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Released in October 2017, these are high-end headphones produced until 2023, when they were replaced with the Beats Studio Pro. They connect by Bluetooth and have 40 hours of battery life, with 22 hours of battery life with adaptive noise cancelling on.
Jul 25, 2023 · It’s been 15 years since Beats launched Beats by Dre Studio, its first ever pair of headphones. By 2012, NPD data notes that it had 64% of the premium US headphone market and by 2013 the...
- Carrie Marshall
Aug 31, 2020 · About a year later in 2012, Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre bought 25% of the company back from HTC for $150 million. It was also in that year that we saw the release of the first non-Monster branded products: the Beats Executive headphones and the Beats Pill.
- Overview
- 1880s: the headphones that’d give you a headache
- 1890s: the original earbuds and Spotify too
- 1910: the first headphones that looked like headphones
- 1958: the first stereo headphones and the first cans made for music
- 1960s: the first wireless headphones and open-back cans
- 1970s: the future’s orange (and blue, and…)
- 1990s: brand new retro
- 2001: Apple changes everything
- 2004: kind of blue
News
By Carrie Marshall
published 24 April 2022
Wireless headphones are older than you think
(Image credit: Shutterstock.com / Iuliia Pilipeichenko)
When was the last time a tech purchase made you laugh with joy? For me it was the first time I listened to my favourite songs on a set of Apple AirPods Max headphones, which enabled me to hear things in those songs that I’d never heard before. Never mind hearing what the artist was playing: sometimes I reckon I can hear what the artist was thinking.
Headphones weren’t originally designed for music. They were made for telephone operators who needed to physically connect everybody’s phone calls. The first model, unveiled in the 1880s, didn’t look much like today’s headphones either: it looked more like a phone that had been cut in half and attached to your head. And it weighed around 5kg, the equivalent of 111 pairs of AirPods.
The first headphones were designed by Ezra Gilliland, a friend of Thomas Edison who also designed the telephone switchboard, and set the template for many models to come: these weren’t headphones for fun. They were tools for the workplace, things you couldn’t wait to tear off at the end of the working day.
If, like me, you thought earbuds were a very modern invention, think again: they’ve been with us since 1891, when Ernest Mercadier patented his “bi-telephone” and suggested using rubber covers to make them more comfortable. As with Gilliland’s operator phones, the bi-telephone was intended to be used by telephone operators.
The same decade saw the invention of the Electrophone, a kind of pre-digital Spotify where you could don headphones, dial in to a switchboard and listen to live performances from London theaters.
Nathaniel Baldwin came up with the first recognizably headphone-y headphones in 1910, selling them to the US Navy for use by radio operators. His headphones featured a new, more sensitive kind of receiver that Baldwin declined to patent because he thought his invention was “trivial”. But he did patent his headphone design, which you can still see i...
You can thank John Koss for whatever you listen to your music on today: his Koss SP-3 headphones not only introduced stereo listening, but they were the first cans designed specially for personal music listening. Koss was a big fan of jazz, and wanted to recreate the excitement of a live musical performance so you could enjoy it anywhere. Today Kos...
The first wireless headphones were released decades before Bluetooth. In the 1960s, multiple manufacturers offered solid state radio headphones that enabled you to listen to radio while looking a bit like one of the Cybermen from Doctor Who.
Headphone design really evolved during this period. John Koss – yes, him again – had originally aped Baldwin’s Navy headphones, but in the 1960s his headphones borrowed from airline and military models and introduced broader, more comfortable headbands and noise-reducing ear cups to help you hear the music more clearly. You can see the airline-style designs of the era in the image above, which is an RCA advert from 1972.
Koss didn’t just make headphones. He made deals too, and one of his best ones was with The Beatles: the Beatlephones were the first big-name branded headphones and sold like hotcakes while Dr Dre was still taking his first baby steps, long before Beats.
There was another key development in the 60s: Sennheiser’s HD414, launched in 1968. These were the first open-backed headphones, allowing outside audio in, delivering a more spacious sound, and making them much safer for listening to on the move – something that was still relatively rare in personal audio. They also introduced something else that would soon become iconic: brightly coloured foam ear pads.
By the 1970s headphones had become truly mass market products and worked in two key markets: the teen market and the audiophile market. And then Sony came along and changed everything. The Walkman, introduced in 1979, came with ultra-light open-backed headphones with a super-skinny headband that enabled you to wear them on your head or park them ar...
As new technology introduced higher quality portable music formats – portable CD players, portable DATs if you were loaded, and later on Digital Compact Cassette and MiniDisc –portable headphones got better too, although you wouldn’t always know it given the poor quality models that often came in the box with new audio hardware. That was great for the third party market, though, and the growing popularity of portable audio meant that nobody thought you were a weird loner if you wore your headphones in public. In fact, they became a badge of pride: in the 1990s, big closed-cup headphones were a sign that you took your music more seriously than the foam-eared brigade. Maybe you were a DJ!
With headphones firmly in the fashionable category, headphone design went to all kinds of interesting places in the 90s: headbands, neckbands, earbuds, over-ears and open-ears came in every conceivable shape and size.
In 2001, Apple launched the iPod. You may have heard of it. It wasn’t the first hard disk digital music player and some would say it wasn’t the best either, but it became the digital music’s Walkman and made digital music mainstream. The headphones weren’t exactly great but they were a sign that you were cool enough to have an iPod, and Apple’s ins...
Bluetooth, named after the tenth-century Danish king Harald Bluetooth, was launched in 1999 as a way to wirelessly connect microphones and headphones. It wasn’t initially used for music because quite frankly the sound quality was awful, but it became popular among the business and professional driving crowd; for a while blinking Bluetooth earpieces made every travelling salesperson or taxi driver look like one of Star Trek’s Borg.
That’s not to say there weren’t Bluetooth headphones for music; the first products hit the market in 2004. They just weren’t very good.
- Carrie Marshall
Beats by Dr. Dre (Beats) is a leading audio brand founded in 2006 by Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine. Through its family of premium consumer headphones, earphones and speakers, Beats has introduced an entirely new generation to the possibilities of premium sound entertainment.
Dec 4, 2019 · We admire the Powerbeats Pro headphones for their build, their fit and their superb features. Thanks to the Apple H1 Bluetooth chip technology, they’re wonderfully easy to set up and use, and they’re virtually glitch-free in their delivery of wireless audio.
Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine founded Beats by Dre in 2006 to produce consumer headphones with a premium sound.
