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Masaaki Suzuki's Stax headphone

DuxServit

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For fans of classical music and specifically Bach, you will probably have heard of Masaaki Suzuki and his Cantatas project.

In the Bach special issue of Gramophone magazine, there is a photo (attached) of Suzuki-sensei wearing a Stax headphone in the recording studio. I looked-up the liner notes of some of my CDs, but they only say "Stax" without mentioning any model number.

Anyone know what model it is?

masaaki-suzuki-stax2.png
 

Scgorg

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Judging from the headband, yokes and the slimmer cable I would guess this is a Stax SR-Lambda, the original normal bias one from 1979.
Edit: I believe the SR-Lambda pro (1982) also shared the same exterior design, so it could be that.
 
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DuxServit

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The plastic looking headbands look like classic SR-Lambdas. But I was thinking how the headphone could last so long in a recording studio (with many hands & heads).
 

Leporello

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Older Lambda by the look of them. BIS lists B&W, Stax and Sennheiser (also in that pic) as their monitoring equipment in the relatively recent Mendelssohn - Enescu recording.
 

Scgorg

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The plastic looking headbands look like classic SR-Lambdas. But I was thinking how the headphone could last so long in a recording studio (with many hands & heads).
Headphones in general are quite durable, as long as they aren't abused constantly. The chassis and headband here is already a give-away that this is a pre-1990's lambda, while the slim cable means it has to be one of the earliest lambdas (either the SR-Lambda or SR-Lambda pro) as the later lambdas with this same construction (such as the lambda signature) have a thicker cable.
 
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DuxServit

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... while the slim cable means it has to be one of the earliest lambdas (either the SR-Lambda or SR-Lambda pro) as the later lambdas with this same construction (such as the lambda signature) have a thicker cable.

The slim cable is very noticeable, as most of the older Stax I've seen use the ribbon type cable.
 

Scgorg

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The slim cable is very noticeable, as most of the Stax I've seen use the ribbon type cable.
Make no mistake, this is still a ribbon cable (though it's hard to see), but the early ribbon cables used a smaller conductor spacing than their current ones. The SR-Lambda was actually the first stax to use a ribbon cable. The SR-Sigma and everything before it (1977) used a more "normal" looking cloth covered cables.
 
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