This from All Access:

-------------------------Headphone Inventor Dies-------------------------

In the spirit of those famous KOSS billboards, it's fair to say the company exists, at least in part, beKoss of MARTIN LANGE JR., writes LEE ARNOLD on his blog. In 1958, LANGE was the engineer who developed the prototype for the first KOSS Stereophone, inspired by JOHN C. KOSS SR.'s idea for personal stereo headphones.

The rest is headphone history.

"MARTY LANGE was instrumental in the development of the first SP/3Stereophone," said KOSS, founder and now chairman of the KOSS CORP. "His creativity and dedication were critical to the business we built together."

LANGE died of natural causes last week in hospice care at his GLENDALE home. He was 82.

first one I got was the Koss "red devil"!!not that good,but bettersound than cheap speakers!!!!

> it's fair to say the company exists, at least in part, beKoss of MARTIN LANGE JR.

Tee-hee! Since headphones with one transducer for each ear had been around for many years before 1958, I am very surprised that nobody else had thought of wiring the transducers independent of one another before that.

When I was a very young man I spent most of the summer doing lawn jobs in the neighborhood (around 1967-68 time) Saved up over $100. I grew up in NE Portland not far from the one AND only Radio Shack in the state of Oregon, on 42nd
Street in the Hollywood district.

I spent $99.95 and bought a Panasonic AM-FM-FM stereo radio. It was cool – real wood like speakers. But the best part was about a week later - plugging my first set of KOSS Headphones – Don’t remember the Model but they were brown-tan color and were just what I needed. Was
able to be and my room and tune-out my parents and my brother asking pesky questions!

And with those I remember listening to KPAM-FM and hearing Dick Jenkins and I believe Craig Walker (1967-68) before he went to KGW..

I had my own radio station via Walky-talky. I believe with the help of my friends at Radio Shack I was able to adapt the KOSS headphones

I bet KOSS inspired a lot of future radio broadcasters!

My mother had a fit! She thought I would blow out my hearing!!! I did not turn up the volume rally loud,just comfofrtable!!!

PRO 4 AA'S BABY!! They were fantastic cans in the 70's until the pads wore out. Then it was like wearing a vice on your head!!

PRO 4 AAA's were never as good in my opinion.

I loved those Pro 4AAs...but they didn't hold up to the repetitive taking on and off that a jock does. Pieces would fall off of them and the wires would short. They sealed beautifully... until those pads wore out - and then the squealing began. Not to mention they weighed at least 9,000 pounds. You could almost hear your neck vertebrae rupturing during a talk set.

My favorite since the 80s have been the Sony MDR V600s.

or one or more of the wires break near the plug, and they become intermittant!!??

Two schools of DJ thought on headphones.

1) I don't care what they sound like. I just want to hear when to talk. For those jocks ANY old ratty earphone thing would do.

2) I want to hear the music and my voice mixing with the station and I want it to sound GOOD. That required volume to overpower the natural sound of your voice in your skull bones. That volume meant feedback in front of an open mic and THAT meant ear-sealing cushions were a must.

That was me. And Parker. And lots of us. And the Pro 4AA's were the state of the art in the 70's.

Because they were not meant for the rough and tumble world of the top 40 jock they had a predictable failure pattern. First to go, the plug would develop a short from all the in and out. Then the wires up top from one ear to the other would short. Then the cushions would fail.

Replacement ear cushions had to be purchased from Koss, but the other repairs were done in the field by friendly engineers or starving DJ's. New plugs, zip cord or Belden 8451 for cables and duct tape to re-assemble the headband were all common field modifications.

I had a chance to hear some "new" Pro 4AA's not long ago and I must say that the Sony MDR series is superior in every way, but for awhile the heavy Koss Pro 4AA's were as good as it got.

I kept my KGW/ KING pair for a long time until the barn mice got em. Great memories.

He actually died months earlier but was held together with long pieces of electrical tape stolen from the engineering department.

A few months ago after another of those "what headphones are the best, and all those we have suck" discussions with our on-air people, I was looking for a set of headphones to use as a baiss for comparison. I bought a pair of Pro 4AAs. No one likes them....not even this old guy...but we used them to find some we did like, and Murdock strikes again. Sony MDR was everyone's choice. I put the Koss away in my equipment filing cabinet....along with some casettes, reel to reel tapes, carts, etc.

Speaking of headphone volume - Murdock, time for you to post the story of how you and Rick Miller temporarily thwarted Emmett Bernard's plan to save our ears via OSHA standards.

(Hint: The story ends with resin in the patch bay... and the Chief Engineer from KFRC taking a picture of it!)

Emmett was a very very good studio engineer and took his job very seriously. When informed of OSHA's regulations about sound pressure levels in the work environment he ginned up a way to measure SPL's delivered by headphones to DJ's ears.

As I recall, the Emmett Labs test jig had a microphone that went between the earphones. And some ping-pong balls.

At any rate, he measured the maximum SPL allowed to be produced and de-rated the headphone amp in the main on-air studio so that it could produce up to that volume and NO MORE.

And it wasn't near loud enough.

When they built out KGW AM at 1501 SW Jefferson almost all of the actual audio components were in the rack room(Gordy's production room)and were terminated in a huge patch panel with the usual connections normalled. Everything went through there.

Rick and I were trying to patch something one day when we realized what we were looking at. CR Monitor Amp #1 In/Out. CR Monitor #2 In/Out. CR Headphone Amp In/Out.

Hmmmm.

CR Monitor #2 was an unused spare, so we repatched and used that amp for the headphone monitor channel. Plenty of volume now.

Worked great. Until we forgot to unpatch one night and he found the 6 or seven patch cords nad pads and whatnot that we had slammed together to make it work. He took one look at it and filled the key patch point with epoxy glue so we couldn't get at it.

Game to Emmett.

I'm unclear as to whether he ever did find out what we did after that, which involved me bringing in a headphone amp of my own, hiding it in the furniture back by a turntable pre-amp and running our own pirate headphone monitoring channel.

I left that amp there when I transferred to Seattle, where Harrison Klein had a much more modern view of headphone amps and had a massive Pioneer amp sitting on top of the cart machines at KING. For all I know that little amp may still be in some KGW warehouse, in that furniture hidden by the box full of sand that the turntable was mounted on.

> At any rate, he measured the maximum SPL allowed to be produced and de-rated the headphone amp in
> the main on-air studio so that it could produce up to that volume and NO MORE.
>
> And it wasn't near loud enough.

OUCH! This seems to imply that when listening to headphones, it is very easy to exceed the volume levels at which hearing damage starts to happen. I hope that I'm wrong.

I have a related story to share from my days at WITR (a university radio station). At that station, there was a guy who did a techno show where he would beat-match and mix the music live on the air. This show was done from our backup studio, which had a pair of variable-speed turntables.

The board in the backup studio was a mid 80s vintage UREI console with a built-in monitor amplifier, that was probably about 10 Watts per channel. Given the small size of the room, I would have imagined that turning up the volume all the way would make things unbearably loud for any person with a functional sense of hearing! (For the techies amongst us, the amplifier was built around a pair of those 5 pin TO-220 power ICs. Although I can't remember the exact part number, this was a "cousin" of the LM383 that Radio Shack carried years ago, except that this IC was designed to operate on a split supply.)

One morning, after the techno show, I came into the station, only to smell a burnt smell in the backup studio and to see a note that said something like, "Amplifier dead -- (signed) [the techno DJ]." After talking to the guy and examining the damage, the story came together. The techno guy said that he couldn't get the sound in that studio "loud enough to mix." After suffering through this frustration for one show, he decided that he would bring in his own amplifier and hook it up to the room speakers. Unfortunately, when he disconnected the speakers from the studio console, the bare wire ends from one of the channels shorted together, blowing out the amplifier. Thank goodness that his aural machismo didn't blow up the puny monitor speakers in that studio! I was never able to figure out how in the Hell he didn't run into problems with the monitor speakers feeding back into the turntables, with how loud the volume must have been in there (or how damaged his hearing must have been).

You know, I think it'd be really cool if ol' Emmett found his way onto pdxradio. I'd love to ask him about that punch-button news board, which was a real trick to make sound smooth. Last time I saw him was at Flipper's memorial, and he looked exactly the same. Emmett, you out there?