Headphone News Blog

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.

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.