Master & Dynamic - MORNINGCALM JUNE 2018

PDF VERSION

RHAPSODY IN SILVER

Master & Dynamic constructs headphones for architects.

A condensed version of this piece appeared in MorningCalm magazine’s June 2018 issue.

Listen. The hills are just faintly squeaking with the sound of music. Play music through a pair of cheap earbuds, and you’ll find that the tinny tune is often accompanied by an orchestra of animated phone calls and staccatoed by the persistent coughing of someone nearby.

With a good pair of headphones, all the noises of the city recede; you find your own private oasis. But while superb sound quality has long reigned supreme in the realm of hi-fi headphones, it was often at the expense of aesthetics. Then Master & Dynamic came along. 

Launched in New York in 2014, the company was inspired by a youthful passion for music that lies at the heart of the city’s own constant sonic reinvention. When Jonathan Levine saw the way his son was dedicating himself to producing music at just 16 years old, he built him a recording studio in his office. Knowing nothing about the audio industry, Levine was making his first foray into what would eventually lead to a successful headphones and speakers company. 

Since its founding, Master & Dynamic has been lauded by sound experts previously derisive of designer headphones heavy on style and light on substance. But when asked whether he’s now developed ultra-sensitive ears capable of picking up minute sonic subtleties, Levine laughs. “Not at all. I’m not an audiophile,” he says. “When I first got out of business school, I went to Wall Street — but got fairly bored. As a young man I wanted to be an architect, which I was talked out of. But I’ve always loved design. So in building Master & Dynamic, it felt like coming home to architecture.”

Much has been written about Master & Dynamic’s seemingly underdog triumph in a market oversaturated with heavy hitters formidable for their longevity. Beyerdynamic produced its first headphones in 1937, Sennheiser in 1945, Audio Technica in 1962, Bose in 1964. And then in 2008, of course, the ultimate status-symbol headphones rocked the industry. In 2014, then, what new blueprint could you draw up?

Levine considers this. “I think in many cases I was a little bit naïve,” he says. “I had been designing and developing and manufacturing products for close to 18 years or more by then, so I did have an understanding of how manufacturing and design worked, but had not been around headphones, for sure.” He recognizes that, in part, it was the fortune of timing. “In many ways, Beats is the best thing that ever happened to me,” he says. “If it wasn’t for Beats, I wouldn’t have seen the opportunity in the marketplace. But the opportunity I saw was not to try to become the next Beats, but to become the next long-term heritage brand.”

Master & Dynamic knew it was green, and it knew the color could work for them. “We never take the easy path,” Levine says. “We really think that to enter and succeed in the category, sometimes you have to change the rules.” It wouldn’t try to reinvent the wheel. Instead it would do something arguably more nebulous and difficult: create something elegant. “Most of my team, even in the early days, worked in different fields, whether it’s design or fashion or others. Not headphones,” he says. “I just got very lucky, which happens a lot in this business — serendipity. I wasn’t looking for a chief product officer; I just happened to be introduced to a very talented young man who’s been with me for four years. He spent 10 years at Bose previous to that.” 

The talented young man is Drew Stone Briggs, who Levine says disagrees with him on luck playing any part in success. For Briggs it’s all about skill, and his skill set has helped design headphones that marry comfort and sophistication without sacrificing audiophile-grade sound. At the top of the company’s line of headphones is the MW60, which features a leather headband that connects to memory-foam ear pads covered in soft lambskin. It uses 45mm neodymium drivers, powerful yet lightweight. Perhaps most attractive of all, the headphones are wireless. The MW60’s battery lasts around 16 hours, and the Bluetooth signal range is impressive, allowing you to put several thick apartment walls and closed doors between you and your music source before the sound starts to sputter. This is largely due to the placement of the company’s patent-pending antenna, which, rather than being hidden inside the headphones, makes up a part of the aluminum frames that edge the ear pads. Levine cites this as an example of how good product design is indistinguishable from good sound design — which sounds obvious, but is often not the case with headphone brands. “That’s the tension between what we want to go from a design point of view and the benefits that we get from a technological view,” he says.

Nor does Master & Dynamic rush to pack in every hot feature available in their competitors’ products. One that’s notably missing is active noise cancellation — once almost synonymous with Bose headphones, now offered by most brands as a matter of course. Like Bluetooth wireless, active noise cancellation has come a long way. It’s not only gotten more precise in identifying and cancelling dynamic ambient sounds, but also casts less of a muddying shroud over the music you want to enjoy. Still, Master & Dynamic will only include the feature in the line-up when it’s truly earned its place. The company has been hard at work on its own implementation, and Levine surmises that consumers will hear the Master & Dynamic difference by the end of this year. 

In the end, metal, leather and a discerning vision intertwine in a product that’s undeniably stylish. But Master & Dynamic isn’t aiming for mere style, hopelessly mired in its own era; its ambition is timelessness. “There’s no group you go in front of that votes on your design and says, ‘Yes, this is now timeless, congratulations,’” Levine says. “For something to be timeless, people have to recognize it as something that looks and feels familiar. It has to be a balance of what came before and what’s new.” 

This timelessness is not just a polished final look but accumulates in the microscopic layers of technique. “In the companies I admire in my personal life, I can always see the effort that goes into what they do,” Levine says. “Sometimes it’s not even supposed to be consumer-facing. It’s just part of their DNA.” Levine is an avid watch collector, and Master & Dynamic recently rolled out a stunning redesign of their headphones in collaboration with Leica. On the surface, there seems to be no meaty connection between the camera maker and Master & Dynamic — there’s no 3.5mm jack integration with the Leica SL forthcoming. But for Master & Dynamic, the particularity of the object is secondary to a shared goal of dignified design.

Levine mentions the attention to detail found in eyewear. The frames are the slim margin designers have to make a difference, whether in the curve of the temples or the barely noticeable maker’s mark etched near the inside of the hinges. It’s a touch Levine has adapted to his products. “If you notice on our headphones, we etch the letters M and D into places where people might not even see them,” he says. “But that’s important to us. While we’re focused on the audio market, I think all of our inspiration comes from outside the audio market.”

In 2017, Master & Dynamic launched its first speaker at the MoMA Design Store. Designed by architect Sir David Adjaye, each 16.5kg piece of concrete is created from a mold. “Everybody thought I was crazy,” Levine says, recalling the initial reaction to his idea for a concrete speaker. It was so crazy that it was selected as a 2018 CES Innovation Awards honoree. “The best thing someone can say to us is ‘impossible.’ Every time someone has said to me that it’s impossible, regarding one of the products we wanted to build, we actually do it and the outcome is pretty special,” he says.

Master & Dynamic is based in New York, and Levine’s boundary-pushing instincts must be in part influenced by where he lives — the birthplace of music genres that have left an indelible impact on the world. Put on headphones to seal off the sounds of NYC and instead soak yourself in the sounds of, well, NYC: Miles Davis, Simon & Garfunkel, Run-DMC. Artists then and now are raised by the city, whether they originally hail from it or not, listening to its cadence to add their own part to the overlapping canon. Leonard Cohen wrote one of his most famous songs in the Chelsea Hotel. In a poem, he mused, “I want to be lost among / your thoughts / the way you listen to New York City / when you fall asleep.”

“It’s a great city to build a company like this,” Levine says. “Beats is an LA company, Bose is a Massachusetts company, and you’ve got other competitors from Germany, Denmark and the UK. I really think we’re the first major headphone audio company out of New York. I really think that New York itself is rooting for us.” And Master & Dynamic roots for New York, starting in their own office. “We knew when we moved into our headquarters that we were going to have a recording studio, and we built it so that people could come in and use it,” he says. “Sit and write, mix, engineer, to put down vocals. We’ve had a great group of people come through over time.” He notes that there are much fewer recording studios today than there were in the past, but musicians can use the studios at Master & Dynamic free of charge. 

For years, too, the company has sponsored an arts program at a public charter school in Harlem. “The ethos of Master & Dynamic is that we want to engage with and support the masters of not just music but any sort of medium, as well as support and promote the dynamic up-and-comers,” Levine says. “Because at the end of the day, the luminaries in music used to be the young disruptors.” Asked about an artist in New York he’d like to work with, Levine says, “Definitely André 3000. He knows it, too. I think he’s just being coy.” It’s an obvious pair. No other headphones are so fresh, so clean.

But for all its eye-catching looks, Master & Dynamic knows that there’s a sense in which a good pair of headphones tries its best to disappear. Levine has often reminded people that he’s dedicated to the art of sound reproduction. “Which means that we don’t play with the mid-range, we don’t play with the bass, we don’t play with the highs,” he says, as if reciting a mantra writ in stone. He and his oldest son created a master playlist that encompasses all the genres beloved between them — classical, hip-hop, rock, blues — and tested rigorously between all the musical possibilities. Master & Dynamic is deeply pious about providing the sonic spit and image of an artist’s intent. “Which is why we’re genre agnostic,” Levine says. “I’ve actually met, through this business, a lot of those people who compliment me and say that they’ve listened to their songs a thousand times, and it’s never sounded quite as good as it sounded on our headphones. So that’s a very proud moment for me.”

What Master & Dynamic wants to give you most of all is space — an intimate corner of a very crowded world. And sometimes this space isn’t one of escape, but a place where you can really anchor yourself. Between the headphones you find room for introspection, and everything in the MW60 has been designed with this sort of immersion in mind. The lambskin ear pads melt away.

And you don’t have to stay put. By nature it’s a pair of headphones that pushes you out the door. You can wander with the absentminded purpose of a flaneur, hearing every hesitation and exhale in a song with near synesthetic clarity. As you wander each street and avenue, the city around you crumbles so you can build it up again.