Victor Company that hails from Japan will be rolling out the HP-FX500 sometime in February next year - an inner ear headphones that does not rely on plastic, but wooden diaphragms instead. This adds a touch of elegance whenever you groove to your favorite tunes, and I sure as heck hope that the wood use has already been treated so that termites won’t be able to have a field day munching on it! This isn’t the first offering from Victor Company to use wood though, as the company has already started the mass production and sales of stationary speaker unit using wooden diaphragms way back in 2003.

As for the HP-FX500, it has the honor of being the first commercial headphone with wooden diaphragms in the world. This is all claimed by the company, and I suppose you have to have a certain degree of hearing capability in you in order to tell the difference, but you can rule me out on that one. I can’t really tell whether the sound is much “richer” or “warmer” as audiophiles tend to describe in a speaker or headphones review, but if you are one of the discerning, you could probably give the HP-FX500 a spin in order to find out for yourself.

According to Victor Company, it adopted the use of a wood dome diaphragm manufactured by thinning a birch material into a dome shape, so that “it can quickly transmit sound and appropriately absorb excessive vibration.” The entire housing is also made out of wood, enabling users to “enjoy a natural acoustic environment and reverberations of sound”. The HP-FX500 features a playback frequency zone of 8-25,000Hz, output sound pressure level of 100dB/mW and maximum permissible input of 200mW. There is no word on pricing as at press time, although word on the street has it that it will be somewhere in the region of ¥15,000 or so.

Source: Tech On