This review is brought to you by Dick McV
At CES, I managed to pick up a pair of NEMO headphones to review for the site. NEMO is a company that’s been selling its headphones in Japan and is making its first bid into the US marketplace.
These headphones aren’t your standard headphones, as you can tell by the image. For one thing, they’re not quite noise-cancelling, but they’re at least noise-blocking. In addition, the headphones work a little differently. As the product rep explained it to me, the sounds from the headphones are actually being projected away from the center of the ear. With the sound waves not rushing into the ear canal, you are actually listening to the reflection. The sound then resonates within the ear canal to produce extended base as well as the surround sound effect.
So, what’s good about these headphones? Well, the noise-blocking capabilities are very effective. I took them around on Syracuse’s Centro bus system, and in the back they have an extremely noisy heating/cooling unit back there; bad enough that you’ve got to shout over it to possibly understand another person 2 seats away. The headphones blocked out the fans to a weak hum, and I could enjoy my music in peace.
The audio quality on the headphones is great, too. When I wear these headphones, there’s a noticeable increase in the quality of the bass sound and the music feels a lot closer to the ears. What I mean is that I don’t feel as though the sound is coming from a distance, like I’ve noticed when I switched back to the iPod’s earbuds for a day to compare sound. As for the highs and lows, there’s some improvement in what you can hear, since the background noise is largely blocked out, which makes it a lot nicer when When I plugged these headphones into my Nintendo DS, they were an absolute godsend when playing Elite Beat Agents. Seriously, without these things to help my concentration, I wouldn’t even be past the easy difficulty. Yes, I know, I suck at rhythm games.
It’s not all sunshine and lollipops, though. There are two flaws that I’ve noticed so far with the headphones. The major problem is that because of how the headphones are designed, if you’re outside on a windy day, or someone has a fan blowing at you, you’re going to hear it, and it’ll be somewhat loud. What I’ve managed to do to fix this is to wear a decent skullcap that’ll cover the headphones. Once the hat’s over it, then the audio quality is back to normal, although the headphones might get pushed slightly further into your ears, and become uncomfortable for you. The other problem with the headphones is that because of the material that makes up the part that’s in your ear, you’d better have fairly clean ears, otherwise the outside will become slightly covered in wax. Sure, it can be easily wiped off, but it’s not too pleasant if someone wants to try out the headphones while you’re using them and you forgot to break out the Q-tips in the morning.
After all this, are these headphones worth it? Most definitely. I’m certainly no audiophile, but I find that these headphones are a drastic improvement over the standard fare of headphones. These headphones will be running in the $35-$40 price range, and I think they’d be a good investment if you enjoy listening to your music and frequently deal with too many distracting noises in your daily life. If you frequently are outside where the wind is blowing (i.e. Chicago), then you might want to take these headphones for a test before investing in them.
February 13th, 2007 at 2:12 pm
Gimme one Dale.
February 13th, 2007 at 4:33 pm
Please share, thats what real strangers do.