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.
Nothing is glued.
Everything comes apart.
Every joint in a pair of Breitmanns is a fastener you can reach with a hex key. Four bolts hold the driver to the baffle. A two-pin connector carries the signal. The pads lift off the cup by hand. There is no adhesive anywhere in the assembly, because adhesive is a decision you cannot take back.
So the pair you order is not the pair you are stuck with. Swap the driver and you own a different instrument by lunch — ninety seconds on the bench, nothing to solder. Change the pads when they pack down. Change the cable, the grille, the cabinet. Five voices fit the same baffle, and every one of them is a part you can order on its own.
It also means nothing here is ever finished being repaired. A pair from 2011 comes back to this bench and gets parts off the same shelf as a pair built this morning, then leaves measuring the way it left the first time. Any pair, any year, indefinitely.
Anatomy
Nine parts, in the order they go together.
The order matters as much as the parts do. Each one seats against the one before it, so a cup opens on a kitchen table — no jig, no press, no heat gun.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.