new gadget .... headphone review

Able Planet was kind enough to send me a set of their NC300 headphones for review so let’s get to it. I have used the NC300 headphones for two weeks during my office commute as well as in the evening when watching TV or gaming when the situation called for quiet as to not disturb other occupants of the house.

COSMETICS and DESIGN

The headphones are pretty much all a matte style black finish, black headband, black ear cups, black joints and black ear cup padding. They do also offer a white model which is two tone, the ear cups being white and the headband also being white while the ear cup and headband padding are a grey color.

The NC300’s are powered by a single AA battery that slides into a small trap door in the ear cup. There is also a slider on/off switch with a red LED to indicate that the power is on. With the slider in the ON position the listener will enjoy amplified audio as well as the nose cancelation technology but even off, the headphones work with no noise canceling and at a lower volume.

The headphone cable detaches at both ends which I?ve actually really found handy. Usually the cable is permanently connected to the ear cup, but with the NC300 you can disconnect it. Both male ends of the cable and the female jack on the ear cup look like they?re gold plated which is typically what you?ll find in quality products. The quality of the cable itself is very nice, it?s a nice thick gauge of wire. Far too often for me I?ll end up with static in my ears after a few months with a set of earbuds because the wire is so thin and delicate, I don?t expect this will be the case with the NC300?s.

Another nice feature is that the ear cups can rotate 90 degrees so if you wanted to keep them around your neck when

not using them, they will fold flat to your chest and not restrict movement of your head. This is also of course really nice for traveling because they take up slightly less space being able to fold flat. On that topic, the NC300’s also come with a firm travel case which is a nice feature that you find with other quality headphones. The trade-off here though is the bulk of the case to keep your NC300’s protected. Inside the case you’ll find a mesh pouch which contains the extra airplane adapter and ¼” stereo adapter, a slot for the headphones to slide into with the ear cups rotated and lastly a cut-out for a portable media device.

Now here are some personal taste things that I didn’t like so much. I don’t like the contour of the headband to ear cup design. Instead of the headset kind of staying tight to your head, the band comes down wide and then angles back in to your ears. So if you’re looking at someone wearing the NC300’s, there’s a decent gap between the edge of your head and the band. This is just a design that I’ve never cared for though plenty of headphones do this and maybe it’s necessary to provide the rotating ear cup feature. The other aspect that I think could be improved slightly is the comfort. I wore these for 50 minutes at a time and occasionally my ears would feel like they were being squeezed against my head, you know that feeling. I’d say it’s mild, I’ve certainly worn much worse but I have a gaming headphone that I can literally wear for 3 or 4 hours at a stretch and my ears don’t feel like they’ve been squeezed. So for comfort I would say these are average for a full ear cup style headphone.

NOISE CANCELING

This is the second pair of noise canceling headphones that I have used, the first pair being shortly after noise canceling was introduced at an average consumer level. I can say that generally noise canceling technology in the NC300’s has come a long way from that earlier set I had years ago.

For testing, I used the NC300 headphones on my daily commute to/from work on the train which travels both above and below ground. I typically watch the previous night TV shows on my laptop during my commute which frees up a few hours in the evening for gaming. One challenge I have is that the train noise will at times overpower even the max volume setting on my laptop using regular earbuds.

The first thing I noticed when putting the NC300’s on was there is a bit of a seashell effect, it’s actually seems like the ambient noise in the train is amplified with these on and turned off. However once you turn the headphones on, most of that noise instantly goes away. There is some noise left over though, such as the steel on steel screeching of the wheels on the track around corners. I will say though that even though all outside noise isn’t canceled out, what is left over is at a greatly reduced volume. These have even been nice to wear with the noise canceling on when I wanted to sleep on the way to or from work rather than listen to something.

The big test for me was, can I still hear what I’m listening too when the train is the noisiest, underground going around a bend. The answer is yes; with a slight volume adjust on the in-line volume knob which is another feature I really like. I’ll set the laptop audio output to max and use the in-line volume knob to control the audio level instead and it’s worked out great.

One other thing that I was pleasantly surprised with was the longevity of the single AA battery. I wasn’t sure I would like having to maintain a battery but so far the NC300’s have run at a little more than 20 hours on the battery supplied in the box.

AUDIO PERFORMANCE

Lets start with some specs. Able Planet has their own proprietary audio technology they’ve named ‘LINX AUDIO’ and this comes built into the NC300 headphones. This technology has given Able Planet over 20 CES and CTIA awards going back to 2006.

The audio performance stated on Able Planet’s website for the NC300’s is as follows:

Frequency Response : 20hz – 20,000hz which is good, this range exceeds what most adults can hear, though teenagers do have a broader range.

Sensitivity at 1khz : 115dB off and 121dB on

But what do they sound like? This is really a subjective topic because everyone has different audio tastes and different hearing ranges. So this part of the review is really just all on my personal taste, I’m certainly no audiophile; I’m just a Joe commuter that wants a decent sounding headphone to please my ears to/from work.

So first I’ll start with music. The results to me were really a mixed bag. I found the audio quality to be decent enough in the mid to low ranges, even producing a decent amount of bass. However I thought that the highs where lacking somewhat. Listening to some classic rock and heavy metal, the audio ranged from sounding fine to sounding like it was all low range. I found that

female vocals usually sounded fine but male vocals either sounded fine or they sounded like they were singing far away. In this day an age of MP3’s and AACs, this could also have just as much to do with the quality of the sound file instead of headphone sound reproduction, so I dusted off my CD Walkman and played some discs. Although I still feel like the NC300’s don’t do well with the highs, I didn’t really detect any tunneling or get any sense of the singer was singing from a few yards back from the band. So really this seems like your music listening experience is greatly dependent on how good the source is, these headphones won’t make a 128khz sampled MP3 sound like a CD for you.

The next testing I did was audio playback of TV shows through my laptop. This by far made up the bulk of my listening with the NC300 headphones. I can say that the audio reproduction was all really good. Voice came through loud and clear, explosions had just enough bass to them, action scenes sounded good and overall I was very pleased with the results of this test.

The final bit of testing I did with them was with the Xbox 360. Now these headphones are stereo so they may be better suited for portable gaming devices such as the DS or PSP but I thought I’d try them out anyway on the Xbox. I set it to stereo and fired up the demo of Splinter Cell Conviction. I found the sound reproduction to be quite good, I was able to hear ambient noises, character voices came through fine, gun fire sounded decent and in one instance I was even able to pick out basic directionality of footsteps. If you have a partible gaming system, the NC300’s will be a pretty good choice for you giving really good sound reproduction as well as noise canceling to eliminate a lot of environmental noise.

CONCLUSION

I found the TRUE FIDELITY NC300 headphones to be a pretty good value. The headphones to me look like they were built with quality in mind. The construction seems like they can take the abuse of a road warrior and there’s a few nice extras thrown in like extra adapters and a firm carry case. The noise cancelation technology did an ample job of eliminating ambient noise and I got a decent amount of runtime out of the battery at a little more than 20 hours. In general given a decent audio source, the sound reproduction was quite good though lacking in the high range a bit but nice through the mid and low ranges.