I am an Electrical Engineer that enjoys being part of the DIY community. I have built many of my own devices over the years such as hi-fi tube amplifiers, guitar effects modules and amps, radios and radio transmitters, headphone amplifiers and so on. This is the first product I have built that I am putting out there into the world. I started this project as an experience in itself, to try and recoup some of my losses and continue to improve and build more. My main motivation is that the headphones really do sound quite amazing. I like them far better than any headphone I’ve ever listened to or owned. I have to add, that my interaction with all of my customers, some of whom I now call friends, has been enjoyable and I continue to learn from them, so this has also been a shining source of motivation.

To be honest, I had never heard of Stax or electrostatic headphones before I started this project. A friend of mine built his own electrostatic speakers, and after my first listen I became a believer in the uniqueness, beauty, clarity and validity of electrostatic technology. Due to the dipole nature of the technology, the bass is not as present in loud speakers due to the back wave reflecting and having destructive interference with the forward projected wave. Not so with headphones, so I decided to go this route for my electrostatic adventure. A friend asked me how much I would sell them for, and this got me down a more “How do I even sell this?” rabbit hole, which brought me to learn, develop, and improve much more than if I had just kept it all to myself.

One of the barriers for being able to experience electrostatic headphones is cost. The headphones themselves require high voltages to drive the technology and so they must be accompanied by an electrostatic amplifier which can be quite pricy. While I did not want to be in the business of selling amplifiers, I thought I would share my own amplifier designs as open source to be built by an experienced builder. In addition, most customers are already seasoned electrostatic enthusiasts that have quite a passion for the technology and have used my headphones with their own commercial Stax amplifiers with excellent results.

I will continue with this project as long as I keep enjoying it, have time available, and it continues to delight and surprise people.

I want to thank all my customers for supporting my small business. If interested in viewing some of my past projects, paintings, frames and so on you can see some of them here: https://hshworkshop.wordpress.com/. You can also follow me on Instagram at @nectarsoundnet.

SLR.
Nectar Sound Research