Yamaha YH-5000SE

HEADPHONES HOME HEADPHONES OF THE YEAR OVER $5000 We confess that we’ve heard these only in pre-production form so far, but that, combined with the whole story here, was enough to secure this award for Yamaha’s new YH-5000SE flagship headphones, which look back some 47 years to Yamaha’s HP-1 in 1976, the headphones in which the orthodynamic driver made its debut. It wasn’t a new idea entirely, even back then, but it hadn’t yet been successfully implemented: a speaker diaphragm that used isodynamic magnetic fields to drive an über-thin diaphragm etched with a conductive material. Yamaha called it orthodynamic; more commonly now we say planar magnetic. Fast-forward four decades to 2016 and Yamaha’s engineers, freshly targeting stereo with the all-analogue 5000 Series (see p41), decided to apply this design concept…

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Sound + Image (Digital) - 1 Issue, May - June 2023

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