Hey there tek syndicate, im sure not many people recognize me. I used to be an admin back on the old site, and kind of got busy with life over the past few years. Anyway, I had the opportunity to go to CES 2016 and talked up a sennheiser engineer into allowing me to listen to their orpheus headphones.
For those of you who are not aware, the orpheus is a rehash of their older electrostatic headphones, also called the orpheus, however this time around they went way way over the top. These bad boys will set you back a wopping 55,000 usd… and (in my opinion) are more of sennheiser showing off they are the kings, rather than making a viable product for people. But hey, what do i know, im a poor college student, maybe a millionaire things 55k for headphones is worth it.
So, moving on - what make these tick? well, unlike conventional speakers, there is no cone or voice coil. No, instead the orpheus uses a micrometer thick platinum coated membrane sandwiched between two plates. These plates can have a charge applied which causes this membrane to be attracted to one of the sides. swap the polarity, and it moves to the other. tada, you have audio.
This technology has been around for a while, but sennheiser really took it to the next level. Electrostatic cans require high voltage. normally this is done with a special amp. sennheiser has the amp and preamp like other high end systems have (although, on the inside its very different, using 4 amplifiers, 2 for each channel if i remember correctly, where they run out of phase to remove noise, similar to how XLR works). However, the high voltage step up is not in the amp. Instead, they have moved it into the headphones themselves, to remove the noise which might be added to the length of wire.
Way over the top, but boy did they sound amazing. I never thought headphones would give me an ear to ear grin. These definitely did.
I have a video of it turning on, and a few pictures. although they were taken on a camera phone in low light… Just waiting to put my new rig together so i can pull them off my phone. In the mean time, if anyone has any questions. shoot 
