Yes, you can use any good pair of headphones to listen to your favorite metal tracks and probably have a banging good time. Truth is, though, metal isn’t the most popular music genre, so any headphones you’re likely to use probably aren’t optimized to make all those distorted guitars, emphatic rhythms, and vigorous vocals sound their best. Unless, of course, you’re using Heavys.
A new pair of headphones optimized for heavy metal, the cans were built from the ground up with fans of the genre in mind. Whether you’re into trash metal from before the turn of the century, progressive metal with all its technical complexities, or European death metal, this thing should provide you with a much more enjoyable listening experience.
You know how headphones typically have one driver on each earpiece? The Heavys come with four drivers on each side (two woofers and two tweeters), each one focusing on a different frequency. That’s right, you don’t just get one driver on each ear producing lows, mids, and highs simultaneously. Instead, each driver handles its own frequency range, producing a sound that allows you to hear every detail in a clear and accurate manner. According to the outfit, this is crucial to the complex sounds that tend to be associated with the metal genre.
Even better, they designed an acoustical setup that’s built to generate a natural-feeling, front-oriented sound field – you know, the kind that makes you feel you’re in the audience watching the band play onstage. It does that by putting the tweeters at a position that’s perfectly perpendicular to the ear, with the drivers surrounding it from different directions. According to the outfit, it produces a vibe that’s similar to surround sound setups.
Heavy metal is, of course, associated with loud music. That’s why, the Heavys’ acoustic tech broadcasts specific frequencies at specific volumes, which, the outfit claims, makes the resulting music sound louder than it actually is. This allows you to enjoy heavy metal the way it’s meant to be consumed (very loud) without the accompanying hearing damage that results from all the pressure produced by cranking up the volume to max. They also added a dosimeter with a built-in pressure gauge that, the outfit claims, will let you turn up the loudness without damaging your ears. We’re not entirely sure how it does that (we only know of dosimeters that measure radiation), but we’ll take their word for it.
Like many modern headphones, it has active noise canceling, so you can focus on your music even when you’re in a noisy location, along with Bluetooth, so you can listen to your music without being tethered. However, since wireless streaming can’t really match wired listening, especially when it comes to complex heavy metal tracks, each headphone also comes with a cable if you’d rather listen to your music in full fidelity. According to the outfit, the built-in battery can run for up to 50 hours between charges (hopefully, with both Bluetooth and ANC running).
A Kickstarter campaign is currently running for Heavys. You can reserve a unit for pledges starting at $149.