I've owned these headphones for several years and they are without a doubt the best set of headphones I have owned in terms of audio quality. Keep in mind I have never spent over $40 or so in headphones though. Awesome bass and highs. I've had these so long the cable wore out, so I eventually just took them apart and spliced in a new cable and left the noise cancellation piece off since I never used it. They still work great.

Great sound for the price when it was still working

Poor design wiring to right side; needs some serious "re-thinking" done there.

We purchased the Maxell NC II Headphones early 2007 and it was meant for use on transcontinental flights. We like the NC capablities for that price, and we used the set twice. However, on our third trip, we noticed that there was no sound from the right side! Examination revealed that the wire to the right side got damaged in the kink of the hinging right "shell". Albeit it is not a very expensive set, it is a very poor and weak design and we are very disappointed with Maxell! Surely, you would think that it lasts a bit longer than that!

superb bass, noise cancelling works great
good sound spectrum when noice cancelling is off
price
confortable

noice cancelling on-drowns out the highs
requires 2 aaa batteries for nc

These headphones are the best you can by for under 100.00. I have spent money on skullcandy(very pretty phones though), koss, sony, and none of them come close. the base reproduction is amazing (go to google.com type in bass tester and pick one of the videos that pop up and see what i mean). the midrange is ok and high is excellent withougt the noice canelling on. But, like someone else said the noice canceling is great for noise such as airplane fans or heaters, but the noice cancelling drowns the highs but still powers the lows even more giving more bass than the voices and high instruments. overall buy this set and have a good time with them. (4.8 of 5)

Similar Products Used:

koss
sony
skullcandy
phillips

They've survived 2 combat tours to Iraq and still work. (Can combat proven be applied here as a marketing tool?

As mentioned; high end clarity dissipation with noise canceling feature enabled.

In all honesty, they are a great bargain for the money spent on them. They sound great, fold up rather conveniently and have been a great set of headphones.
I agree with the previous review about the high end sound quality when the noise cancellation is enabled, but it's something that it tolerable.

The bulk of my travel constitutes very noisy cargo style aircraft. (C-5, C-17, C-130, etc..) The sound cancellation in these types of environments is remarkable considering that these are by no means expensive headphones.

Crystal clear sound Loads of distortion free power handling Surprisingly strong, clear bass crisp treble

Noise cancellation kills the high ranges.

I'll start off by saying that the Noise cancelling feature is both great, and this set of headphone's biggest downfall. On a plane, it cancels out a surprising amount of the background noise. It cancels out the noise of a fan very well. The problem lies in the fact that when you turn it on, all of the crispness of the high-med to high end goes with it. In a loud area, this is not a huge deal, but it is very disappointing to hear the quality go downhill. Enough complaining about the NC. The 40mm drivers on these can support more than enough power for spirited listening. Heavily padded cups remove nearly all of the echoing that normally comes with the closed air design. Unfortunately that padding does not keep it from getting warm inside there. It does allow you to listen fairly loud without people around you hearing a thing. With a little equalization, these can be fitted to listen to anything (rock, hip hop, jazz, blues, classical, movies) Since I rarely use the noise cancelling I will give these a 5, but if you need to use it a lot, look elswhere and plan on spending at least twice what these cost. Overall, very nice effort by Maxell.

Similar Products Used:

Koss, sony, panasonic