Kicker Cush Headphones Review

As I’m a big music fan, I always love the part of my job where I get to kick back and relax with some headphones on, so I fired up some of my favorite albums and a few special picks that I know can be quite demanding to reproduce and got to work it the Cush.

Initial impressions were that the Cush can provide a really nice clear tone, even at high volumes there was no distortion to the sound, but from there on out the Cush headphones really started to disappoint me, lets take a look at what I didn’t like, then well try get them out the way and move onto the good stuff.

The delivery is very flat, which is a good thing in quality headphones but there is no depth to the tone what so ever, I found the sound to be very distant and lacking in mid tone warmth. It was clear to listen to but at the cost of high quality Kicker have killed all realism to the low, mid and high tone ranges. Metal sounded washed out at best, the warm tones of my prog rock collection were gone and the high tones of classical music uninspiring.  This isn’t what I look for in a pair of headphones.

After a quick tinker with the EQ on my PCs media players (winamp and VLC) things just got worse. Any deviation in the frequency range caused distortion or sacrificed another tone range way more than it should have, leaving me with one option “flat or nothing”.

I did promise some good stuff didn’t I? well there is some, don’t worry. The headphones are extremely comfortable, that is always a good starting point and even after an hours use I didn’t feel I had need to adjust them or take them off.

There was some hope at the end of the tunnel for the Cush though, vocal heavy and non intensive music seems to favor very well on them, I would like to quantify that with “pop music” but quite frankly that’s just to vague these days. Most modern chart music is mixed with a lot of compression to the frequency range, which ironically is something that benefits the Cush headphones when it comes to play back.

But the highlight for me was audio books, their high comfort levels and ability to produce clear tones for a steady vocal range made them an absolute joy to use for listing to a few chapters. Not likely their intended market but certainly worth mentioning.