How much would you pay for a good pair of headphones? $50? $200? How about $55,000? Sennheiser, purveyor of all things high-end audio, has released an update to its legendary Orpheus headphones, which combine an electrostatic set of cans with a valve pre-amp clad in solid marble. The company claims this results in an 8Hz to 100KHz frequency response—far beyond what human ears are capable of hearing. As such, the price for these new cans is pegged at $55,000 (probably £40,000 or more in the UK).

For the uninitiated, the original Orpheus HE90 headphones were the result of a Sennheiser R&D mission in the '90s to build "the best headphones ever made." It took until 2013 for Sennheiser's engineers to come up with the Orpheus HE90, and even then, only 300 of the things were made and attached to a ~£12,000 ($16,000) price tag.

The modern reboot took another 10 years to make, according to Sennheiser, thanks to updates to the electrostatic design and valve amplifier. The result is a set of headphones with a sound pressure level of a hefty 100 decibels and an alleged total harmonic distortion of just 0.01 percent. If true, that makes the Orpheus one of the cleanest audio products ever made.

The high cost of the Orpheus is largely thanks to the electrostatic design, which works very differently to the two driver that you'd usually find in headphones (dynamic drivers, which are basically a miniaturised speakers, and balanced armature drivers).

Sennheiser

Sennheiser

Sennheiser

Electrostatic headphones work by placing a static electric charge on an extremely thin film that floats between two metal plates. The voltage of an audio signal passing through the plates causes the lightweight film to oscillate and produce sound. Because the film is so light and there's no physical contact required to get it to move, it doesn’t have its own resonances or damping issues. Thus, the device produces extremely clear sound.

The downside to electrostatic headphones is that they're tricky to produce and require a high-voltage amplifier to drive them. For the latter, Sennheiser has gone for a hybrid approach with the Orpheus. The pre-amp is driven by eight valves (or tubes if you're in the US) housed in Carrara marble. The power amp has been integrated into the headphones themselves, which Sennheiser claims avoids the signal loss that can occur between the amp, the cable, and the headphones.

The amp inside the cans is all solid-state, making use of MOSFET transistors. The diaphragm in the headphones is platinum-coated, and it sits between two gold-coated electrodes. The resulting diaphragm is just 2.4 microns thick. You get all the other usual audiophile guff too, including silver-plated oxygen-free copper cables and an ESS Sabre ES9018 chip that uses eight internal DACs with a resolution of 32 bits and a sampling rate of up to 384kHz.

Oh, and when you turn the Orpheus on, the controls and vacuum tubes rise out from the marble base, and a protective glass cover opens up to reveal the headphones. That's what $55,000 buys you in this day and age.

I'll admit, I badly want to hear how these things sound—especially when hooked up to one of those audiophile Ethernet cables. If you're interested in the Orpheus and have the requisite funds lying around, you can nab one when it goes on sale in mid-2016.