Headphones, Active Noise Reduction

 (16 customer reviews)

After 9 months of use, the right headphone earpiece broke at its swivel connection at the headband. The swivel joint is only .25 inches in diameter and each headphone earpiece is massive compared to the strength and durability needed at this skinny hollow plastic joint. When the phones are rotated for storage, there is no guard to prevent a large lever arm to apply force and bend this joint with any movement. The soft carrying bag offers no real protection. After a number of cycles of use, stress fatigue in the plastic (like metal fatigue) sets in and then ...... SNAP one of your headphone earpieces is dangling by its wire.
As an analogy, I offer the example of those plastic model airplanes, you might have made as a kid. To get the individual parts, you bent the pieces back and forth until they snapped off from their molded plastic branches...same principle, but in this case, it results in headphone failure.

I've had the 712i headphones for about a week and I am NOT very impressed with them at all. The headphones are relatively heavy making them not very comfortable for long periods of time. The noise cancelling is great, but because of the closed cup design, it suffocates the ears making it uncomfortable to wear for more than an hour continuously. As for sound quality, again it fails to live up to it's MSRP price tag. Fortunately I was able to find these headphones for less than $40 but even that price was too much in my opinion. Instead, I would definitely recommend going with the Sennheiser HD212 or even the HD202. I have the HD212's and love those headphones. I only bought these because I wanted to see if there would be a difference in quality given the higher MSRP of these cans. There was a difference, a big negative one.

I purchased these last year, and on my first use on a 6 hr airplane flt. the headphone broke. The headband started digging into the side of head above my ears after a while. I took the headphones off leaving them on my seat and when I returned sat on them and one of the ear phones broke off instantly. They were bulky fitting into the loose cloth bag they come with. Not impressed at all with the design, but the noise cancelling feature was nice when I clicked it on.