Yamaha YH-5000SE headphones ... Elven magic for your ears

What Hi-Fi? got hold of a pair of these headphones:

"Sometimes looking back is helpful in moving forward. It’s a seemingly popular approach in hi-fi right now as manufacturers are increasingly launching new retro-modern designs based on old classics in their catalogues. And it's one Yamaha decided to take six years ago in order to develop the forthcoming YH-5000 flagship headphones you see before you. Yamaha looked back 50 years.

Yamaha engineers, however, focused their attention on creating a best-of-both-worlds driver; a driver capable of the performance of a more expensive electrostatic driver but with a simpler construction, closer to that of a dynamic driver. The result? Its Orthodynamic driver (a design type now commonly referred to as a Planar Magnetic driver). This is a speaker diaphragm that used isodynamic magnetic fields to drive an über-thin diaphragm etched with a conductive material. 

As Yamaha literature states, the company’s engineers “...created a polyester diaphragm with a thickness of 12 micrometres [the same dimensions as the tape inside a C90 cassette]. Photo-etching technology was then used to engrave a conductive material onto the surface in a spiral pattern to act as the voice coil. The voice coil was then divided into five concentric rings, also then divided to match the location of the magnets, which were also divided into five sections positioned with alternating North and South poles.” When the music signal flowed through the patterned etching, it generated magnetic fields that would interact with one another to make the diaphragm (and integrated voice coil) move and produce sound, with the magnets helping to keep the spread across the whole diaphragm even, and the magnetic fields’ complete envelopment of the diaphragm ensuring that movement is responsive and controlled."