Today we received the Axent Wear Headphones, It was quite a surprise because the last update were saying "There are still lots of improvements to be made", but here we are with the final product in hand.
First thing to notice is, the box is pretty cool.
Also it's pretty huge.
Inside that box was a nice black case, and the headphones themselves were inside, along with a (very small) usb cable, a (pretty small) double headed headphone jack, and a small microphone.
As you can see I ordered the blue ones.
They look pretty nice, and don't feel cheap to the touch.
The cat ears are pretty heavy though, so if you bend your head forward or backward, the headphones will fall down.
The cups can flip pretty much any side so you can have them rest on your shoulders when not wearing them, or you can bring them inside itself to make them more compact when carrying around.
Now, these are headphones so let's talk about sound Quality.
At home right now I have a pair of AKG K-271 Studio (~250$), a pair of cheaper Sony mdr-zx600 for on the go music (~40$), so the comparison will be done with those 2, pretty differently priced pair of headphones. (
you can read the review I made of my AKG 5 more than 5 years ago here)
Right of the bat I'll say this now, I love Music, and while I won't call me an audiophile, I'm the closest thing there is to it, that isn't it. I love a pure sound, and I want what I listen to, to be as close as possible as what the arranger probably wanted me to ear. So this whole review will be based on that principle. (This is also why I have AKG)
The test I did wasn't scientific at all, I just played 3 songs, which are pretty different from each others, all repeated a lot with the different headsets, trying to pick up the sound difference, what make each of them sound better or worse.
The songs were:
- fripSide - Sister's Noise
- EGOIST - Fallen
- Kimino-Museum - ラストリモート
Let's get it out of the way now, The AKG headphones were a lot better than the other ones, it's not really surprising, it's a completely different class of headphone. With Those awesome AGK headphones you can ear a lot of really small sounds that are harder to notice on the other ones, and you can also pinpoint each instrument easily, and where they "stand" in the sound created.
The Sony ones were surprisingly really good for their price, The bass was a little stronger, and there were a very few times where I noticed a little something missing, it wasn't because the bass was too strong, it was just missing, and I can't really explain it. The surprise came from the Axent Wear, and it wasn't a good surprise.
First the Bass are really high, and make a lot of noise. So much in fact that it over powers other frequency, which, 1st makes it hard to actually see if the other sounds are actually there or not, but covers most of them pretty much completely (especially in a Bass heavy song)
In Fallen, the added bass gave an interesting feel to the song, making it a little more "scary" I guess, but still, it removed too much of the original intended chaos this song was originally carrying.
This is not really surprising for this kind of headphones I guess.
Bass heavy have 2 purposes, 1: hide low fidelity with big bass, 2: please people who rally just want boom boom.
Lots of "fashion" headphones hide their crappy sound with big bass, for example Skull Candy.
I think the Axent Wear aren't sounding that bad, and if you're one of those that really love bass heavy sound, you might like them, they are not just the high fidelity headphones I would have hoped they would be.
The Sony, which are a third of the price, sounded better than them.
You can read an relatively interesting
article about bass and headphones here
Now, just comparing the price and sound directly would be unfair to the Axent Wear. They are after all, more than just normal Headphones. First, they are actually a headset, and come with a microphone. I didn't actually test the mic, because I didn't really care about it, but that's 1 more feature.
2nd: they have Speakers in the Cat ears, that's cool right?
It could have been.
But the sound of those speakers are fucking awful.
It sounds worse than 5$ shitty speakers you can get in discount shops. It get distorted pretty quick if you raise the volume, and if you don't it just sound empty.
Also, if you have the headphones on, and start the speakers, you will not detect a change of sound, so be careful with that function, or people might give you weird looks (for other reasons than the fact you have fucking nekomimi on your headphones)
3rd: They are a fashion Item.
They have fucking nekomimi on the top, they are looking pretty nice overall.
I mean I love the look of my AKG, but this is a different class, those are made for this look primarily.
4th: they are shiny! The LEDs in the Speakers and ear cup looks pretty cool.
Just look how cool I look at the Game center with them!
I hope I didn't forget anything, if you have questions or comment please post them below.
You can pre-order Axen Wear here.
See you next time Nyaa!
Update 2016/09/09:
Since this post is still landed on often by people looking for a review of these, I decided to update it a bit. I learned a few things after writing this, especially about why the speakers on mine didn't work well.
It turns out the whole first batch, for the backers, was crap. Lots of problems happened, and the backers were pretty much used as beta testers. My friends who ordered them got 1 where the LEDs didn't work, and 1 where the external speakers didn't work at all.
As for me, 1 week after writing this review I started having problem with a bad contact inside the headset, making the right speaker stop working all the time. Brookstone, who took over the sales of the headphones, decided that since backers paid more than 1 year before getting their product, they were not under warranty anymore, so we got stuck with these shitty things.
Basically backers are not considered customers by them.
