Headphone Hooks
858 words | ~ 5 min read | Jun 22, 2020 | last modified Jun 22, 2020 | diy
I did not set out in life to be an audiophile, but at some point in life you look around and realize that you’ve spent hundreds of dollars on headphones and developed strong opinions on their quality, and at that point it seems kind of silly to deny that you’re an audophile. So.
I have three main sets of headphones that I keep at my desk: Sennheiser HD 280 Pro, Bose QC35 ii, and Sennheiser HD 6XX (Massdrop edition). These all have different characteristics and serve different purposes:
- the HD 280s are wired headphones* with very good passive sound attenuation, and I’ve owned them for long enough that the original headband pad completely shredded, so it’s been replaced with a crochet pad I made. The earpads are also coming unglued but I’m procrastinating on replacing them. These were my daily driver headphones for walking around campus and doing work at my desk when my dorm was loud, which was a lot of the time (my dorm had other social properties that I liked enough for the noise to be worthwhile). They clamp tightly to my head in such a way that I get headaches from prolonged use; glasses choice matters a lot for this (my current computer glasses frames were carefully selected to be as comfortable as possible for wearing headphones). This tight clamping gives them better isolation properties.
- the Bose headphones are wireless noise-canceling headphones. I wear these when there’s a lot of environmental noise and the HD 280s don’t quite cut it. I don’t like to wear wireless headphones when I can avoid it, but admittedly they are a lot better for walking around campus with (the HD 280s have this incredibly long and inconvenient cable and I developed a habit of spinning it around, which was probably dangerous/annoying for other hallway users).
- the HD 6XX are my most recent headphone purchase, because I realized I had like $60 in Massdrop credits due to delayed keycap sets** and wanted to get myself a nice graduation/birthday present. They are open-back headphones, because my new apartment is generally pretty quiet, and this bothers me less than noise canceling/attenuation for prolonged periods of time. It’s also nice to be able to hear my roommates when they’re yelling for me. These are my new daily driver headphones for doing work. Open-back headphones also theoretically sound nicer/more “open”.
Of course, I only have the one set of ears, so the headphones not in use have to go somewhere. Previously, I was keeping all of these headphones piled up on a table near my desk. This was annoying, and made it hard to put other things on the table; they’d also always end up on top of other items I keep on that table, like my stapler and tape dispenser. Since headphones are sort of a funky shape, the common solution to the problem of headphone storage is the headphone hook, which is typically a cheap plastic hook with a sticky backing that you glue onto your desk somewhere. I had a headphone hook stuck to my desk in my old dorm room, and it was ugly and felt a bit flimsy, especially since I kept piling multiple sets of headphones onto it. Due to the furniture geometry, it also got in the way when I was moving out and had to pull my bookshelf away from the wall to rescue some stuff that fell behind it.
Therefore, my new headphone hook solution was to buy three foldable wall-mount aluminum clothes hooks and a roll of double-sided VHB tape. The set of three hooks cost ~$10 and the tape roll was 16ft for ~$20. Of course, I didn’t use anywhere near the whole roll; I have practically the whole thing left for future endeavors to perma-stick things to other things. In my new room geometry, there are no pieces of furniture being blocked by these hooks, but they’re foldable anyway so I can easily get them out of the way if that changes. The hooks are stuck to the side of my loft bed ladder in a visually pleasing vertical line, which makes them all easy to access. They’re also close enough to my laptop that I can leave the headphones plugged in while hanging them on the hook and the cable doesn’t get in the way of anything else. I’m very pleased with this solution.
I wrote the first draft of this post on Jun 8. I’ve been using these hooks for a good few weeks now, and they’re great. Unfortunately, this didn’t solve the perpetual-table-clutter problem, but at least the clutter is made of other stuff now – progress?
* I am never sure how to deal with plural “headphones” grammatically. the HD 280s are? the HD 280 is a headphones? the HD 280 is a headphone?
** Group-buy keycap sets are inevitably delayed. Massdrop being an experienced group-buy manager, sometimes they do in fact deliver things on time, but I am a big fan of SA profile keycaps, and the SA production line has been very backed up lately. And Massdrop gives me a $10 credit every time. >:)