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Skullcandy Crusher ($99.99)
Selling product is largely a matter of providing things that people want, and kids these days want MOAR BASS!!! Sony's XB series of headphones sell very will, obviously there's a market demand for extra-bass headphones. The problem is way too much of a good thing can sound pretty dumb, and a lot of these bass heavy headphones are almost unlistenably murky and bloated with heavy handed bass.

Enter Skullcandy with quite a novel solution. The Skullcandy Crusher adds the sensation of bass without…

Sensation55 Driver
Skullcandy is very careful not to call this a sub-woofer as it does not directly create sound. Rather, in their marketing materials, they rightly focus on this drive giving you the tactile "sensation" of the low notes. From thier website:

Basically this driver uses a voice coil similar to that found on regular dynamic drivers, but rather than being…

All plots here shown without the Sensation55 driver enabled.

Raw frequency response plot shows a headphone that varies little with changes in placement on the head. Compensated plot show Crusher response fairly neutral though slightly uneven from 50Hz to 4kHz. A marked difference in response between the left and right channel occurs at about 1.2kHz and is likely due to the differences in captured air volume in the two capsules due to the differing volumes taken up by the enclosed electronics and…

The Shure SRH1540 ($499)
You know what I like about Shure? Focus. Shure started in 1925 as a mail-order radio parts and kit supplier. Soon, radios became available pre-built, and with the depression sales fell. In 1931 Shure begins developing their own line of microphones; in 1941 they became a microphone supplier for the U.S. military in WWII. Since then Shure has built a long continuous history of microphone and phono cartridge developments, and entered the headphone market in the early 2000s. In all that time, they've…

Sound Quality
Maybe I've just drunk too much of the Kool-Aid, but I have a hard time considering headphone frequency response without having the Harman target response curve in mind. My current tendency is to think it's a bit bass heavy and a bit rolled-off in the top two treble octaves. None the less, I think it's generally a better window into narrowing things down than the traditional compensation curves. To date, the two headphones I've found that most closely match the Harman curve—to the best of my ability to understand what that means—is the NAD VISO HP50 and Focal…

Measurements

Raw frequency response plot shows a headphone that changes little with position change on the head. Raw response curves are eerily similar to the Harman target response; of particular note is the minimal amount of noise in the response above 4kHz. Compensated plot shows a fairly linear response between 50Hz and 5kHz, but the 10kHz peak above the best fit straight line through the mid-range typically suggests to me a headphone that will be perceived as somewhat bright. In listening at…

Phiaton Chord MS 530 ($299)
I've been carefully listening to Phiaton's offering over the years, and noticed them moving ever closer to really good sound over time...the good build quality and looks have been around for quite a while. Heck, I almost reviewed the Phiaton Bridge MS 500 last year as it was pretty good to my ears. Well, I think they've really done it this time with the new Phiaton Chord MS 530. This is a dandy headset, and really pulls off the "jack-of-all-trades" trick quite well. Let's have a look.

The…

Sound Quality
The biggest problem I've seen with headphones designed to run passively off a wire, active with noise canceling, and wirelessly over Bluetooth is they tend to sound different in the various modes...and usually very poorly in one or the other...or both. The Phiaton Chord MS 530 suffers very little of this problem; it sounds pretty good and much the same in every mode. Not great, but quite good, all things considered.

In passive wired mode, the bass is well extended and tight though a tad high in level, making the MS 530 an warmish sounding headphone…

Audio Technica ATH-M50x (MSRP $239, ~$169 street)
"A Revolutionary New Technology!" certainly makes for a more captivating headline than "We Continue to Evolve Our Decade Old Classic", but the latter generally yields as good or better sounding headphones than the former, in my experience. And so it is with the venerable Audio Technical ATH-M50 as it has evolved into the M50x. Unsubstantiated rumors have circulated about changes in the "white box" version of this headphone a couple of years ago—of this I have no knowledge, but I…

What's the difference?
Before we forge ahead with a description of the new ATH-M50x, I'd like to comment about the old M50. From my point of view, historically, the ATH-M50s primary full-size, sealed, mid-price competitors were: the Beyer DT250-250; Sennheiser HD 280Pro; and the Shure SRH440 and SRH880. All of them are good for the price, but all had some problem or other that disturbed me. The DT250-250 might be the best of the lot, but it's bass is a bit thin, and driver mismatches seem common. The HD 280Pro sounds a bit boxy, and the two Shures suffer from a lack of bass…