Just last Tuesday I sat in my audio den, yawning, and a little perturbed as I pulled open another box of free audio equipment shipped in by an adoring manufacturer. The U.S. Postal Service slammed the morning mail against the front door, a pile which included a flock of news releases and technical reports on the latest audio components. I cross-faded the Boston album to Journey, and leafed through the releases to see if any of the components were held by girls in bathing suits.

Halfway through, my eye caught news of a hew set of stereo headphones. Headphones. I haven't thought about headphones much in the last few years. Except for airline pilots and dentists, headphones are like trip glasses: a relic of a faraway time when Sgt. Pepper, headphones, and drugs induced sonic dimensions and delusions.

More recently, I wore headphones a lot when I was around Lou Reed and his binaural odyssey, butloften wondered if if wasn't just a fad Lou had for wearing sunglasses and headphones in public.

Besides Lou, pilots, and dentists, people must still buy headphones. Of course! Thafs how we get to the point in my story, although I confess I stretched it there to get here.

At Studio 54, very few people wear headphones. Whistles and moustaches, yes. Headphones, not often. Which must be a bit of a problem for the headphone biz.

I'd need a strait jacket way before headphones to listen to Donny Osmond or Helen Reddy.

That leaves "The Roadies' Song" as headphone material. (Did I get the apostrophe in the right place, Jackson?)

How many people still listen to rock 'n' roll? Not as many as did. And of these fragmented teens, how many need headphones to listen to the Clash? 1 don't even need a hi-fi for that. Oh sure, Tubes and Kansas fans spend a lot of time listening on headphones to Ted Nugent. I admit that. I interviewed over 200 Kiss fans and several of them told me they'd been in a record store that had headphones, but they weren't hooked up.

Headphones need a good gimmick. In the 60's .they had a drug culture. The only fad they've had going in the 70's is binaural sound. You see, Lou Reed uses a recording system that, when played back on open-air headphones (headphones without solid metal cups isolating the ears), produces the audio illusion of actually sitting in a hall listening to a band. You feel/hear like you're there. The only problem is that you have to wear headphones, and like Lou Reed.

Some other time I'll delve into the basic correctness of binaural sound—treble spreads and distorts, bass collects and rumbles, like a bi-amp system running mono from 400 down and stereo above. I doubt binaural sound is the gimmick to bring headphones into vogue.

Headphones are of value to the serious audioer. They're usjed to monitor tape dupes, edit tape, make tapes from records, and other tech events. They let the wearer concentrate on the signal. But more normal hi-fi enthusiasts hardly use their headphones, except if they have to listen without disturbing somebody else.

There is one terrific use for headphones. Again, Lou Reed (somewhat of a headphone maven as you've probably gathered) turned me on to this. If you hate to fly, headphones jare wonderful. The right headphones and cassette deck blots out all noise. Lou and I, each wearing headphones and.carryina cassette decks, flew from Frankfurt to London one afternoon, and completely drowned out all the ugly sounds that traumatize during take-off, flight, and landing. There's one problem: only Uher makes a cassette deck that pumps enough watts out of the headphone jack so the sound in your ears is loud enough to cover all background noise. I've never run into a Sqny or other Japanese cassette deck that does that.

Do I own headphones? Yes. I've got a pair of Koss HV/1, retail list $49.95. I've had them for ten years. When I get tangled in their coiled audio cord, I occasionally seek vengeance by bouncing them off the nearest wall. But despite abusive conditions they've performed admirably, and they still work well. Which, I guess, says something about headphones from a reputable manufacturer. In the same period of time I've burned qut a couple of amps, including a Kenwood KA-6004 (and shame on them for that), and tom up several types of speakers.

As you've probably guessed, writing a column like this takes weeks of research and hours of drafting and re-drafting. Well, last night I took a break before the final rewrite. I had dinner with my friend Deane Zimmerman (she also owns Koss HV/ls) at a Japanese restaurant on Columbus Avenue, between the miso and the teriyaki, I looked out the window and saw a guy with a moustache wearing a set of radio headphones and leisurely roller skating down the street.

Should you own headphones? Well, you should at least think about it. Ultimately, it depends on how serious you are about listening to records. Rock artists no longer try to dazzle us with stereo-mono tricks that used to make headphone listening mandatory. v But headphones are useful for critical audio evaluation.

And if you shop around, you probably can find a pair to match the color of your roller skates.