Download top and best high-quality free Earphone PNG Transparent Images backgrounds available in various sizes. To view the full PNG size resolution click on any of the below image thumbnail.

License Info: Creative Commons 4.0 BY-NC

Headphones are a pair of tiny loudspeaker speakers worn over the user’s ears on or around the head. They’re electroacoustic transducers, which translate an electrical signal into sound. In contrast to a loudspeaker, which broadcasts sound into the open air for everyone around to hear, headphones allow a single user to listen to an audio source secretly. Earphones, earphones, and cans are all terms used to describe headphones. A band around the top of the head holds circumaural (‘around the ear’) and supra-aural (‘over the ear’) headphones in place. Earbuds or earpieces, for example, are discrete devices that insert into the user’s ear canal. Bone conduction headphones, which wrap around the back of the head and rest in front of the ear canal, leaving the ear canal open, are a third kind. A headset is a telecommunications device that combines a headphone and a microphone.

Headphones link to a signal source such an audio amplifier, radio, CD player, portable media player, mobile phone, video game console, or electronic musical instrument through a cable or wireless technology like Bluetooth, DECT, or FM radio. The earliest headphones were created in the late 1800s for telephone operators to wear in order to keep their hands free. Initially, the audio quality was poor, but the advent of high-fidelity headphones was a step forward.

Headphones come with a variety of audio reproduction quality options. Headsets built for phone use often do not have the same high fidelity as audiophile-grade versions designed for music listening. Cable-connected headphones often include a 1/4 inch (6.35mm) or 1/8 inch (3.5mm) phone port for connecting to the audio source. Wireless stereo earphones use Bluetooth connection to send audio signals through radio waves from sources such as cellphones and digital players. Beginning in the 1980s, the Walkman effect caused headphones to be worn in public locations such as sidewalks, grocery shops, and public transportation. Audio engineers who mix sound for live performances or sound recordings, DJs who use headphones to cue up the next song without the crowd hearing, airplane pilots, and contact center staff are all examples of people who utilize headphones. Employees in the latter two categories use headphones with built-in microphones.

Headphones arose from the desire to free up one’s hands when talking on the phone. There were a number of iterative devices that preceded the “hands-free” headphones. Electrophone, a British business that established a system that allowed their clients to connect into live feeds of events at theaters and opera houses around London, invented the first device that is indisputably a headphone in the 1890s. Subscribers to the service may hear the performance through a set of gigantic headphones kept in place by a long rod below the chin.

In 1891, French engineer Ernest Mercadier received U.S. Patent No. 454,138 for “improvements in telephone-receivers…which should be light enough to be carried while in operation on the operator’s head.”

Due of his inability to hear sermons during Sunday church, Nathaniel Baldwin of Utah built a prototype telephone headset in 1910. He presented it to the US Navy for testing, and the Navy soon bought 100 from Baldwin. In order to fulfill orders, Wireless Specialty Apparatus Co. partnered with Baldwin Radio Company to open a manufacturing plant in Utah. His inventions constituted the foundation for “sound-powered” or “non-electric” telephones, which were widely utilized during World War II.

Download Earphone PNG images transparent gallery