ORA Sound GraphenEQ™ Headphones
The world’s first graphene headphones.
A taste or perhaps a sound of things to come. Do the ORA GrapheneQ™ Headphones deliver on their promise of ‘a groundbreaking audio listening experience?’ Or are these nano-tech based cans JUST a great pair of headphones?
Introduction
So. Holy crap. I lucked out when doing this review. These headphones arrived just as I was knee-deep in mixing down some of my music. I’m no professional, so I end up doing most of my music-making after hours and while the kids are asleep. And while my studio is currently in the basement (le sigh), sound travels up the vents into my baby boy’s room. That means I do a lot of my critical listening with headphones. Enter the ORA GrapheneQ™ Headphones. Not only did I get to test out a pair, but if they’re good, I could use them to tweak my music to my heart’s content. Well, for as long as I had them anyway.
Design
In my preview, I wondered ‘just what the heck is graphene anyway?’ To help explain, here’s some verbiage I found on ORA’s Kickstarter page:
“Graphene is a new material, first isolated only 13 years ago. Formed from a single layer of carbon atoms, Graphene is a hexagonal crystal lattice in a perfect honeycomb structure. This fundamental geometry makes graphene ridiculously strong and lightweight. In its pure form, graphene is a single atomic layer of carbon. It can be very expensive and difficult to produce in sizes any bigger than small flakes. These challenges have prevented pristine Graphene from being integrated into consumer technologies.”
But since graphene is “200 times stronger than steel and 1000 times lighter than paper,” ORA has spent the last few years creating GrapheneQ™, their own, “…proprietary graphene-based nanocomposite formulation. Specifically designed and optimized for use in acoustic transducers, GrapheneQ™ is a composite material that is over 95% graphene by weight.” ORA makes it by “…depositing flakes of graphene into thousands of layers that are bonded together with proprietary cross-linking agents. Rather than trying to form one, continuous layer of graphene, GrapheneQ™ stacks flakes of graphene together into a laminate material that preserves the benefits of graphene while allowing the material to be formed into loudspeaker cones.”
That’s a lot of cutting-edge technology packed into the design. However, the price point kind of lets you know. At an average price of $299, these are not high-end headphones. They are aimed squarely at someone like me, the budget-conscious audiophile; which as a first effort is a good thing as it introduces the feature set to a wider customer base.