Boomphones Review

The first thing you'll notice when you receive your Boomphones is the fancy carrying case they come in. It's mainly for storage as most of the time when you carry headphones with you, they'll be, ya know, on your head, but it still does set the tone that your getting something upscale. The Boomshell as it's called is durable and well structured, something you wouldn't expect from just a case. But through this measure you can tell that the producers of Boomphones expect that you'll want to keep your product safe since you'll obviously value it that much.

Boomphones are noise cancelling headphones that allow you to listen in a standard fashion with the headphones over your ears. Nothing exactly groundbreaking there. But once you turn on the switch, post charging through USB, the bass amps up and there's even less noise coming in from the outside. Again, nice feature but nothing awesome there. It's almost expected. But what sets Boomphones apart is where these over the ear headphones get their name.

You can tap the Boomphones icon on your ear and the headphones will essentially convert to speakers or a Boombox as they like to call it, giving the headphones their name. While there is no evidence as to whether it can save the world and there doesn't appear to be an option of Turbo Bass (which is probably a good thing), it does function fairly well as a set of speakers. The sound is just as robust as when you have the headphones on over your ears. It's not merely that it's louder, but the sound is being emitted from the outside of the headphones as opposed to the inside which gives it that boombox effect.

Unfortunately the sound is what we were left underwhelmed with at CES and continues to do that. The sound quality is not worth the $199.99 pricetag. All our audio experts agree (including the namesake of the website which equals big business) that you can do better for your money with products from companies like Sennheiser for that kind of price tag. It's just not as robust as you would expect for something that expensive. I have many pairs of earbuds that exceed it in sound which simply shouldn't be the case.

It seems that they focused on having equal speakers on the inside and outside of the headphones instead of investing their effort into the actual sound quality. It's unfortunate since there is so much potential within these headphones with their unique features and according to the company, out of the box listening ability, which is questionable at best.