Speaker 1: So whenever I do a review of a pair of premium over your headphones from brands like Bose, Sony and Beets, I always see a lot of comments about how they’re way overpriced at $300 or whatever price they are and how dumb people are for buying them when they could get a perfectly good pair of headphones from a less well-known brands for way less. There’s certainly a lot of truth to that, but I thought it would be a good exercise to compare some budget and mid-range headphones to those higher end models to see exactly what you’re getting at [00:00:30] various price points and how everything stacks up. And to spice things up, I’m going to have a few of my colleagues do a blind trial of a few budget and premium headphones to see if they can tell the difference between the two, and I think you’ll find the results pretty interesting. Speaker 1: So let’s jump right into the comparisons. Okay. When it comes to budget versus premium headphones, you’ve obviously got to start with the design. First and foremost, when you’re looking at a budget model, you’re going to get a pretty generic design. These are reference headphone designs that come out of the same factories in China, and you’ll see [00:01:00] a bunch of models on Amazon that kind of look alike. I’ve got a few of my favorite budget models here, all of which cost less than a hundred dollars. This is the one more sono flow, which costs around $65 on Amazon and kind of looks like an old Sony model. Another model that I like that gets high marks from Amazon users is the $99 sound core by anchor space one. And speaking of another headphone named space, I don’t know what it is about the space name, but headphone companies seem to like to use it. Speaker 1: This is the new sound Petes space that only costs around $55 [00:01:30] and reminds me a bit of an audio technic headphone. The EDIFIER eight 20 NB plus is also a good value for around $65. All the models I have here have active noise canceling, and they’re all decent headphones that are relatively comfortable to wear with memory foam ear pads, and they sound pretty good for their modest price points. Do they look and feel a little cheap? Yeah, they do. They’re not made with high-tech plastics and are short on metal parts. Some like the sound core space one can be a bit bulky [00:02:00] looking. However, the space one is one of the rare sub 100 models that has ear detection sensors that pause your audio when you take the headphones off your ears and resume playback when you put them back on. I should also point out that a lot of budget headphones don’t come with any sort of case. Speaker 1: The one more sono flow does include a nice hard case, but the sound piece space doesn’t, and the sound core space one includes a simple carrying pouch. Battery life for all these over your wireless headphones tends to be really good across the board, so [00:02:30] that isn’t a factor. What you do get with a more premium headphone like the WH 1000 X mark five, that’s a Sony or the Bose Quiet Comfort Ultra Headphones is a distinct custom design along with better build quality and higher quality components. Also, the headphones can end up fitting your head a little bit better and offering a little more comfort over longer listening sessions. The Sony 1000 XM fives and Bose QC Ultra headphones also deliver better sound noise canceling and voice calling, as well as [00:03:00] a few bonus features and more natural sounding transparency modes. To be clear, the bows that Sony costs about five times as much as some of these budget models I’m showing, they certainly aren’t five times as good and maybe not even twice as good, but they are at least 25 to 35% better. Speaker 1: Before I get into those blind trials I was talking about, I’ll just add that there are some mid-range models that cost between a hundred and $200. These include the Sony CH seven 20 N, which lists for $150, [00:03:30] but sometimes goes on sale for as little as a hundred dollars. And the new Sennheiser Sentum Plus, which lists for $230 but should dip to less than $200 later this year. Centum plus is the slight step up model from the centum and the step down model from the flagship Momentum Wireless four. The higher end MW four looks similar but has larger drivers that deliver slightly better sound, 10 hours more battery life and a total of six microphones instead of four. As for the Sony CH seven 20 N, it’s [00:04:00] lighter than the flagship 1000 XM five, which makes it very comfortable to wear, but it looks and feels significantly cheaper. Doesn’t come with any sort of carrying case and both its sound and noise canceling though good or a step below the XM fives, but enough about what I think. Let’s have some fun and blindfold a few of my colleagues here in the New York CNET office and see if they can tell the difference between budget and premium models. Speaker 2: They’re all right. They’re a little clampy, they, I’m feeling [00:04:30] a little clamped. Speaker 3: I like the cup. It feels nice and soft. I do not like the plastic around here. It just feels very cheap. Speaker 4: It feels like it’s mid, not mid like bad. It just feels like, I don’t know if it’s very, very expensive. If it’s really lightweight, Speaker 5: It doesn’t move as much on my head and yeah, it feels very comfortable. Speaker 4: This one definitely feels like [00:05:00] more expensive. The cushions are actually a lot more comfortable in my opinion. Speaker 2: Alright, these are immediately more comfortable than the last pair. Speaker 3: This is the type of leather I like feeling. And then this hard piece up here, quite fricking nice actually. Speaker 5: I think the ear muffs better. It’s softer than the first one that we just tried. Speaker 4: [00:05:30] So this one’s pretty light, but it’s almost really light, so it makes me think that it’s not that expensive. Speaker 5: I like this one. Speaker 2: I don’t know. These kind of feel crappy compared to the other ones. Speaker 5: It just feels really comfortable. I think it’s just a perfect size for my head. Maybe Speaker 2: There’s not a good seal around my head. [00:06:00] I don’t know. Not thrilled with those. Speaker 3: It’s super comfortable, but it feels a little heavy. It feels like if I wore these for walking outside for an hour, I would start to sweat a lot, which isn’t great. Speaker 5: I had headphones like these before and they were definitely used to kind of shut out the world. So I definitely use these headphones to listen to music and kind of shut out everything. Speaker 3: Yeah, there’s nothing I like about these. I’m not going to lie. Speaker 2: These are lovely. Speaker 3: [00:06:30] So with this, there’s no clicking, there’s no nothing. You kind of just like it’s a free sort of slider thing. I don’t like that. Speaker 2: They’re nice and light, not too much. A little bit of pressure on top of my head, but not too much. Speaker 4: This one feels like it’s very structured. It’s definitely thin as well. I would say this is pretty lightweight. The one right before was bulky, lightweight, but this is obviously just from feeling it. I can tell that it’s skinnier. [00:07:00] I guess Speaker 3: The leather feels god awful. I apologized to the first set of headphones that I was like, oh, this feels kind of synthetic leather. No, this is, that’s better than this. This is sorry to this brand. This is not good. Speaker 5: I’d probably say the third one is the most expensive, just because I feel like the comfort is there and then the least expensive would probably [00:07:30] have to be maybe the first one, Speaker 2: Third of the cheapest, then the second, then the first, then the fourth. Speaker 3: Three costs the most, followed by two, followed by one, followed by four. Speaker 4: I think the second one is the most expensive. After that I think is the fourth [00:08:00] one is right after that. Then I would say the first one is third place and the first one is third place, and then the third one is last place from most expensive to cheapest. Speaker 6: Be beast in the streets. Speaker 7: [00:08:30] Look at yourself. Speaker 5: I like the second one better. So the second one, I felt like the volume was a lot more full. I could hear everything. I think the first one was a little bit farther away, if that makes Speaker 2: Sense. These, that first pair seemed really [00:09:00] harsh to me. The clarity seemed a little bit better on these. Speaker 3: The second pair just felt more of an experience. The sound quality was just better, whereas the first just kind of felt like, okay, there’s music playing, but I wasn’t jamming the same way. Speaker 4: These sound better bass. It sounds a lot punchier. It sounds like a more cleaner bass. That’s where I really noticed [00:09:30] it in the sound, but these still really good too. I mean, I felt like it was a party in my head. Speaker 1: Okay, so there you have it. As you can see when it comes to the fit of the headphones, some people actually preferred the cheaper models, but basically everyone felt that the bow sounded better than the sound. Petes, I didn’t have my colleagues compared the headphones noise canceling and voice calling performance or their feature sets. So this is far from a comprehensive test, but the long and short of it is that I’m seeing more budget [00:10:00] headphones, like the sound feed space that I’m able to recommend to folks who just can’t afford higher end models or simply think they’re overpriced. One thing I can’t tell you is how these budget headphones will hold up over time. There are no hard and fast guarantees that premium headphones will last a long time, but as I said earlier, they not only tend to have better build quality, but they’re equipped with higher quality components, which can obviously make a difference in their lifespan. Speaker 1: Also, with some of these cheap headphones, the performance can vary slightly from unit to unit. [00:10:30] The quality control can be a little dubious. All that said, I do think the gap between cheaper over your noise canceling headphones and higher end models has narrowed in recent years. Though there still is obviously a gap. There’s something to be said for opting for a mid range model like the Sennheiser Sentum Plus or Beach Studio Pro when it goes on sale for $200. But even those models can be out of a lot of people’s price range. But what do you guys think? Let me know your thoughts on budget versus premium headphones in the comments section [00:11:00] below, and be sure to call out your favorite models. Also hit the like button if you found this video informative at all and subscribe to this channel if you haven’t already. I’m David Carne for cnet. Thanks for watching.
