STAX: The Headphones That Spoil You for the Rest

There is a specific hazard in listening to a pair of STAX. It's that everything you put on your head afterwards sounds slightly broken.

STAX don't call them headphones. They call them earspeakers, and for once the distinction isn't marketing. A conventional headphone uses a scaled-down version of the moving-coil driver in a loudspeaker — a little cone or dome pushed back and forth by a coil. A STAX earspeaker works the way an electrostatic loudspeaker does: a diaphragm so vanishingly thin it barely has any mass to move, suspended in a field between two charged panels. It responds to the signal with almost no inertia, and that single fact is where the whole STAX experience comes from — a quickness and a low-level resolution that conventional drivers, for all their refinement, simply can't reach.

The catch, stated plainly

This is not a plug-and-play pleasure, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. A STAX earspeaker needs a matching energiser — a dedicated amplifier that supplies the high bias voltage the electrostatic panels run on — so the minimum system is two boxes, not one, and there is no driving them from a phone on the train. It asks for a bit of commitment.

There's a tonal catch too. The STAX signature is light on its feet, fast and honest rather than muscular; if what you love is weight and slam, a good moving-coil headphone will give you more of it. What STAX give instead is resolution — the full decay of a piano note, the air around a voice, the quiet detail that other headphones quietly round away. For a certain kind of listener that is the whole game, and nothing else scratches the itch.

Where to start

The way in is the Advanced-Lambda line: the SR-L500 MK2 gives you the genuine electrostatic character at the sensible end of the range, and the SR-L700 MK2 is the clear step up in refinement. Above them sits the reference SR-009S — the most revealing earspeaker STAX make, and the one to hear if you want to know how far this idea can be taken.

Every one of them needs an energiser, and this is where a STAX system rewards a bit of thought rather than just buying the matching box. The solid-state SRM-400S is the clean, direct option; the valve SRM-500T and SRM-700T add a little body and bloom. A better energiser under a mid-range earspeaker can do more for the sound than trading up the earspeaker itself — worth knowing before you spend.

Where STAX are at their most persuasive, oddly, is late at night and quietly. Put on something like Keith Jarrett's The Köln Concert at low volume: where ordinary headphones compress and coarsen, the electrostatic panel just keeps resolving, and the softest passages arrive fully intact. It is the opposite of a party trick.

Hear STAX in Norwich

Hearing an electrostatic system for the first time genuinely rearranges your expectations, and it's the sort of thing better done in a chair than described in a paragraph. Bring a handful of recordings you know well — the quieter, the better. We keep STAX set up at Ber Street, energiser and all, so you can hear the real thing properly driven. Arrange a listen with the team.

Martins Hi-Fi 85-91 Ber Street, Norwich NR1 3EY 01603 627010 [email protected]