JPS Labs and Joe Skubinski.

Abyss Headphones is not a separate company. Its website describes it as “a division of JPS Labs LLC,” the American maker of audio cables, and says the names Abyss, Diana and AB1266, and its triangular logo, are registered trademarks of JPS Labs. JPS Labs says it has provided “advice, products, and service” since 1990; we give that date as the company’s own, and it belongs to the cable business, not to the headphones.

The person behind both is Joe Skubinski. Stereophile’s Herb Reichert, writing in July 2017, described him as an “audio engineer” and the “owner and founder and president of JPS Labs,” who started out as a cable manufacturer and, after wandering around an early CanJam headphone show, “decided to take JPS Labs in a completely different direction—toward a goal of producing the best headphones ever made.” Enjoy the Music’s Dave Hanson, in 2016, called the AB-1266 Skubinski’s “first headphone,” the work of “a man who has built a name for himself in the world of high-end cables.”

The headphone brand has a short paper trail. The Abyss website was online by October 2012, according to the Internet Archive, when its contact page gave JPS Labs’ address as Seneca Street in East Aurora, a village south-east of Buffalo, New York. By 2016 the company had moved to Lancaster, a town in the Buffalo suburbs, which remains its address today. The cable business continues alongside the headphones: JPS Labs still sells its Superconductor and Aluminata cables, built on a conductor it calls Alumiloy. JPS Labs now describes itself as designing, making and distributing cables under its own name and headphones under the ABYSS and DIANA brands, with related electronics and accessories; the Abyss online shop sells JPS cables and Stackzilla equipment racks alongside the headphones, and recommends amplifiers from Woo Audio, Boulder and others for each model.

The AB-1266 and the Diana.

The first product was the AB-1266, a large open planar-magnetic headphone with a square, skeletal frame. According to Stereophile, JPS Labs began full production in late 2013 after five years of research and development; Abyss itself says it spent “nearly 5 years” developing the driver’s materials, magnetics and acoustic design. Steve Guttenberg of CNET first heard it in 2013 and later called Abyss “a brand-new headphone company in 2013.” An archived 2013 product page described a frame machined from solid aluminium, lambskin ear pads, a weight of 660 grams and a planar driver with no magnet structure behind the diaphragm. Reichert likened the frame to AKG’s K1000, which also held its drivers just off the ears.

The design has been revised rather than replaced. The AB-1266 Phi followed with a new driver — Skubinski told Reichert it raised sensitivity to 88dB/mW — and the current version, the AB-1266 Phi TC, costs $5,995. In May 2018 CNET reviewed the Diana, the company’s second headphone and a much smaller one, at $2,995 and about 330 grams; a Diana Phi followed in 2019. The range now includes the Diana TC Signature; the Diana DZ, with abalone or carbon-fibre inlays; the Diana MRx, announced in June 2026 with a feature the company calls Extended Bass Response; and the JOAL — short, the company says, for “Jack Of All Listening” — its least expensive model, at $1,895.

The clearest independent recognition came from Stereophile, which named the Abyss Diana TC its Headphone Product of the Year for 2023, ahead of finalists from Apple, Focal, HiFiMan and Naim, and said there was “no ambiguity in the voting.” Reichert summed the headphone up as “the Abyss AB-1266 disguised as a pretty woman.”

Design and documentation.

Beyond the best-known headphone names, a group of smaller specialists builds around less common designs: planar magnetic drivers, true ribbons and electrostatic panels. The seven makers here span the United States, Europe, Russia and China, and most have a thin public record.

Three make planar magnetic headphones. Abyss, a division of JPS Labs, gives its address as Lancaster, near Buffalo, New York, and says it machines and assembles its headphones there. Kennerton, which sells planar and dynamic models, gave its location as St Petersburg on its website as archived in 2025. Sivga, best known for wooden-cup dynamic headphones and the parent of the planar brand Sendy Audio, is in Dongguan, in China’s Guangdong province.

RAAL’s website described it in 2007 as a company based in Zaječar, in eastern Serbia; its ribbon headphones, first sold as RAAL-requisite, now carry the RAAL 1995 name, and its American distributor, Requisite Audio, says they are handmade in Serbia. Warwick Acoustics, which makes electrostatic headphones and car audio systems, gives its address as the MIRA Technology Park in Nuneaton, Warwickshire.

The other two work in central Europe. Ultrasone’s legal notice gives an address in Wielenbach, in Bavaria, and it speaks of “craftsmanship from Bavaria.” Erzetich, which makes the dynamic Mania and Thalia and the planar magnetic Phobos as well as amplifiers, gives an address in Nova Gorica, Slovenia, and says its workshop is “located in the Slovenian woods.”

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and what it says about where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

“Products engineered and made in the USA.”

Abyss makes a strong manufacturing claim. Its website says it produces its headphones “from scratch in our New York, USA facility,” that it uses “4 CNC machines to manufacture all components in Buffalo, New York,” and that the JOAL is “engineered, machined, finished, assembled, and tested” there; its product pages use Buffalo as shorthand for the Lancaster site. CNET reported in 2018 and 2019 that Abyss headphones and their drivers were designed, machined, finished and hand-assembled at its Lancaster factory. We give the claim as the company’s, with that support; we have not visited the plant.

Its look follows from the machining: aluminium frames with ceramic-polymer or powder-coated finishes, exposed hardware and a suspended leather headband — modelled, the company says, on a hammock — rather than moulded plastic. The original AB-1266 had an anodised finish with bare aluminium accents; the Diana line added a choice of colours and inlays, and the JOAL a textured black powder coat with a machined wave pattern. The website sets the name in capitals as ABYSS. The company offers a 10-year warranty on its headphones and runs a trade-in scheme, and its service page puts an out-of-warranty rebuild of both drivers at $300 to $500. We found no published brand guidelines, typeface or colour values.

For a design guide, Abyss shows how an engineering-led brand can make its manufacturing process its identity. Compare Audeze, another American planar-magnetic headphone maker, and Dan Clark Audio, a third. For this guide we use anodised black, graphite, aluminium and a lambskin tan with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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