By Matt Brown, Multimedia Director.
The music industry is an expensive landscape, with artists spending outrageous amounts of money to release their LPs.
This may be rightly so, as professional recording studios are full of vintage equipment and well-tuned technology. However, none of this matters if you follow the line down to poor quality earbuds.
Good technology continues to get smaller, more efficient and widely available at a consumer level. Ideally, they should represent the music accurately, allowing you to hear an album how the artist wanted you too. You should not have to pay hundreds of dollars on a pair of headphones that give you an inflated bass (along with an inflated ego).
Monoprice’s mouthful “Premium Hi-Fi DJ Style Over-the-Ear Pro” headphones are a perfect compromise of cost, construction and quality.
Completely covering you ears, each individual speaker can swivel up to 90 degrees and extend 1.5 inches in order to fit heads of all shapes and sizes. The audio cable is detachable, which potentially saves you wringing your neck when reaching for that fumbled drumstick. In the packaging you’ll even find two cables, varying from 11.5 to 50 inches in length in addition to a 3.5mm to quarter inch adapter.
Internally, the earphones are equipped with two 50mm drivers which perform with a sensitivity of 100dB (plus or minus 3dB). These drivers are able to reproduce the ear’s full frequency range of 20hz to 20,000hz, and are near flat from 50hz to 2,000hz allowing all the warmth of the audio to sit well.
However, with some inconsistencies beginning at 8,000Hz and slight distortion at 500Hz and 2,000Hz. The headphones aren’t perfect, but are affordable with a $23.98 price tag (MSRP).
Additionally, according to the website the headphones are equipped with “thick, comfortable padding that keeps the music inside and the noise outside.” While it does indeed prevent noise coming in, the headphones leak sound even at a modest volume. The padding is comfortable, but they crack in colder temperatures. Replacement pads are available for purchase online.
