This project is about acoustically transparent DIY 3D-printable headphones. They are designed to be used in combination with signal processing, either with binaural convolution or just a simple eq.

The design is kept simple and only requires 5 (+2) printed parts in total. Their acoustically transparent design makes them not only nice open back headphones but also perfectly suited for AR applications. If bass reproduction is more important than transparency, felt pads, acting like additional masses, can be put in front of the driver.

This repository relates to the open-acces paper "Ultralight circumaural open headphone", which was presented at the Audio Engineering Society Convention in May 2023 in Espoo, Finland. Therein, development process and measurements are documented. It can be found at https://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=22075

Plans and instructions to build them on your own are found below or will be added soon.

The main question considered in this project was how a headphone design could look like, if the benefits of equalization were considered in the development process from the start. In addition, since the work was intended to be a freely accessible DIY project, 3D printing was chosen as the manufacturing method to ensure feasibility and repairability.

• 3D printable design
• Optimized for mixed and virtual reality
• Great for listening to music
• Convertable to different needs (hear-through vs low-end)

To get started with building these headphones, follow these steps:

1. Clone or download this repository to your local machine.
2. Open the design files in your preferred 3D printing software.
3. Print the design using the recommended settings (to come, if not yet available)
4. Follow the assembly instructions provided in the repository to build the headphones together. (to come, if not yet available)

This project is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. See the LICENSE file for more information.

If you have any questions or feedback about this project, please contact me at [email protected].