jburkett

Overall Rating
 3 of 5

Value Rating
 4 of 5

Used product for
1 to 3 months

Price Paid:  $18.00 from Petra Industries

Summary:
Most of the reviews I have read are pretty accurate. I use them on my Onkyo 601. They sound pretty good at low to medium volume. They do seem to lack a little in the midrange area. They distort when trying to reproduce bass at medium sound levels. They are very comfortable and could easily be worn for hours. In my opinion they would be best suited for someone who wanted to watch tv or listen to music without disturbing the wife or kids. Not for the "audiophile", but good for the casual listener on a budget.

Strengths:
Very light, attractive, very comfortable.

Weaknesses:
None. You get what you pay for.

Price Paid:  $12.00 from falabella.com

Summary:
For the money I paid, the best thing that I could find. I know that the reviews here aren´t that good, but they sound very good, I replaced my old CD180 with this.

Strengths:
Good sound and comfortable. Cord from only one side.

Weaknesses:
This are open headphones, so If you´re listen to loud, someone from the other room maybe can hear you.

Similar Products Used:
Sony CD-180

Price Paid:  $20.00

Summary:
I got these as a Christmas present off my folks, as my existing headphones (MDR-V3) were well and truly worn out. Admittedly these Sony's were not the ones I would of chosen if I was buying them for myself, I would probably have chosen (knowing what I now know) some Sennheiser HD-497s. These open backed headphones are used for listening to mainly dance music, watching TV/Movies, and playing the very occaisional game of Quake 3. To boost the volume I am using a cheapo B-Tech BT928 headphone amplifier. My only sources in this setup are my digital satellite receiver and my PC with Videologic Sonic Fury sound card. Most of my music is played back as 192K Mp3s through coolplayer.

Strengths:
Firstly, the headphones are attractive looking headphones, with a decent amount of cable, and are very comfortable. They are decent phones to use for average sound quality for movies/tv and games, but...

Weaknesses:
...The sound quality, or lack of it renders music very unenjoyable. To my ears, my old clapped out V3s seemed to sound much better, despite being closed back designed, and many years old. The CD280's have a muffled, unimpressive sound for music, and definetly dont seem suited particularly to the music I listen to. The bass is there, but it doesnt seem to have any authority or weight. It is now at the stage where I do not listen to music anymore when I have to use the headphones.

Similar Products Used:
Sony MDR-V3

Price Paid:  $0.00

Summary:
Maybe it's just my sound set-up, but I found these headphones to be nowhere near as good as advertised or as some reviews let me to believe. Maybe I should describe the test conditions before I get into any detail. I used a Vortex 2 SuperQuad sound card, Winamp with the A3D plugin, and some songs encoded at 192kbps. Overall, the headphones sounded pretty good, until I enabled the reverb engine. In case you're unfamiliar with that reverb is, it is basicly just the echo's you hear everywhere. When you sit in a room and talk, your voices comes back to you after it bounced of the wall, which distorted it somewhat. Good sound cards can emulate this effect to produce some extremely realistic sound effects. During my test I enabled a concert hall preset reverb. This sounds great on my speakers and even my cheap, $8 headphones. The new sony ones however completly died. The slightest base in the song caused them to distort the sound majorly, and deep base sounded so horribly that it became almost impossible to hear anything but the tearing noise of cheap plastic being ripped. This was not on a high volume either, infact, it was impossible to get a high volume. Which would be the next weak point. I can turn the volume on my old headphones up so loud that they can almost be used as speakers. At the same volume, the Sony headphones are still at a comfortable level. On the plus site of thigs, they feel great and are extremely light. I imagine that I could listen to them for hours without them getting uncomfortable. That is, if I were going to keep them longer than until tomorrow.

Strengths:
Light, extremely comfortable.

Weaknesses:
Horrible sound distortion at low frequencies and/or reverb. Need to turn volume up all the way to sound loud enough.

Price Paid:  $30.00 from Wal-Mart

Summary:
I have these headphones hooked up to my computer on a Sound Blaster Live and I am quite impressed, I find the bass breaks up a bit, but only at really high volumes... Even as I write this review I am cranking up the volume way above what I like to consider loud and I do not hear the bass breaking up. For $30 this is a solid upgrade... I like the 10ft cable, however it can become a bit annoying but a twist-tie fixes that. My only complaints are that I prefer the vynil padding over the more foamy padding as it tends to attract the hairs of my cats, and also the treble can be a little over the top but its easily fixed by tuning it down the trebel through software.

Strengths:
Good Overall Sound Attractive Price Good upgrade from earbud''s and other "computer" headphones

Weaknesses:
Foam pads 10ft cable can be a tad long.

Similar Products Used:
Jensen earbud''s, Jensen Computer Headphones w/ Mic, Philips CD-Player Headphones.