Ten years ago, the headphone market was thriving. Beats made it “cool” to wear large headphones out in public and into coffee shops, and the audio market saw a mass mainstream explosion.
Studio headphones made sudden inroads into new consumer markets after years of being confined to mixing booths and tracking sessions, with the Audio-Technica M50X even getting a number of high-profile influencers to hype them up. The influx of consumer cash lead to new developments in noise cancelling, wireless technology, and weird hardware form factors that would never be seen again.
The rise in popularity of headphones also meant a surge of content creators and reviewers trying to cover all this new tech stuff, and in the middle of this I got into writing online headphone reviews. Over many years I covered everything from the disastrous to the wonderful, from classics in the studio space to gaming headsets to truly terrible oddball experiments.
I thought that I was riding on the edge of a boom that would keep growing and expanding out into new markets — but I was actually witnessing the last gasp of an industry on the cusp of severe Apple domination.
In 2014, Apple bought Beats, and began their slow march to putting little wireless AirPods into everyone’s ears…
