Blue Lola headphones are available in two colours, black or white. But not blue. Blue is the brand name, an acronym for Baltic Latvian Universal Electronics. But the company’s location is nowhere near the Baltic, it’s in Westlake Village, California. Westlake Village is not a village, it’s a city. I’ll try to make the rest of this less confusing.

Blue was started in 1995 by a Latvian recording engineer and an American session musician and made its name with microphones that have found their way into plenty of studios. Lately it has been shooting for a wider market with we non-professionals; as well as a really neat little stereo microphone that slides into an iPhone, it’s making headphones. I guess because headphones are all the buzz, and the tech involved is not much of a stretch from microphones.

And so here we are, Blue Lola headphones at $449.95, the unique aesthetics of which will certainly catch your eye along the rows of headphones at your local retailer. The earpads are mounted to the headband by a sort of double-jointed lever arrangement that looks all wrong for comfort but actually works very effectively, and when it’s on your head you can’t see it anyway.

The earcups remain approximately parallel when moved apart and the assembly scissors down onto your ears in a delightfully simple and easy adjustment. Together with excellent cushions it makes the Lolas comfortable for hours on end. Blue modestly declares this design to be both visionary and revolutionary, and says ordinary headbands are ‘uncomfortable’ and ‘kill sound quality’, statements so silly one wonders about the rest of the stuff on its website.

The Lolas are over-ear headphones with sealed backs, and this together with an effective seal around the ears by the cushions isolates the listener from the outside world nicely. It also means sound doesn’t leak out to annoy the other people on the bus.