The standard shape for big, chunky headphones has long been a rainbow with Moon Pies at either end. No rule exists, however, forcing audio companies to keep making them that way.
Philip Kaplan, the tech entrepreneur behind Tiny Letter and DistroKid, has been proving as much all year. The tireless tinkerer has recently turned the world of headphones into his own personal sandbox, with wild designs that fluctuate between a shark cage for your head, a beer-can helmet full of subwoofers, and Maleficent-style goat horns. Through boundless curiosity, a cheeky sense of humor, and plenty of elbow grease, the mad scientist of headphones has become the toast of audio Reddit—and possibly your next obsession.
Kaplan, who bears a passing resemblance to Steve Jobs, has been interested in audio quality his entire life. The longtime drummer even published a children’s book on music production in 2022. As far as his keen interest in headphones is concerned, though, his origin story begins with a summer job at an electronics store. The 15-year-old Kaplan used his employee discount to buy his first pair of serious, high-quality headphones: the Koss Porta Pro Jr., which went for a then-whopping $25. It was the first time he experienced true bass so vividly. Much like the man in the infamous Maxwell tape ad from the ’80s, the sound quality blew him away.
“It was like getting a deep-tissue brain massage,” Kaplan recalls. Since then, he has been chasing similar highs, forever in search of the next sound experience that could rattle his bones and rewire his circuitry. Early in 2024, he started creating these experiences himself.
Experiments in headphone design
Kaplan had been rehearsing with his band in a studio space, each member donning headphones. The audio quality on Kaplan’s pair was poor. Worse than that, it was a distraction. He fiddled with the equalization setting for a while, but it didn’t improve what he was hearing. Eventually, his software engineer instincts kicked in. He realized he might be able to improve the headphones’ sound by modifying them.
After rehearsal, he cracked open the hardware and started experimenting. He disassembled the small AKG headphones and used electrical tape to put them inside bigger ear cups. The results were prohibitively messy, but the improvement in sound quality was near what he’d hoped for. He never ended up quite finishing those headphones, however, because digging around inside their guts had given him ideas that extended far beyond the scope of that particular project.
Suddenly, he had several more high-priority design ideas that needed looking at.
