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# Family Tech: Headphones

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<!-- video src="https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/Ryq8Ebev.m3u8" -->
## Video: Family Tech: Headphones

[Watch (HLS stream): Family Tech: Headphones](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/Ryq8Ebev.m3u8) (3:50)

![Family Tech: Headphones](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/Ryq8Ebev/poster.jpg?width=720)

_Published 2008-08-04. TIME's Josh Quittner, with a little help from the family and pets, reviews some of the best in new high-end headphones_


---

Jul 27, 2023 12:56 PM UTC

---

## More From This Series

[All Videos](https://time.com/video/)

[5 Affordable Headphones for Your Lifestyle](/video/L07NkhHL/)

### 5 Affordable Headphones for Your Lifestyle

[Family Tech: Fitness Gadgets](/video/FL7akRuH/)

### Family Tech: Fitness Gadgets

[Family Tech: The Pico Projector](/video/K7BhCtfY/)

### Family Tech: The Pico Projector

---


## Transcript

Hi. Welcome to my garden. It's been headphone month at the Quittner household. I've been trying to play with lots of different things. The Bose Acoustic Comfort3's, 1, a 2, and a 3 3's are the very expensive ones. They're about 350 bucks. They're also really, really very comfortable, and the noise cancelation on them is quite remarkable. The good folks at Sennheise actually sent me early this week these wireless ones. The wireless ones are really super cool. They actually fit right in your ear, you know, like this. Well, they actually fit in my ears quite well. But if you got little girl ears, they don't quite work.

But they sound really, really great. They have very high fidelity. The only problem with those is they're about $ 500, where the Bose are $ 350, so you're really getting up there in price range. Everything looked pretty cool. I thought all these were great, and then earlier this week the long and the anxiously anticipated headphones from Dr. Drey arrived in the Quittner household.

>> 1, 2, 3 except the folks snope doggie doggin' back to Drey--

>> These are not old man's headphones.

>> so back old nut because--

>> Look at these things. It's like they're stylish. I mean, I've taken to actually wearing them around town just-- without listening to anything just because they look so cool. [ unk ] up. Here we go. They're very, very comfortable. You just put them on your ear. They got this lovely distinctive red cable. There's a mute button that's built right on to the side, so if you want to talk to, you know, your wife or something, you can just hold down the mute button. The red cord behaves just like any other headphone cord. It plugs into your audio source. But let's say you wanna be listening to music on your-- on your iPhone.

It also comes with a black cord, and the black cord has a microphone built in. So, you can attach this lovely black cord and you can be listening to music on your iPhone. And when a phone call comes in, all you do is hit the answer button, and you're good to go.

>> Hello?

>> So how do they sound? I figured that for 2 headphones that were similarly priced, in fact identically priced, they're both $ 350 at retail, I figured the Beats, since they came from a legendary hip- hop performer, would actually excel down in the lower registers. So-- and the base notes. In fact, I really couldn't hear much of a difference, so I set up a Y- cable and I listened to them both side- by- side and the base was exactly the same. The surprising thing was in the upper registers, the beats were amazing. I mean, I could hear entire orchestras up in the high notes, where on the Bose it was just kind of a muddied undifferentiated sound.

But if it's noise cancelation you're after, you can't beat the Bose. These babies are for blotting out the snoring guy sitting next to you in 16B, while the Beats, would have some noise cancelation, are really just for listening to music.

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