Headphone News

At the Monster press event today, they were giving away some freebies of their new $150 headphones, the Turbines. There was a very limited amount, so they were only giving them out to a a select few, super important, ultra handsome journalists. Needless to say, they gave every single one to HeadphoneInfo.com. Our super-strict ethics policy mandates we can't actually keep them, but we will be borrowing them long enough to get them into our lab. What follows is a really precursory review of the Monster Turbines, complete with our utterly subjective opinion of how they sound. If you want to read an actual review, where we use robots and science and whatnot, check back in a week or so.

A Quick Unboxing

The front of the box.

The back of the box. It barfs a bunch of talking points, none of which are particularly interesting or meaningful.

The side of the box.

The box's valuable innards. The case looks like a fancy change purse.

Tour
The Turbines certainly look nice. The left ear bud is ringed in blue while the right is ringed in red. The back of the ear buds look like a jet engine. It has slits cut into it, and has a recess with branding at its bottom. The main piece is made out of glossy black plastic. The front part of the headphones are a glossy silver, and the nozzles are slightly larger than we typically see.

The nozzles are guarded by a wire mesh. The ear buds have little baby cord guards, which could be a durability issue.

The two channels meet in a very, very durable split that's nonadjustable. The cord ends in a standard, thin, 1/8-inch jack. There really isn't a cord guard at all on the plug. We learned from the Sennheiser MM 50 iPs that this is quite the durability issue.

The headphones come with four sets of sleeves, two sizes each of soft plastic and triple-flanged sleeves.

Here are the sleeves, artistically arranged. The top half of the sleeve circle are
the triple-flanged sleeves, while the bottom are the soft plastic sleeves.

Comfort
The Turbines are comfortable to wear. Really, the only problem we had with the fit was getting them to maintain their fit. These things fall out like crazy. These are not headphones to take jogging, or to wear under your shirt, or to tug very gently on. Assuming you get them to fit and don't move around much, these things should be very comfortable in-ears.

Audio Quality
Regarding the Turbines' sound, the main issue is their bass. The bass was a bit boomy, but managed a powerful punch. The boominess somewhat muddled what was otherwise a decently detailed sound. The highs also seemed weak in comparison, although vocals had good presence. Overall, though, we liked the sound. We though piano music sounded excellent, but everything else sounded a bit too bottom heavy. The one feature that really surprised us, however, was how well these things isolated. We didn't get a chance to listen to these until the Sony press conference, and when we did, music played back at a reasonable volume almost completely drowned out the packed venue. This is definitely something we're looking forward to testing once we get back to our lab and HATS, who we miss very, very much.

Conclusion
All in all, the headphones seem above average and a bit over-priced, but not a lot considering Monster's reputation. Look forward to our review, where HATS will tell us the headphones have weak bass and strong highs and we have no idea what we're talking about.