In product design, as in nature, evolutionary forces sometimes spin out of control and push certain features to surreal extremes. Look at cars from the '50s with soaring tail fins and dashboards packed with every Space Age doodad imaginable, or the Irish elk evolving antlers so massive that they literally drove them extinct.
Or look at the headphone market today. Ever since Beats by Dre cracked open the market for luxury headphones at triple-digit price points, it and its competitors have been scrambling to find new features to pack into their products in order to justify their three or four hundred dollar price tags.
If the new Alpine Over-Ear headphones (which weirdly don’t seem to have a more specific model designation) were a car it would have tail fins as tall as a tall man. If they were an elk it would be unable to lift its head from the ground due to the ridiculous size of its antlers. There is so much going on in these wireless headphones that they have a USB jack to charge them. They’re so complicated that they’ve got firmware.
The rechargeable batteries inside don’t power a noise-cancelling unit like you might guess. The Alpines actually don’t need noise cancellation because they’re so big and heavy and densely padded that they physically block out most ambient sound. (Wearing them feels almost like wearing a motorcycle helmet.) The juice is to power a pair of amplifiers and digital signal processors, as well as a vibration unit in the band at the top of your head that’s designed to conduct sub-bass frequencies directly through the bone of your skull, in order to give you a level of bass response that would damage your ears if it only came through the speakers. I couldn’t actually tell if the so-called "TKR3 Full Frequency Immersion Technology" actually delivers deeper bass tones, but having a rumble pack on top of your head going off to the beat does deliver some of the same haptic satisfaction of being in a car with a trunk-rattling system, which is something that the people at Alpine know a lot about.
The batteries also power a Bluetooth connection to your phone, which doesn’t actually transmit the music—you still need to plug them in—but instead communicates with the headphones’ own app, called Level Play, that includes a five-band graphic equalizer and a feature that sorts your music into three different "energy levels," if that’s how you want to decide what you listen to. Even its app (its app!) has almost too many features.
Between the rumble pack and their substantial size, it seems like the primary markets for the Alpine Over-Ear would be gamers and hardcore EDM fans. But their comforting physical heft and ability to block out New York City-subway-at-rush-hour levels of noise should also appeal to anyone with agoraphobic tendencies and a willingness to spend three hundred dollars on a pair of headphones.