STAX SR-L500 +SRM-D50

Legendary. It’s a powerful and emotive word, but it is one that every audiophile applies to Stax headphones… or, as Stax prefers to call them, ‘earspeakers’. In fact, in reality, they are essentially miniaturised full-sized loudspeakers… even the shape of the headpiece is rectangular, rather than the circular form usually employed for headphones. (The three most expensive — and most recently designed — models in the Stax range have circular rather than rectangular earpads, but traditionally, Stax headphones have had rectangular ear pads.)

What makes Stax earspeakers especially unusual is that instead of a dynamic driver element where a coil of wire interacts with a magnetic field in some way to move a diaphragm to create sound, Stax earspeakers instead use an electrostatic system, where high-voltage electrical charges move the diaphragm. How high a voltage? Around 400 volts AC for