Sennheiser announces thing, refuses to reveal name, price or release date

However, we can safely say it's a headphone amp made of marble, with headphones that put out frequencies audible only to bats, and it won't be cheap

Last night in London,top headphonesand mics brand Sennheiser put on a concert with the German young peoples' orchestra, playing the works of Reich, Glass, Ligeti and others and then accompanying Pound Shop Kate Bush, Imogen Heap.

But it also announced a pair of flagship headphones so special that it actually barely announced anything about it at all. Was this the canniest PR sinceSteve Jobs' first "One more thing"?Or was it quite perplexing and vaguely annoying? We don't know.

What we do know is that it's a headphone amp where the electronics are embedded in a huge slab of marble, "the same as Michelangelo would have used," (had he been a headphone engineer).

We know that it has a frequency range from 8Hz to 100KHz, which is miles beyond the range of human hearing in both directions, but very good news for audiophile bats at the top end, and elephants, supposedly, at the bass end. And we know that atomised platinum is involved in the headphones part of it, somehow. We also know that Sennheiser deliberately lit it so it was really hard to photograph.

The lid on the headphones box and the valves to the right of it rise up at the press of a button. This is what it looks like with the power turned off:

So that's nice. What we don't know is what it's called, how much it will cost and when it's coming out. A Sennheiser spokesman did coyly state that it might be produced at "a rate of one per week" and that it would come out "within months rather than years".

He also pointedly asked, "Where do you think Sennheiser currently sits in the market?" To which we said, "Not at the super-high, luxury goods end", to which he sort of said, "Mmmm," although he might have just been clearing his throat.

So, we reckon about £50K, out by Christmas and it might be called something like "Xerxes" or "Zeus", because the last venture Sennheiser made into the luxury market was with the Orpheus, which cost about £10,000 back in 1991.

The launch, at London's very presitigious and subtly marble-festooned Westminster Central Hall was an extremely swanky affair, and this is clearly not a product for the masses. It's for Dr Dre himself, not for people who wear his headphones. Although if you got lackeys to wheel it down the road behind you, along with a generator, while you wore the headphones, you would have the most blinging "portable" music system of all time, homes.

The concert, introduced by the Sennheiser brothers themselves (Andreas and Daniel), was excellent by the way, and was "recorded in 3D" for posterity. T3 left completely baffled, but impressed nonetheless.

Duncan Bell

Duncan is the former lifestyle editor of T3 and has been writing about tech for almost 15 years. He has covered everything from smartphones to headphones, TV to AC and air fryers to the movies of James Bond and obscure anime. His current brief is everything to do with the home and kitchen, which is good because he is an excellent cook, if he says so himself. He also covers cycling and ebikes – like over-using italics, this is another passion of his. In his long and varied lifestyle-tech career he is one of the few people to have been a fitness editor despite being unfit and a cars editor for not one but two websites, despite being unable to drive. He also has about 400 vacuum cleaners, and is possibly the UK's leading expert on cordless vacuum cleaners, despite being decidedly messy. A cricket fan for over 30 years, he also recently become T3's cricket editor, writing about how to stream obscure T20 tournaments, and turning out some typically no-nonsense opinions on the world's top teams and players.

Before T3, Duncan was a music and film reviewer, worked for a magazine about gambling that employed a surprisingly large number of convicted criminals, and then a magazine called Bizarre that was essentially like a cross between Reddit and DeviantArt, before the invention of the internet. There was also a lengthy period where he essentially wrote all of T3 magazine every month for about 3 years. 

A broadcaster, raconteur and public speaker, Duncan used to be on telly loads, but an unfortunate incident put a stop to that, so he now largely contents himself with telling people, "I used to be on the TV, you know."