Workshop No. 4 · Asheville, North Carolina · Est. 2009
Wound by hand. Voiced by ear.
Open-back headphones turned from solid hardwood, one pair at a time. A coil, a magnet, a diaphragm and a cabinet — in that order, and nothing in between.
- Built to date
- 1,204 pairs
- This year
- 41
- Signal path
- Fully analog
Analog is not a mood.
It is a signal path.
There is no digital processing in a pair of Breitmanns, because there is nothing here to process with. A voice coil hangs in a magnetic gap. It moves a diaphragm. The diaphragm moves the air between it and your eardrum. That is the entire device.
Which means we cannot fix anything afterwards. A cabinet that resonates badly stays bad. A driver wound two turns short measures two decibels down and goes in the scrap drawer. The work has to be right on the bench, in wood and copper, the first time.
— Anselm Breitmann, at bench 1 since 2009
Anatomy
Nine parts, in the order they go together.
Nothing is glued. Every joint is a fastener you can reach with a hex key, which is why a pair from 2011 is still repairable on the same bench that made it.
The bay
One cabinet. Five voices.
The baffle takes any of them. Four bolts, a two-pin connector, ninety seconds on the bench. Nobody agrees on what a headphone should sound like, so we stopped trying to decide for you.
Configure
Build yours.
Every combination is a different instrument. Change a part and the card on the right re-measures — response, mass, drive requirement, and what the result is actually for.
The bench
Five operations. One person does all of them.
-
01
Break down the billet
Stock is bought as whole boards and rested in the shop for a year before it is cut. Cabinets are book-matched from adjacent slices so the left and right cups share a grain history, which is vanity, and identical density, which is not.
-
02
Turn the cabinets
Both cups are turned on a 1954 Hardinge with a hand-ground form tool. The two grooves you can see are not decoration — they are where the tool was reset, and they are the only reason the wall thickness is repeatable to a tenth.
-
03
Wind the coil
Four layers of copper-clad aluminium onto a Kapton former, counted by a mechanical tally. A coil that comes off the jig two turns long is two decibels wrong and does not get a second look.
-
04
Voice the pair
Wool damping is packed by hand until the measurement stops moving. This is the only step with no fixed number attached to it, and it is the step that takes longest.
-
05
Sign the plate
The serial plate is engraved with the build code, the date, and the measured deviation of that specific pair. If it ever comes back for service, that plate tells us exactly what it left as.
Fourteen weeks
from now.
We build forty-one pairs a year and we do not take more orders than that. Send the build code from your card and we will write back with a bench slot, or tell you honestly when the next one opens.