Choosing Your Wood: Introducing the Lawton Audio ToneWheel
To help you make the best possible selection for your Custom Chambers, we’ve created our cool new ToneWheel. Each wood species brings its own special tonal character to your phones. With so many woods, we are guaranteed to have something that meets both your aesthetic and sonic desires. So how will you ever decide?
Easy! Just use our ToneWheel to quickly determine what kind of listener you are, and then choose from among those woods best suited for you. Click HERE to visit our ToneWheel.
Our Cups Fit Fostex / Denon / Massdrop / E-MU!
Our Chambers fit a variety of different headphones. Here is a complete list of makes and models that are ready for a pair of Lawton woodies:
More Than Just A Pretty Face
Yes, our Chambers are the best-looking enclosures ever seen on any headphone. No one else has ever used woods of the quality you will find in our cups. It has taken us years to search out and collect the rarest and best examples of these natural ToneWoods. No other wooden headphone has a finish that compares to the 12-layer, hand-rubbed mirror-like surface adorning all our Chambers. It takes almost a month just to complete this radical finish alone, allowing it to dry and cure in between the many coats. But that’s what it takes to achieve the signature depth of figure and saturation of color inherent in our woodies.
But our Chambers are about so much more than pure beauty and pride of ownership. They have been meticulously conceived and shaped to bring out the absolute best sonics from your Fostex or Denon. They are also loaded with innovative features and materials not found in any stock cups from the original manufacturer.
Lawton Audio Headphone Chambers: Cups Matter!
At Lawton Audio, we know that every part of your headphone adds to or impacts its character and performance, even if the manufacturers don’t. When you approach the humble headphone “cup” seriously as a critical component, as we do, you quickly see that it actually has several key functions.
- It must act as a kind of speaker cabinet, carefully coupling with the driver to prevent stray resonances from muddying up the sound.
- It must also perform as a sort of musical instrument body for your driver; carefully tuned and shaped to ensure a pleasing musical experience.
- Finally, in a sense, your headphone cups almost become the “venue” or “hall” in which the musical event you are listening to takes place. It has to sound big and realistic, wide-open and coherent to be convincing.
Hi-Tech, Hand-Crafted Speaker Cabinets for Your Fostex
Loudspeaker manufacturers have long understood the importance of cabinets and housings to allow their drivers to operate at their peak. We’ve taken some of these principles and applied them to our Custom Wood Chambers, which you can think of as your headphones’ speaker cabinets. Perfecting the overall shape and form, interior volume and depth, and combining that with the special materials we apply to the inside has enabled us to unleash the performance of the driver and the maximize the quality of its output.
Compared to the stock cups, we knew we could better tune our Chambers for acoustic qualities. Our state of the art equipment lets us cut a very carefully designed, complex shape. The resulting fit is tight, solid and precise, locking into place with the Fostex driver unit.
Our Chambers (especially in combination with our Tune-Up) truly enable the amazing Fostex drivers to perform at their absolute peak potential, improving focus, enhancing speed, clarity, snap, and precision.
Big Cups Throw A Big Soundstage
Customers constantly remark on how much “bigger” their headphone sounds with a pair of our woodies on them. That is one the many advantages of our deeper and more voluminous cups when compared to the relatively shallow stock cups. Our Chambers come equipped with a specially designed acoustic foam lining on the interior that subtly absorbs reflections inside the cups, preventing “sea shell” reverberant sound, and enabling your closed headphone to sound more open and transparent. If you like a big and deep soundstage for a more “out of head” listening experience, our Chambers will deliver.
Deep Bass From Deep Enclosures
Another benefit to our bigger cups is an appreciable enhancement to the depth and fullness of the sound. You can expect a more substantial and realistic presentation with a hearty and deep, but not intrusive bass presence. The materials we apply to the insides of the cups help keeps the bass tight and focused, and most of all fast and responsive.
The Alchemy of Wood. The Magic of Mother Nature’s ToneWoods
Your ability to select the ideal wood for your Custom Chambers lets you enjoy an entirely new kind of enhancement for your personal listening pleasure. Different woods imbue their own subtle nuances to the overall musical presentation or “feel” of your headphones; just as different woods do when used to make the same musical instrument. Luthiers, or musical instrument makers, have long identified those wood species that produce the most desirable timbres. These are known as “ToneWoods”.
All of our Lawton Audio Chambers are made from these illustrious ToneWoods, selected from the highest grades available, heavily seasoned and stable for years, a process that adds to the consistency of tone and overall performance. You could choose by eye and be happy with any of our cups, but we have developed a simple tool for those who want to tailor their choice to better match their desired sonic goals.
Timber Timbres. What’s Your Flavor? The ToneWheel Knows.
We make it easy for you to find just the right pair of Chambers. You don’t have to know anything about wood or understand technical audiophile jargon to quickly and easily determine which pair of cups is right for you. To simplify your choice, we have grouped our woods into 4 Types that share similar physical and musical characteristics. Click HERE to see how our innovative new ToneWheel Wood Selector makes your decision fun and easy.
5 Types Of Wood in 3 Grades of Beauty.
You may have noticed a little graphic in the corner of our pics of our cups and headphones. These 2 little boxes inform you which Type and Grade of Wood is being featured. Type refers to sonic characteristics of the wood, while Grade refers to their degree of beauty (and their price). For example, let’s say the picture shows an Exhibition Grade pair of Maple cups. Maple is a Type 1 wood. The graphic will show:
Alternatively, let’s say the pic is of a Museum Grade pair of Cocobolo. Cocobolo is a Type 4 wood:
As a result, you can quickly and easily see whether a wood pictured is your correct Type, and if it would fit inside your budget depending on their Grade.
Check Out Our Gallery Sections To Find More Pics Of Your Wood
We have tons of great pics of our Chambers and our Headphones to help you decide which wood is the right one for you. Check out the Chambers Galleries HERE, and the Headphones Galleries HERE.
How To Order
Ordering is easy. Simply submit your request via e-mail through our Order Page, and we will reply promptly.
Because each order is unique, and each customer has a special set of requirements, we do not have a shopping cart system or “Buy It Now” option.
When you finalize your order with us, you will be sent an e-mail invoice enabling payment.
We accept credit/debit cards and Paypal.
For general questions or enquiries, please Contact Us.
Send Us Your Phones! We Ship World-Wide.
Lawton Audio is based in the good ol’ USA, and we happily serve a world-wide clientele. We’ve made headphones for people from every corner of the globe. We’ll happily answer all your international shipping questions.
Instrument, Exhibition, & Museum Grade Chambers For Fostex & Denon
For each type of wood we offer, our Chambers come in three Grades, Instrument, Exhibition or Museum. All of our Chambers share the exact same design, features, and deluxe finish. The only difference between them is in the physical beauty (or Grade) of the wood used to make them.
As gorgeous as our entry-level Instrument Grade cups look, as you climb up to Exhibition and then Museum Grade, you reach the absolute best and most stunning stock available for that particular species of wood.
Our Instrument Grade Chambers feature quality woods from billets that were specially selected for use in the making of fine musical instruments, drawn from the absolute cream of the commercially available supply.
Our Exhibition Grade Chambers are made from specially obtained private reserve stock, featuring premium figure, grain and color. The industry labels such wood “exhibition grade” for its rarity, beauty, and desirability.
Our top Museum Grade Chambers feature true heirloom woods from amazing one-of-a-kind boards. These Chambers truly epitomize and demonstrate the best qualities of that wood, with textbook grain patterns and coloration.
Take a Look Inside Our Latest Chambers
Our chambers themselves are amazingly complex pieces of precision wood turning as you can see from the inside view. Let’s look at what’s new.
We have added more internal volume to our new Chambers without greatly increasing size or weight. The internal chamber dimensions are carefully tuned to bring out the best in your Fostex or Denon, enhancing their overall acoustic properties.
We are now employing a new damping compound inside our cups, the latest in materials science, vastly superior to the commercial products used in the past.
We also replace the stock batting material Fostex uses inside their cups with our own purpose-made acoustic foam. Our material works subtly, absorbing frequencies evenly across the spectrum, for less fatiguing sound that is present, clean and clear. Cups treated with this foam sound more open and spacious as well.
Immaculate Lacquer Finish. No Dyes or Stains!
We never cheat by staining or dyeing our woods to enhance second-quality material. Every breathtaking wood you see on Lawton Audio’s website is just how Mother Nature made them, brought to glorious life with a beautiful natural finish.
Our 10-step lacquer finish is all-new and improved, featuring an ultra-high-gloss mirror-like sheen. These are the same preferred high-end materials used by the best musical instrument makers. Strong and durable, the new finish will give you years of beauty and protection.