Audio-Technica ATH-W5000

Cable Connectivity (11.59)

The Audio-Technica ATH-W5000s have just over 10 feet of cord for you to play around with. This is a solid length for a set of at-home headphones. Unless you live in some Victorian-era estate, the ATH-W5000s will be able to hook up to a system on the other side of the room.

Other than a long cord, however, the ATH-W5000s don’t offer much in terms of connectivity. The plug ends in a 1/4-inch jack and doesn’t come with an 1/8-inch adapter. This is annoying. Sure, chances are the people dropping $1000 on a set of headphones are going to connect to their $10,000 audio setup, which will only accept 1/4-inch plugs and will, in fact, self-destruct if it senses an iPod in the same room. With the abundance of lossless audio formats and more and more media players offering pristine playback, the ability to hook up to such a device would have been appreciated. If you want such functionality, you’ll have to make an additional purchase.

Portability (0.47)

The ATH-W5000s aren’t portable. First of all, they are absolutely gigantic. Secondly, fitting 10 feet of cord into a normal-sized pocket isn’t the easiest thing to do. Thirdly, the headphones will shift a lot as you move. We would recommend only using these headphones indoors.

The ATH-W5000s do come with a case, which should help you carry them safely from place to place. The interior of the case looks suspiciously like Dracula’s coffin.

Maintenance (4.00)

The ATH-W5000s are somewhat annoying to maintain, simply because their cup padding is a pain to put back on. Here’s a shot of the cups before you start randomly removing its pieces:

If you do decide to take off the pads (which we really don’t recommend given how annoying they are to refit) you will see this:

Beautiful. From here, you’ll need a thin Phillips-head screwdriver to get out all the screws. The big screws are really the only ones you need to worry about. These will remove the wooden backs, revealing this fuzzy scene:

And, while we’re here, one more picture with the fuzz removed. From here you can keep unscrewing. We weren’t able to, because they were screwed in really tightly and we didn’t want to risk stripping them, since they probably cost $40 themselves.

Other Features (5.00)

Battery

The ATH-W5000s do not require batteries to operate. Just plug them in and listen. For this we awarded them some points.