ZMF Headphones

The treat at CanJam, for me, was this little room right here: ZMF Headphones. On the way in, I met Zach on the way out — brandishing a tiny handy-cam and apparently doing Insta vids. The guy has serious video creds — went to school for it, taught it, the whole nine. One look at his website and you’ll realize that you’re doing web design wrong. Seriously. He’s embarrassing the rest of us. Also, interestingly, this headphone thing was only just becoming a thing when our John Stancavage first heard them at AXPONA 2014 — but you’d never know it by looking at this room right here.

To be blunt, my favorite headphones are open-backed, and ZMF kills it here (see what I heard in AXPONA, for example), and I’m kinda in love with the variety of open-back solutions ZMF is currently offering — like the planar Caldera (starting at $3,499), the open back dynamic Atrium (starting at $2,499), and the lux Verité ($2,1999). All are very different, and sound very different, but while the sound is uniformly elegant and evolved, it is the look that ZMF brings to a complicated market. And that look is dandy.

Zach walked me through the process a bit, and I am totally loving the idea of getting one of these brilliant cans in a bespoke config. The options are wild — pick the wood, pick the pads, pick the chassis hardware, pick the grill. Want copper? White gold? Red? Blue? Stabilized resin-wood? BURRRRRRRRL? I have some ideas.

Zach, bro, call me?