The classic headphones upgrade you should know about

The Koss Porta Pro headphones are one of the most iconic and popular designs in the history of audio equipment. The headphones were first released in 1984 in response to the rise of the Sony Walkman and aimed to translate the company’s audio prowess into a portable, affordable form factor.

The results were unmistakably odd. The collapsible headband, blue driver housings and striking shape meant you could spot them from a mile away. But Koss managed to deliver its trademark warm, bassy sound signature into an accessible product, and its retro-futuristic industrial design has never quite gone out of style.

Koss, which is still a family-run business headquartered in Milwaukee, sold the Porta Pro virtually unchanged for decades. At under $50, they remained a great option for on-the-go listening. But with the demise of the smartphone headphone jack, eventually a modern wireless update was an obvious move.

Going wireless

Unfortunately, Koss’s first attempt in 2018 was a whiff. Despite coming after Apple’s AirPods made their debut, the wireless Porta Pro relied on a cable that housed an inline remote and a battery that rested on the wearer’s neck. Between the awkward wearability and a persistently flashing blue LED, the feedback was generally scathing.

But recently, I found out that Koss released a radically updated version around a year ago, dubbed the Porta Pro Wireless 2.0. This feels like the sort of thing I should have noticed at the time, but apparently Koss didn’t feel the need to actually tell anyone about the new version. There’s a press release, sure, but for some reason the product got virtually no coverage in the usual channels.

Major sites like The Verge didn’t follow up on withering coverage of the 1.0 model. You won’t find reviews on major audio equipment outlets. Even the thread on legendarily obsessive audiophile forum Head-Fi has just 13 posts. (For comparison, the thread on my own Koss go-tos, the relatively obscure KPH30i, has 392.)

The Porta Pro Wireless 2.0 is, however, freely available to order on Amazon for $99, so obviously I had to check it out.

Nailed it

I am pleased to report that Koss actually nailed everything with this 2.0 edition. These are, for mostly better and occasionally worse, exactly what you would have expected from a wireless set of Porta Pro headphones in the first place.

Most importantly, the dangly neck wire has been banished. It’s now actually accurate to call these “wireless.” You lose the controls on the inline remote, sure, but I think most people would take that tradeoff. And while the design of the cans themselves remains the same as the original, the lack of wire makes them much more practical to wear.

On the tech side of things, Koss has thankfully upgraded the 2.0 model to USB-C for charging. There is still a pulsating LED that indicates connectivity, but it’s tucked away on the underside of the right earpiece and isn’t bright enough to be an annoyance. And unlike the previous model, these support analog audio through a cable when the battery dies.

Porta Pro headphones were never known for their sturdy build quality—in fact, they’re positively flimsy. But the upside of this is that they’re very comfortable and can be squeezed down easily into a small circular footprint, which Koss takes advantage of with the helpful inclusion of a compact round hard case.

As for the sound, well, they sound like Porta Pro headphones, which is to say they sound awesome for what they are. They’re not exactly reference-level audio hardware, but the thumping bass and smoothed-off treble is a great fit for rock, rap and beyond, while the semi-open-back design allows for sound that feels wider and less claustrophobic than noise-cancelling Bluetooth cans.

The Porta Pro Wireless 2.0 does still feel pretty retro, for better and worse. There’s the lightweight plastic design, of course, which I imagine Koss correctly deemed to be nonnegotiable. But there’s also the lack of modern features that are standard on headphones these days, like easy pairing. Getting these up and running on your phone is a roughly equivalent experience to using a Bluetooth earpiece in your car 15 years ago.

If you’ve never used Porta Pro headphones before, I should also point out that these are not necessarily the most versatile headphones around. The on-ear, semi-open-back design is what enables the surprisingly wide soundstage, but it also means they offer virtually no sound isolation, and your audio is going to leak out to people around you. In other words, don’t plan to use them on a plane.

Still, overall the Porta Pro Wireless 2.0 does exactly what it ought to—these are Porta Pro headphones, but wireless. Maybe the muted launch was because Koss was stung by the reception to the previous wireless model. If so, I think that was a mistake. That was a bad product, and this is not.

I think the world should know that you can, in fact, now buy a great wireless version of Porta Pro headphones, which remain a genuine design classic to this day. I’m honestly not sure why this was news to me, but if it’s news to you too, my work here is done.

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