Sennheiser launches headphones priced at ?45 lakh in India
German audio company Sennheiser on Thursday launched its HE 1 headphones in India priced at ?45 lakh. The company claims the headphones took nearly a decade to develop and the production is limited to one unit a day. The headphones have gold-vapourised ceramic electrodes, while an accompanying amplifier is made using marble from Italy.
Successor to the legendary Orpheus, audio giant Senheiser's new HE 1 headphones are now available in India. And just like the legendary Orpheus, the new HE 1 will cost you a bomb to own. Senheiser has launched the premium, high-end headphones in India at an alarmingly high price tag of Rs 45,00,000. But, if the HE 1 are anywhere near as close as the headphones they will replace, well, they ought to be expensive.  "For a decade now in the Indian market, Sennheiser has shaped the industry and has been at the cutting edge of audio by continuously re-defining the gold standard of what is technically possible," said Sennheiser CEO Daniel Sennheiser. "With the HE 1, we are once again pushing the boundaries and are showing that we can repeatedly set new benchmarks in excellence and reshape the future of the high-end audio world."The new HE1 use a completely new amplifier concept that combines the superior impulse processing of a tube amplifier with the low distortion of a transistor amplifier "to perfection" according to the company. There are a total of eight vacuum tubes that process the incoming signal. The advantage of tube amplifiers is their superior impulse processing. However, one challenge is their sensitivity to air-borne-noise. For this reason, the amplifier housing is crafted from granular, in homogeneous Carrara marble and is freely suspended with the amplifier. The decoupling of the tubes in combination with the damping properties of the marble has the effect of reducing structure-borne noise to an absolute minimum. The tube amplifier stage is followed by a patented ultra-high impulse amplifier stage that is directly integrated into the cups of the headphones.Senheiser has used gold-vaporised ceramic electrodes in the headphones. The advantage of this design, it says, is the extremely short distance between the amplifier and the diaphragm which is less than one centimetre in the new HE1. Thus, the headphone system requires far less power for charge reversal. At a voltage of only around 5 Volt, the music signal is transmitted balanced to the high-voltage amplifier integrated into the headphones and is amplified there. This ensures extremely high impulse fidelity with relatively low power requirements. Just like the tubes of the tube amplifier, the system's MOS-FET transistors have a square characteristic curve to prevent the hard distortion that occurs in amplifiers with bi-polar transistors.Sennheiser uses a new amplifier concept in a class that the audio specialist calls Cool Class A. In the low-frequency range, Cool Class A provides Class A power at any volume. In the high- and ultrahigh-frequency range, the amplifier switches from Class A to the usual Class AB operation. That will, however, only be the case when listening to a very unusual frequency spectrum.