My model consisted of three main elements: The ear cup(s), the shell containing the ear cup(s), and the headband. I started by modeling the ear cup. I did so by taking a cube, subdividing it twice, and then using smooth vertex until it formed a rough looking sphere. From there I scaled it down flat, so it almost looked like a hamburger patty, and extruded the center faces inwards to make a rough ear hole shape. At this point I made a couple more subdivisions and smoothed the vertices, and the result was the ear cup shape I was looking for.
After this I moved onto the shell. To create this, I started out with a cylinder, and then rotated, translated, and scaled the cylinder so that one of the flat faces was flush with the back of the ear cup. So, at this point I had an ear cup with a thin sideways cylinder attached to the back . The ridges and general design of the shell was all created by manipulating that flat face of the cylinder. I did so with a combination of insets, translations and extrusions. The part of the headphone which connects the shell/cup to the headband was also a part of this object. Again, I created that by using insets and extruding faces appropriately. Before smoothing this object I had to add an edge split modifier so i could be sure that the sharpness of the edges of the ridges, as well as the overall design of the shell would be maintained. This approach worked mostly as expected.
The last object to be created was the headband. For this I started with a cylinder, deleted the faces, and then cut it in half so what I was left with was essentially a semi circle plane. I lined this up with the ear cup, and scaled it to an appropriate size. From there I just extruded faces to give it some thickness, and scaled down the faces at either end of the semi-cirlce to give each end a bit of a tapered design. Smoothing worked pretty well with this object as well. At this point all that was left was creating a mirror of the earcup to add to the other side of the band, and adding appropriately colored materials. And there you have it, headphones!