We're seeing a lot of hi-fi brands looking back to move forward these days, creating products that are dedicated homages to, or have been overtly inspired by, those from their yesteryears, whether in celebration of a landmark anniversary or simply to leverage today's apparent nostalgic yearning. But very few have executed the feat as well or as interestingly as Yamaha with the high-end YH-5000SE headphones it released 18 months ago.
If you're sat there thinking, “I don't remember any previous headphones of such naming”, you recall rightly. The new 'special edition' (hence the 'SE') model is a bold, ambitious and, if nothing else, thorough redesign of its HP-1 from the mid-1970s, which were not only the company's first headphones but also one of the first pairs to implement a planar magnetic (Yamaha called it an 'orthodynamic') driver.
Fifty years later and following a several-decades-long absence of any such model in Yamaha's catalogue, the YH-5000SE arrived with a modern-day orthodynamic driver, an aesthetic miles away from the HP-1's Mario Bellini-designed one, and a name (and price) reflecting not their heritage link but instead their enviable position within the company's flagship 5000 Series.
In a matter of months, the wired headphones have already made a legacy for themselves, winning 's 2023 Temptation Award in recognition of their unprecedented sonic ability at this level, a judgement shared by many other specialist audio publications
