Noontec Zoro Headphones Review

Noontec make some pretty bold claims about this headset, which I’ve already covered some of, you’ll find plenty more bold claims on their homepage if you want to read up on them.  Now I don’t want to just set about proving or disproving these claims and features one after the other, I started testing these headphones much in the same way I do every other headset I’ve tested or owned.

I fired up some of my faviourite albums, selecting the ones I’m the most familar in terms of the range of sounds they offer or how demanding they can be to reproduce accurately, beginning with the very intricate and detailed “Flex-Able” album by Steve Vai, an eclectic jazz fusion album as it has a lot of complex textures to its sound, then I moved onto the very punishing “Resurrection Through Carnage” by Bloodbath, a seriously heavy death metal album with extremely low tuned guitars and finally the heavy drum and bass type beats of Pendulums “In Silico”.

The first thing I noticed on all 3 albums was that while the audio was very clear, just as noontec described it would be, it tends to feel a little clinical and hollow, while the bass was accurate it lacked that extra depth and low end punch that I would expect to hear in these albums and I don’t mean I want thumping sub woofers akin to the sort of thing you hear in modified street cars, I’m talking about the general depth / tone range that should be present in the music, I tried to fiddle with my equalizers a little to fix this but found I just could get the right feel for them, its almost as if they have a pre set EQ built in to the headphones that cuts off some of the low ranges to prevent distortion.

Treble is very clear, but again sounds a little hollow and there is no warmth to the mid ranges, which really is a matter of preference in terms of how people like their mid range set, but its something  that is important in the above albums, again no fiddling with the equalisers fixed the problem without throwing out either the bass or the treble, so I ended up leaving the EQ set a flat.

Then it hit me, I was going about these headphones all wrong, they are slick, stylish, trendy and dare I say it, fashionable, all the things I am not! so I had to put my “what if I was trendy” head on and start again, I dug into my music collection and pulled out some new albums, Robbie Williams, La Roux, Lilly Allen (I have a broad taste in music) and a bunch of others that are buried in a sea of heavy metal.  Immediately I saw an improvement in the sound, more vocal based music, with electronic beats and shall we say “a more simple sound” definately benefits from the Zoro headphones, the sound came across a lot more balanced and clear than it did with my original selection of albums.

All these albums and tests were performed on my PC, then my iPod and then my HTC desire mobile phone, results were the same across all 3 devices, but the iPod did provide the most volume out of the 3, although this made no difference in general performance, for better or worse.