Firewall for Headphones

Discover the untapped potential of your headphone listening experience

Your headphones can perform on a completely different level. We've come up with a way for you to connect a small, easy-to-use device to your headphone cable which opens the portal to a completely new horizon of performance. You will get results comparable, if not better, than upgrading a loudspeaker's tweeter, or the caps, or the internal wiring. You won't have to tinker with any settings, dials, or knobs. Just set it down, plug it in, and hit Play!

Having successfully implemented over 6000 Firewalls in over 65 countries, we have gained a lot of loyalty form customers across the world. When LessLoss says of any new product, "It's time!" we really mean it. Never is a product released without first making absolutely sure it delivers the goods, and in a most obvious manner. You can read many user feedback entries on our website here, but here are just a few examples:

-- "These are component level improvements."
-- "...music that I have been listening to in some cases for 20 years: ‘that’ was there for all those years and I only hear it today?"
-- "The most incredible soundstage and imaging I have ever heard, bass that no stand mounted monitor should be capable of."
-- "The musicality is outstanding ... a totally relaxed and satisfying listening experience."
-- "Nearly had me in tears such was the emotion in the female vocalist voice and that she sounded like she was in my living room!"
-- "Congratulations to you and your team, you have done it again."

What you get by using this small device is:

• Much better focus. Is this the new-and-improved version of this headphone?
• Much less "fog" in the soundstage. Did somebody exchange my amp to a better model?
• Pure sonic colors to die for. Did somebody redesign the cans for improved impulse response?
• Meticulous control of bass. Has the driver's moving mass been halved?

You get rock-solid performance with every dollar going directly towards massively increased audio performance. The gear is functional and aesthetically clean.

Will it work with my heaphones?

The Firewall for Headphones works with any headphones except electrostatic designs which run at high voltages. Regardless of impedance or sensitivity, you will get greatly enhanced results. Your headphone cable needs to accept signal from a four pin XLR type socket. You need to feed the Firewall for Headphones from your amp using a four pin XLR plug.

Firewall for Headphones Production, or How DARPA missed the Audiophile Boat

The LessLoss Firewall has gone through a lot of research and development since its inception. What began as a novel idea about implementing Skin-filtering by exploiting the naturally occurring Skin-effect of current running through a wire has been expanded upon many times since its inception. Today we are actually using field structuring around the conductor in unique ways. The Firewall is a LessLoss proprietary technology, based on precisely positioned directional metallic particles within a hardened transparent resin carrier. The result becomes a kind of micro-transformer, but without the loss. A kind of ferrite core filter, but without the loss. A kind of directional set of A/C diodes, but without the loss. That pitch black background, so important to stable but elusive "3 AM" type sound quality, gets set to a higher and higher bar at every step of our way. People keep asking, 'Can it really get any better than this?' Answer: you bet! When the Firewall for Headphones is connected to the headphone signal, it brings a cosmic change to the sound quality.

The brains, heart and soul of the Firewall for Headphones

The new Firewall for Headphones is so effective because in designing it we did not ask the typical questions. We asked fundamentally different questions and came up with fundamentally different answers.

This product is not about what the amp sees in terms of impedance or load. This is no Zobel network or other invasive technology. What the headphone driver does as relates to the amp remains absolutely the same as before. Exactly none of the amp's power is absorbed by the Firewall.

In terms of electrical performance, what the amp will "see" per polarity when sending its signal through the Firewall for Headphones is a 16mm^2 cross section of pure copper, which is incredibly high conductivity, much higher than any headphone cable, and certainly more than any internal wiring of any loudspeaker. So, in no way does the Firewall for Headphones impede dynamic signal flow, nor does it influence the impedance of the headphone drivers that the amp sees. In flowing through the Firewall unit, the signal is conditioned without ever influencing its resistance at all, at any audio frequency. This has a profound effect because only the most natural results follow, without even the least adverse effects to sensitive micro-dynamics. The amp (any amp in fact) will continue to perform in conjunction with the headphone exactly as it did before. The resulting sound quality, however, is greatly improved.

Our approach can be split up into three basic terms.

(1) The brains (unique in-house controlled copper processing),
(2) the heart (proprietary Firewall noise reduction solution)
(3) and the soul (special assembly approach).

A perfect balance of the three, all three being exemplary and far beyond the textbook electrical engineering approach using caps and coils, results in a magnificent boost in sonic performance. Let's take these three and unpack them.

(1) The Brains

In standard extrusion processes, the copper undergoes many forces until the desired size is achieved. Pictured at the top of the image below, you can see a standard copper wire as extruded using industrial methods. Next to this standard copper wire, you can see our copper that we use in the Firewall for Headphones. It is a completely different beast. This is created in house through proprietary means.

LessLoss proprietary copper sourcing and in-house processing creates absolutely purpose-specific raw material which undergoes absolutely no tension or forces other than those which are specific to each polarity of our design. Thus, the positive and negative Firewall units are completely different from the very inception of the individual conductor material used. This is no typical exercise in choosing different off-the-shelf metals for positive and negative polarities to get a 'house sound' deemed 'nice.' It goes much more fundamentally into the nature of the material itself. We come intriguingly close to dancing with the concept of brownian noise itself.

This time-consuming and fundamental level of detail adhered to in production creates a material (seen here next to standard copper) which bears a physical malleability closer to that of lead (or even butter), than industry sourced copper. Thus, even its acoustic properties are fundamentally different than those of standard copper. Industrially annealed copper, known as 'soft,' does not even come close.

In slightly different lighting, this image shows in direct comparison how different our in-house made raw material is from standard copper. Standard copper, even soft annealed type, withstands considerable pressure. Our special material does not at all and must be handled with the most extreme care.

99.99999999999999999%... ad absurdum

We have painstakingly investigated the tie between copper purity and resulting audio performance. You will see much talk in the audio world about the so-called 'nines race.' Through direct consultation with several metallurgy labs which determine metal purity with governmentally recognized certification processes, these bearing legal status, we have no doubt that this type of claim is complete bogus. In fact, there is no certification laboratory on earth which will certify any purity higher than the industry standard 'four nines,' which means 99.99%. Anything you see over and above this in terms of purity is pure fiction. And even the four nines purity cannot be guaranteed for an entire spool. Buyer beware.

What we have established through our fundamental investigation is that, in fact, it is not the purity in terms of material analysis which yields the performance we are aiming for, but rather the purity of the process. For it is easy to take the purest copper, process it according to our advanced proprietary methods, assemble it specifically incorrectly, and the resulting sound quality will be far worse than using run-of-the-mill industrially sourced re-cycled copper which boasts no exotic purity at all. These types of tests prove without doubt that people have been asking the wrong questions and have been looking in the wrong place for sonic bliss.

We take pride in this proprietary knowledge which allows us to boost performance to unworldly levels far beyond what any fictitious 'nines race' advocate can even dream of achieving.

(2) The Heart

The heart of our solution is the special Firewall technology we have been constantly working on and perfecting for over a decade now. Due to the proprietary nature of the solution, we cannot delve too deeply into its every intricacy. But we can explain how it is made.

It is made by laser. Direct Metal Laser Sintering (DMLS), also known as Laser Powder Bed Fusion (LPBF), is an Additive Manufacturing (AM) technique designed to use a high power-density laser to melt and fuse metallic powders together. This process has the ability to fully weld the metal powder material into a solid three-dimensional part of any conceivable shape or form.

We are using the most advanced AM system called Direct Metal Laser Sintering (DMLS). Research on this process began in 1995 as a German research project at the Fraunhofer Institute. This new technology was first commercialized only in the year 2000.

Since the components are built layer by layer, it is possible to design organic geometries, internal features and challenging passages that could not be cast or otherwise machined.

A computer process slices the 3D CAD file data into many ~20 micrometer thick layers. The thin layers are, one by one, selectively smelted by the laser which is located in a tightly controlled atmosphere of argon gas. This is no simple desktop operation. Oxygen levels must be kept lower than 500PPM to prevent explosion. The high-power ytterbium fiber laser beam is intense enough to permit full welding of the particles to form solid metal, without creating a porous internal structure.

Any approach to the machinery must be made wearing protective gear, as seen below in an image of the very people working on our Firewall production.

Magnified many times, below you can see the implementation of our Firewall technology in conjunction with our special Entropic Process raw copper rods. Because the Firewall is made by laser, extremely fine details of design can be taken advantage of, resulting in a very sensitive part. It would be impossible for us to deliver this product and provide reliable long-term results in the exposed form as pictured below. Through simple usage, it would instantly bend or break up and lose its physical integrity. The special copper in this form is much like a soggy noodle which has been out in the sun for a few hours.

Careful assembly techniques need be implemented because any maladjusted move results in immediate compromise to this delicate solution. These techniques require special tooling custom manufactured for LessLoss to enable a rational assembly method and to keep costs down.

(3) The Soul

When the brains and heart come together, the soul of the device shines through.

This approach takes care of two things. Firstly, structural integrity of the sensitive components is maintained, even upon years of wear and tear. It is rock solid to the user, and yet remains liquid soft to the signal. Secondly, the lack of any colored material surrounding the active portion of the Firewall guarantees the most natural sound quality possible. You will recognize this sonic benefit through comparison with vacuum tube parts and their surrounding vacuum.

As in any refined balancing act, too much of any one ingredient will inevitably color the outcome. The closest thing to a total absence of coloration is the least electro-magnetically filtering material, which means in this case absolutely pure transparency. This allows the perfect conditions for the Firewall for Headphones to really shine. This you will instantly hear.

Of course, with a solution so effective and mature, we need a flexible umbilical of the same uncompromising performance to feed current to it. C-MARC™ Entropic Process cable is the only choice for this, of course. Nothing even comes close in terms of purity, naturalness, and silence of operation. Use it to bridge your headphone amp to the Firewall for Headphones. This cable features the necessary four pin XLR terminations.

One listen, and you'll see why.

Is the Firewall for Headphones merely an application of the existing Firewall 640x for power?

Absolutely not. We always strive our hardest to offer only the latest, most advanced art we are capable of. The Firewall for Headphones is a different beast altogether and these two should not be confused.