural recordings. Actual bass (though not terribly well damped), very unusual for an electrostat of its day (1976). Cheap on US eBay but not elsewhere. Not too uncomfortable. Not as smooth or flat as the TK33 because the diaphragm is an electret 5 microns thick rather than plain Mylar but more pleasant because of the amount of bass.
[Despite what you've heard, electrets in headphones, with the reported exception of some Sennheiser Unipolars, do not lose their charge noticeably over time. It
is possible to overdrive electret headphones, however, so always ask a seller if the channel balance is perfect.]
Beyer ET 1000 or ET 1000N electrostatic. From 1976. Inexpensive, stylish, fairly lightweight electrostats from a favorite HF maker. Perfectly fine but got no respect for some reason. Good imaging due to chic sintered-metal grilles on open-back cups, although not as good as the ECR-500. Decent but not Stax Lambda Pro level bass.
Stax SR-3/5/X electrostatic. The SR-X Mk3 was the best headphone Stax made before coming up with the famous Lambda design, and some still prefer its sound to the Lambda's. Top-drawer accuracy-- best headphone on the planet in its day-- but hard to collect since everyone still wants one for some reason, clunky transformer box and all. Critically-damped diaphragm makes it mercilessly revealing. The tradeoff is a restricted soundstage-- it doesn't present binaural recordings very well. The bottom octave-and-a-half of bass is weak. On the other hand it can play very, very loud and still remain utterly composed and clean. The SR-5 played second fiddle to the SR-X in the mid-'70s but is a very pleasant 'phone still enjoyed by many HFers.
The SR-X series, the SR-5 and the "New SR-3" are developments of the first version of the SR-3, which dates back to the late 1960s and which I strongly suspect is the basis for what I call the Stax Mutants: the Radio Shack
Realistic HP-100, the
Magnavox 1A9217, the
NAD 20E and the
Marantz SE-1, which go for a bit less than "real" Staxes. Good solid electrostatic sound for (usually) very little money if you shop carefully, but will not plug into Stax equipment without modification. We've just (Feb '08) discovered that
Superex used an SR-3 driver in their PEP series of affordable electrostatics. Contemporary reviews rated the
PEP-79 just below the mighty and mighty expensive
Koss ESP/9 electrostat, the best US-made headphone for several years in the '70s.
Yamaha HP-1 Orthodynamic. Like an electrostatic but with magnetic drive. A "planar-magnetic". Not a hybrid but rather a cross between an electrostat and a dynamic. Not entirely successful as sold but in many ways outstanding for its day and with simple tinkering can be pretty darn good for today. Wonderful ergonomic design, but mechanically fragile. Related Yamahas are the YH-1, YH-100 and YHD-1. Similar, much less common but equally interesting is the Audio-Technica ATH-2.
Stax SR-30 Pro electret electrostatic. Usually goes for too much on auction sites but worth acquiring. More bass than the SR-X Mk3, but midrangey. To compensate, will take amazing amounts of bass and treble EQ without whimpering. The Pro version has a thinner (4 microns) diaphragm, more efficient but less pleasing. Will plug into even the latest Stax direct-drive amps.
That's it. Memory dump complete.
Walt Brand
Any advice on the things to look out for and good deals would be greatly appreciated!
