Once your child gets a bit older, one of the first requests you’re going to get is for decent headphones. Sales of all portable tech goes up at this time of year – driven by the oparents of older teens who are digging in to their exam studies, new College or Uni courses – and there’s always a surge in sales of laptops, phones, PCs… and of course the essential Headphones for teens to accompany all of them.
And no, the cheapy ones simply won’t do. They need to be able to HEAR the bass, and look cool, and be at a price point which won’t make a parent frankly weep (Im looking at YOU Sennheiser).
So we were really pleased when Edifier asked us if we’d like to review the H880 headphones. Well – I say ‘we’. I was pleased and interested. The 13yr old may have bitten my hand off.
This is how they look on the Edifier site:
Yes. Quite. I mean, I may be ‘old’ (I’m not, btw) – but they look pretty darned cool, yes?
But – we’ve had cool-looking headsets before, and they have either just not done the job, or they have been great – until they have failed and broken. Good Looks, in our experience, come at the expense of durability and functionality at the lower end of the market. So I handed this headset over to said teenager, and asked her to let me know what she thought.
Yes. Yes she IS playing Minecraft. Because she fancied some ‘retro gaming’ with her friends… (maybe I am old after all).
To be honest, she hasn’t said much about them. I’ve had a shoulder shrug, and a “mmm-uh”. Which frankly any parent of a teen knows is pretty high oraise.
More telling is the fact that they’ve not left her head for the past few weeks. She wears them, quite literally, for hours at a time, and never complains about sore ears, or gets a migraine (we discovered an old pair of cheap earbuds used to ber a migraine contributor, so we are super-careful over what she listens with now).
Sound quality is excellent, and the inline mic is good enough to allow her to sue them for chat during games, or for Smule app singing.
One of her favourite features is the fact that the H880 comes with two cables – she uses the 2.5m one at her desk, as it allows her freedome to move around her desk with ease without doing the sudden head-dab as the headphone wire goes taught and tugs them off your head. But the 1.2m cable is used when she switches to her phone: in the car or with her phone tucked into a pocket it’s just the right length.
The Edifier H880 is simply and excellent set of Headphones for teens – sylish, sturdy, and with an ergonomic leatherette ear pad which is supremely comofrtable. They’ve also been designed with an eye to practicality and daily use in their design. They feel robust and sturdy enough to withstand a daily battering on the school bus.
The Edifier H880 can bought on Amazon here (and they offer a wireless headphone which I’m guessing is the same great quality in the W800BT here.)
