Thursday, July 30, 2009

[BONUS] Ruffian Skull Headphones Review

When the nice folks at Subjekt offered to give away a set of their Ruffian Skull Headphones they also kindly sent me a set to review myself! I'm not an expert on headphones, but I do use them when I travel (which I do fairly frequently), so I was glad to be offered the opportunity...

(thanks to my intern Gina for modelling them!)

The first thing I noticed about them is that they are heavy. Not fall out of your ear heavy, but rather "this is definitely not cheaply made crap" heavy. The second thing I noticed, which explained point one, is that they're really made of metal. Yep, this is not metal-ish foil over plastic, which I have to admit is what I expected, but honest-to-goodness cast metal! Even the packaging says quality: a small velvet bag, which came with an extra set of the color-coded rubber tips for your ears (in two-sizes no less!).

Of course the only thing that really matters is how they work. The large tips fit my ear easily and comfortably on first try and they really blocked out a good deal of outside noise right away.

Listening to a variety of styles of music on my computer the sound is clean and distinct, nothing's muffled and I could hear plenty of quiet details. There's a good balance of treble and bass, with perhaps a bit more emphasis on the bass than I use on my regular speakers (which have a separate subwoofer), but I think that's not uncommon for headphones and I didn't mind. Turning the volume up to even uncomfortably loud levels didn't seem to distort the sound, though at comfortably loud levels a small amount of sound does leak out, but in most environments (or at lower levels) that would probably not be an issue.

So what's the verdict? I will definitely be using the Ruffian's as my everyday headpones from here on out! Kudos to Radius for making a product that both sounds good and looks good!

Don't forget you have just under a week to enter our contest to try to win a set of these bad boys for yourself. And of course you don't have to wait, you can always go to the Subjekt website to buy some right now.

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