ULI

At ETA, we love trying out gear. It’s impossible not to admire the infinite variety in the market when it comes to the design of audio products. We are constantly reading impressions, white papers, and exploring patent applications. There are few videos and podcasts our team hasn’t absorbed. We are inspired and obsessed.

In recent years, enthusiasts in the headphone space have poured incredible amounts of collective effort into developing performance targets with a modest degree of standardization - a valuable tool to those who simply want to enjoy music and make confident purchases without worrying about the nuances of engineer-ese. These targets are crucial in making the imagination of sound quality accessible to new audiences through the use of graphic abstraction. Hobbyists are becoming more educated - and knowledgeable consumers are powerful.

Yet while visualizations of performance offer a top-down view of sound quality, as product designers we ask ourselves the bottom-up questions at least as often. Instead of simply “how does it sound” or “how close is the performance to the target”, our line of exploration becomes “what design features make it sound how it sounds?” After all, sound quality is itself categorically physical and tangible - the manifestation of how enclosure and transducer design interfaces with fluid dynamics, our ears and our brains.

The U.L.I. headphone design is a love letter to everything we’ve enjoyed about our favorite products in the world of audio. We asked ourselves what features give our many reference transducers - from headphones to guitars and loudspeakers to microphones - their buttery smooth tone, their sense of space, their crisp transient response and dynamic heft, their clarity and timbre, their ergonomic comfort. We itemized and explored each variable in isolation, searched for commonalities and differences, and fused thousands of modifications and iterations worth of knowledge together since ETA’s establishment in 2020 into a headphone packed full of novel features we feel is both uniquely radical in design and easy to enjoy. 

We love the comfort of large over ear headphones - so we teamed up with ZMF to bring the world’s largest earpad to the market, made with all new materials like bamboo silk for supreme comfort.

We love the transient response and openness of open baffle headphones - so we made the ULI enclosure and earpads the most acoustically open over-ear designs on the market, while maintaining satisfying low-end weight and efficiency via optimization of vent placement.

We love the cohesive stereo image of properly positioned loudspeakers - so we angled and rotated the ULI driver across multiple axes to align with multiple features of auricle anatomy. 

We love the clarity and immediacy of on-ear headphones - so we designed a front waveguide to encourage laminar airflow without primary reflection or turbulence between the diaphragm and the ear. 

We love the smooth-yet-energetic tone of vintage guitars and loudspeakers - so the ULI headphone driver is the 21st century’s first to use AlNiCo magnets. AlNiCo is an exotic hard magnetic alloy known for it's timbre. Normally reserved for speaker systems, this is the first one in a headphone. 

We love revealing headphones with reasonable power requirements - so the ULI driver features our 8th generation obscenely robust motor system with more than six times the mass compared to our 1st generation Mini series.

We love the linearity and cohesiveness of premium full-range loudspeaker drivers - so the ULI driver utilizes a silver plated underhung voice coil with greater mass than conventional copper or aluminum for superior control across an extended bandwidth.

We love the classic timbre of paper cones - so the ULI diaphragm is made of organic cellulose nanofibers.

We love all-day listening sessions - so we optimized the clamping distribution of our headband and reduced the total build weight to well below 400g

We could fill your screen with more endless prose about why ULI is designed how it’s designed - one micron at a time. But at the end of the day, it all boils down to one question: what creates the most listening pleasure? 

It’s our honor to introduce ULI - the ultra-low-impedance hyperdynamic circumaural headphone.