The 5 most expensive audiophile headphones in the world are a prime example of how you don’t need a flashy brand name to produce ridiculously expensive products. Unlike the best budget headphones that’ll save you a ton of money, these are dead set on providing the absolute best that technology can produce and couple it with the most luxurious and stylish presentation they can come up with. These pairs of headphones are not only extremely expensive but also rare since most of them have an extremely high production cost and are only made in limited numbers or per request.
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These pairs of overly expensive and rare cans are also not something you’d plug in your iPod and crank up the latest ode to renting expensive cars, clothes and women that the musical industry has spewed out. In purely technical terms, you cannot plug them in your iPod at all, since these sets of headphones have a very high impedance rating, meaning that where you’d hear some self proclaimed master of the universe yell out world capital names, you’d only hear a faint whisper. Listening to music with any of these is serious business. You wouldn’t go mud wrestling in your fanciest clothes in the same way you wouldn’t just plug these into any amplifier out there. People who would buy any of these sets probably already have a considerably more expensive tube (these glowing, toasty glass tubes you’d see in old circuitry) amps that are most certainly top of the line and offer the most pure and clear sound quality there is. After that comes whatever you are playing your music on, which should also be of absolutely uncompromised quality. The last part of the chain is the type of music you are listening to. Don’t be surprised when you see people using more expensive gear with analog music sources such as turntables or even tape recorders because they are the closest you’ll get to an actual physical representation of music. From then on, everything else like CDs and music coming from phones/computers/DVD players has first been converted to a digital bit stream for recording and then is converted back to analog signal for playback. The problem with that is that certain formats like .mp3 greatly compress and get rid of certain frequencies in order to keep files small. On the other hand, there are lossless (with as little compression as possible) formats such as .wav and .flac that aim at keeping the sound just as it was at the point of recording but they can get impressively big.
All in all, listening to music on gear that is that high in quality and price is not for everyone. Not only from a financial point of view but also in the way that many people can’t even differentiate between a horribly compressed audio file and a lossless one. On the other side, there is a lot of modern music which is entirely electronic and heavily processed which will sound pretty much the same in both situations even to the trained ear. There is, however, some of the novelty factors to these sets of headphones and it is easy to see how someone who could easily spare that amount of money could get a pair just for the sake of having one and boasting about it. Let’s take a look at what’s so enticing about these sets of headphones.
