Headphone News Blog

It's been a while since we've done one of these, so our apologies to those who follow our sadly neglected RSS feed.

We just got our review up of the ATH-ANC7s. Our verdict? They aren't anything special, but they're priced very generously. They don't have great sound quality and their active noise cancellation isn't quite good, but they cost $100. Have you seen what active-cancellers generally cost? At this price, the ATH-ANC7s are a good pair of entry-level active-cancelling headphones. You should check these out if you want a pair of headphones to wear on the go, but hate sticking headphones into your ears.

Audio-Technica announced quite a few headphones today. They have three over-ear and two in-ear offerings, with higher-end and one not-as-high end models in each category.

The ATH-CK100 and ATH-CKM50 headphones are the in-ear options. The ATH-CK100 uses a fancy triple-drive system, apparently. It spans a frequency range of 20Hz to 18kHz, a 23Ω impedence, and a 113dB sound pressure level. The ATH-CKM50 is a bit more vanilla (it just has a boring old 10.7mm driver), but it is capable of a slightly bigger frequency range: 14Hz to 24 kHz. The CKM50s also have a different impedence and max SPL, which are 16Ω and 104dB respectively.

Both earphones will be available for the US equivalent of $600 (!) on November 21st.

The over-ear, high-end options are the ATH-A1000X and ATH-A2000X. The main difference between the two is their frequency range: the ATH-A1000X runs from 5Hz to 42kHz, while the ATH-A2000X runs from 5Hz to 45kHz, which isn't really that big a difference. Otherwise they're the same: an impedance of 42Ω, a sound pressure level of 101dB, and a 53mm driver.
 

The ATH-AFW headphones are a more portable over-ear, which run from 15Hz to 23kHz, have an impedance of 30Ω, are capable of outputting 105dB SPL, and have 36mm drivers.

There's no street date or price on any of these over-ear headphones yet.

Aesthetically, these look really similar to other Audio-Technica offerings (click here for more pics). We will look forward to getting in some of these units for review. Until the Headphone Review Bot gives us the run-down, we refuse to speculate on how these things will sound. 

[Story and pics via Akihabara News (in-ears, over-ears)]