Headphone News Blog

The Beats by Dr. Dre and Monster will soon undergo a palette swap from black to white — BUT ONLY FOR  A LIMITED TIME!!! Since this is an exploding offer and explosions are AWESOME, Monster figures these new headphones are worth 2x the MSRP price of the originals. The originals were $350, meaning these new ones are $02BC. Oh, sorry, the sheer magnitude of the price caused us to slip into hexidecimal. Ahem. The new ones are $700. Yeah, that's a lot. There currently aren't any pictures of it out there, but through the magic of a 15-second Photoshop, we've produced the image at right. If the actual product is worth $700, then this picture must be worth at least $5.

[Via Gizmodo]

We just finished our review of the Monster Beats. The audio quality wasn't great, but we did hear a lot of detail. The active noise cancellation was terrible: it was weak, created noticeable noise, and is mandatory for hearing playback, so when you run out of batteries you lose your music privileges.

The Beats are versatile, but not very. The poor isolation, lack of leakage control, and overall size mean they're not the most portable headphones. You can remove the cord, however, so if you have a longer audio cable you can hook up to your home theater setup. We think the Beats are a good option if you were considering the Bose QuietComfort series, but either way we still think you can get a better value.