Sennheiser PXC 250-II

Conclusion

PXC 250-IIThe PXC 250-IIs are a great set of portable headphones. They’re comfortable, not much heavier than a pair of sunglasses, and offer excellent audio quality for $150. Their main downside is their design isn’t always conducive to portability. The cord is too short to put the in-line control pendant solidly in your front pocket—for some people, at least. For us, it just kind of hung there like a sinker, creating tension on the cord. Also, the volume dial on the pendant turned far too easily. Any time our pocket rubbed up against the dial, the volume would shift. This could have been mitigated somewhat by a longer cord—that way the pendant wouldn’t have been swinging around in our pocket’s mouth like a pit and pendulum—but alas, the PXC 250-II couldn’t offer that.

Of course, this is just a minor gripe when considering the PXC 250-IIs performance on the whole. It had a decent frequency response, very low distortion, and average or above average scores on the rest of our tests. The active noise cancellation feature wasn’t particularly impressive, but it did serve to cut on some droning noise.

If you want a very portable set of headphones, we’d recommend the PXC 250-IIs. They aren’t perfect, but if you can live with the control pendant and their other minor annoyances, you’ll get exactly what you’re looking for.