View the gallery in full screen to read more about each headphone.
Even if you're not a self-professed audiophile, a funny thing happens when you don a pair of $1,500 headphones. You instantly turn into the world's most ardent music lover. Old songs and albums require immediate revisiting. Those seminal works you grew up on? Definitely going to need some deeper listening. And god help your co-workers if you're auditioning them in an office. You'll be wanting to share all this enthusiasm and new-found musical nuance with them too.
Indeed, there's a certain magic inherent to premium headphones. While they all have their own unique strengths and musical biases, they also tend to impart a universal sense of immediacy and visceral impact to well-recorded music. All of a sudden every squeak of the kick pedal is apparent, and you can perfectly visualize each instrument in space as it's being plucked, strummed, or hit. In short, great headphones bring you into the recording studio or onstage during a performance.
It's only after this high wears off (which, honestly, can take a few days) that your mind turns to the lavish construction and finer engineering details that have allowed for such a revelatory experience--things like large planar magnetic drivers and an open- or semi-open back design. And while you can quibble all day about sound quality, when it comes to materials, there's no mistaking the line between a great sounding $300 headphone and a $1,500 flagship. Flimsy vinyl and cloth travel pouches give way to elaborate, hand-painted wood and metal briefcases; plastic yields to aged bog oak and laser-etched aluminum; and many of these sonic trophies even comes with their own display stands.
What we've collected here is by no means the definitive list of world-class headphones. There are omissions like the legendary Sennheiser Orpheus, which comes with its own dedicated tube amplifier, and today can go for as much as $30,000. We also left out acclaimed "earspeakers" from Stax--like the $4,450 SR-009, also widely considered to be one of the world's best. Still, these 9 headphones represent some of the biggest triumphs in audio engineering over the past 50 years, and they have the price tags to prove it. So without further ado, here's more than $20K worth of pure audio wizardry.
