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The Audiophile Headphone Community Ruined Its One Shot at Relevance
Today the most popular and best-selling audio products are made by Apple. They’ve blown past all the “traditional” headphone and speaker companies to become the number one seller of things that go in or on your ears and make music come out of them.
If you’re an AirPods owner, congratulations, you’re part of the popular club. On the other hand, if you’re sitting there right now thinking “hah, I’d only ever use Beyerdynamic, or Sennheiser, or Focal headphones” then you’re part of an increasingly insular and decidedly hardcore audio community.
For a brief window way back in early 2014, it looked like things might go a dramatically different way. At that time, Beats was the mainstream headphone of choice, and the company wouldn’t be owned by Apple until the second half of the year. Audiophile headphone brands were still experimenting with different exciting designs, sound signatures, and features packages. They were making cool products that were as much for studio users as they were about exploiting the full wallets of older gentlemen who own rooms full of records.
But then out of nowhere, one such studio headphone product broke through the veil and out into the “normie” world: The…
