Readers with longer audio industry memories might recall the Sennheiser Orpheus, supposedly the best headphones in the world. Now the German company announces an update, the result of over a decade of work.
Released in 1991, the Orpheus HE90 were something of an audiophile's dream-- one complete with a companion HEV90 amplifier and a $16000 price tag. Production was limited, and currently only just 300 pairs are available in the world, meaning existing pairs get sold at a much higher price.
As for the 2015 Orpheus update, a very gushy Sennheiser says the headphones are hand-crafted from over 6000 components, including silver-plated OFC cables, gold-vaporised ceramic electrodes and platinum-vaporised diaphragms "exactly 2.4 micrometres thick, the result of extensive research that shows that any thinner or thicker would be sub-optimal.”
Even the amplifier is fancy, with solid bronze control dials, quartz glass bulbs and housing crafted out of Italian Carrara marble-- a material the company says is not only beautiful, but also "prevents structure-borne noise." The result "“eliminat[es] the capacitive reactance of the cable, delivering an ultra-high impulse fidelity 200% more efficient than any other solution currently available.”
"For 7 decades now, Sennheiser has shaped the industry and has been at the cutting edge of audio by continuously re-defining the gold standard of what is technically possible,” Sennheiser CEO Daniel Sennheiser says. “With the Orpheus, we are once again pushing the boundaries and are showing that we can repeatedly set new benchmarks in excellence and reshape the future of the high-end audio world.”
The price for such luxury? €50000. And production is limited to just 250 each year, meaning your audiophile customers need to save up quickly if they want to snatch a pair once the Orpheus are available by mid-2016.
