Hed Kandi Discothéque On-Ear Headphones

Been seeing a lot of branded headphones coming into the Philippines lately (and we’ve been testing a bunch of them in the past months) and one of the newer and more recognizable brand is Hed Kandi.

Originally started out as a record label, I guess it made sense for Hed Kandi to venture into the headphone market.

We picked this Hed Kandi Discothéque from the local distributor to test out.

The Discothéque is a simple on-ear headphones with a stainless-steel frame for a head-band coupled with soft leather-like pads (on-ear headphones are categorized as supra-aural headphones).

Another twister strip of stainless-steel protrudes from the side, holding the ear cups and allowing the bands to be extended according to the size of your head. The accordion-type cord (more commonly referred to as curly cables) provides good cable-management yet offers the extra cable length when needed (the Discothéque maxes out at 1.5).

The ear-pads are soft and comfortable although I fear that thin piece of polymer film that covers the pads might easily get torn off by accident.

The head-band is strangely very tight, not just because I have a fairly-sized head, but because the steel frame is not very tractable so the pressure of the pads against the ears becomes significant over time. I just think the head-bands can be very tiring to use over prolonged periods of time.

Sound quality is impressive — clear and crisp in the low and mids, not tinny on the high end and has really solid bass. For the most part, I think it’ the bass that gave this headphone really good marks.

The ear pad does a fairly good job at isolating ambient noise but not by much (and because it’s a supra-aural headphones, it really depends on the size and shape of your ear lobes).

Hed Kandi Discothéque technical specifications:
Driver diameter: 40mm
Frequency response: 20Hz – 20kHz
Impedence: 32 Ohms
Sensitivity: 108dB
Max input power: 100mW

The Discothéque retails for about Php1,190USD 20INR 1,719EUR 19CNY 148 in local stores (like Astrovision, Mobile 1, Digital Hub, Digital Walker, PowerMac and iStudio among others), a very decent price-point if I may say so.

They come in a variety of funky colors as well and it’s pretty obvious that this model is targeted towards the more trendy or fashion-conscious crowd. I just feel you’d end up putting it around your neck than around head because of that somewhat uncomfortable head band. Too bad because we really liked the sound quality of this unit.

In any case, we’d love to give this Hed Kandi Discothéque to one of our readers. Here’s what you need to do to score this unit.

In 160 characters or less, complete this line:

“I’d love to have that Hed Kandi Discothéque! I’d give up … “. Include this link at the end — http://www.yugatech.com/143hedkandi.

Post it on your Twitter, Plurk, Google+, FB or Tumbler and leave a comment here with the link to you entry. We’ll pick the random winner on Monday.

Disclosure: Digits Trading, the official distributor of Hed Kandi in the Philippines, supplied us with this unit for review and allowed us to keep it or give it away to readers. They’re also an advertiser on this blog for the next 12 months so you should see their banner ads by end of the month.