Fancy a thump on the ear?
The latest urBeats in-ear earphones are so tough they can stand up to AC-DC
The new urBeats in-ear earphones are tiny and lightweight and yet reproduce amazingly deep bass. And they look really cool with metallic radial etching on the housing, which is precision-machined as a single finished piece so it’s tough and durable.
The maker, Beats, says the single-billet design helps prevent vibrations and unwelcome sounds.
Adding to the sleek look is the matching colour of the earbuds, tangle-free cable and storage pouch – a choice of black, white, pink, Nicki Minaj pink, purple, red, blue or grey.
The earphones use custom-designed drivers to reproduce deep bass and soaring highs as well as clear midrange. They block out external noise with a sealed, in-ear construction and multiple ear tips. You get small, medium and large pairs of rubber buds to fit any ear size.
The cable has an in-line microphone to use as a headset for your smartphone. You can also control the shutter of an iPhone camera and, when playing music, adjust the volume, pause and skip tracks, not to mention accepting and ending phone calls.
The high-grade-rubber cable is 22.3mm long and 1.2mm thick, quite bendable but rarely in a tangle. The urBeats weighs only 180 grams.
During my test I wore the buds comfortably for hours. The earphones rendered impressively deep and powerful bass while retaining the clarity of the highs and midrange sounds.
I mainly used my Sony Xperia smartphone and the Foobar2000 music-player application on my PC for the test. UrBeats was good with rock music, picking up the powerful drum-and-bass and blaring guitars, as well as songs where the focus is on singer’s voice.
I enjoyed listening to “The Best of Sting” album and was happy with the level of bass and clarity of the instruments. Incredibly, I could enjoy AC-DC’s album “Black Ice” too – normally in-ear earphones just can’t deliver the bass adequately.
And I loved the phones’ performance with the progressive songs in Roger Waters’ “The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking”. Apart from the terrific bass, I could hear tiny details that enhanced the songs’ mood and meaning.
The urBeats is distributed by RBT Technology for Bt4,400 and is available at Jaymart, iStudio, Life, PowerBuy, Munkong Gadget and other leading stores countrywide.
Key specs
_ Weight: 0.018kg
_ Height: 22.3mm
_ Length of cable: 1.2m
_ Type of jack: 3.5mm
_ Included: Earphones with matching in-line control and microphone cable, matching storage pouch, four pairs of varied sizes and shapes of ear-tip fittings.
