Philips Quietly Killed Some Amazing Headphones

My favorite headphones for home music listening aren’t long for this world

Photo taken by Alex Rowe.

This article was originally about one of my favorite headphones for home-based music listening — the next overdue installment in my “These Headphones are Too Good” series.

However, it all fell apart during the research phase. Before I write about a tech product, in addition to hours and hours of testing, I go and gather official marketing assets, including links to the official page for the product. It was during this process that I discovered a sad truth:

The Philips Fidelio X2/X2HR headphones have probably been discontinued.

If you’re not familiar with them, they’re a long-held standard bearer of the open-backed headphone world. They have a slightly ungainly design with stylings that would be just as home in 1990 as the modern era — but the sound performance is simply legendary for the price. Years ago, Harman’s own Dr. Sean Olive told me that Philips did similar audio research in-house as that which produced the Harman target curve, only they didn’t publish any papers about it. This research was then used to develop all of Philips’ higher-end headphones.

The resulting X2 was one of the most enjoyable-sounding headphones you could buy. It…