Mighty Small

I’VE BEEN CHAMPIONING the virtues of headphones since the mid-1970s, which marked me as a real audio weirdo in an era when nobody but recording engineers and pilots put a pair on their head. From the beginning, headphones have possessed those rarified sonic attributes that, for me, define accuracy in reproduction: transparency, speed, detail and low distortion. These are qualities that were absent in most loudspeakers of the 1970s – save for Magnepan and a few outliers.

By the 2000s, lots of headphone manufacturers had jumped