Designing headphones isn't rocket science. It's harder. With a rocket, you don't need to worry about what a kick drum sounds like against 32 ohms versus 16 ohm impedance. But don't worry – we'll tell you how it all works, no engineering degree required.
It all starts with the driver
The heart of a headphone is the driver. It's that little speaker that converts an electrical signal into sound waves. Sounds simple, but in practice it's like trying to get one tiny disc to reproduce every sound in the world – from birdsong to explosions.
We don't buy off-the-shelf parts and slap a logo on them. Valco's drivers are selected and tuned separately for each product. The VMK25.2 has a different driver than the VMK20, and each one is tuned to match its own enclosure. Because the same driver in a different enclosure sounds different. Physics, not magic.
Well, maybe a little magic.
Jasse and the sacred tuning
Jasse Kesti is Valco's sound designer. His ears are insured – this isn't a joke, it's a business risk. The man sits in a measurement room, compares frequency responses, and listens to the same track hundreds of times in a row. Sounds like hell, but Jasse claims he enjoys it.
The process goes roughly like this:
- Measurement: Every prototype is measured using calibrated microphones and ear simulators. Frequency response, impedance, harmonic distortion, phase – every number gets scrutinised.
- Listening: Numbers don't tell the whole story. The human ear is still the best tool for judging whether something sounds natural or plasticky. This is where Jasse's insured ears enter the chat.
- Iteration: Tweak, measure, listen, repeat. This goes on until both the measurement results and Jasse's ears agree. Sometimes it takes weeks, sometimes months.
The goal isn't to make headphones that sound "great" in some shop during a three-second demo. The goal is to make headphones that still sound great after a thousand hours.
Why don't we just copy Sony?
Good question. Short answer: because we don't want to.
Big brands design headphones for the mass market. That means compromises. Bass gets boosted because it sells. The midrange takes a back seat because most people won't notice the difference – at least not in a shop. All the money goes into ANC because it looks great on a spec sheet.
We do things differently. Sound quality is priority number one. ANC is important, but it must not ruin the sound. During the development of VMK25.2's noise cancelling, more time was spent making sure ANC doesn't distort the music than on the actual noise cancellation. Sony does beat us on raw ANC performance. But put some music on and compare. That's where we win.
There's another perk of being a small company – decisions don't require six meetings and a PowerPoint presentation. Henri says "that sounds like crap", Jasse tweaks it, and the next day there's a new version. 14 people, zero bureaucracy.
Repairability is a design decision
This one often gets forgotten. Product development isn't just about sound quality – it's also about how the device holds up and how it gets repaired. Valco headphones are designed so that parts are replaceable. Pads, headbands, cables. At the Kajaani service centre, Jasse and the rest of the team swap parts instead of chucking the whole device in the bin.
It's a deliberate choice. It would be cheaper to glue everything shut and sell a new unit when the old one breaks. But then we'd be like everyone else. And we couldn't afford the Death Star, because customers would've switched to a competitor.
Every purchase funds that 0.000001% at a time. Science, not sorcery – except for that 1% that comes from Jasse's ears.
