Polk Audio Hinge Headphones
- The big luxe headphone experience in a package that folds up for travel
- Lightweight and cushy for extended rock-out comfort
- Inline control and mic for music and the phone calls that interrupt your music (Apple standard)
- When Polk says “Optimized Electro-acoustic Tuning” it probably actually means something for real
- Model: AM4118-A, AM4119-A (the two numbers are for the two different colors, which implies that they must have over 4,000 available colors)
When did compromise become a dirty word?
Compromise used to refer to a situation where, while nobody got everything they wanted, everybody got more than they started with. Problems got solved. Things got done. The world moved forward. Somehow, the noble ideal of compromise turned into a crime, a code word for giving up, caving in, selling out.
What does this have to do with headphones? Well, the kind of people who do all their listening under studio conditions insist that only over-ear headphones are acceptable. The fullest, deepest sound, the biggest soundfield, the most complete exclusion of ambient noise: nothing else matters. Who cares if they’re so freaking big you can barely fit them into a backpack? So what if complete isolation from ambient sound can have ugly results when you’re crossing the street? Settling for anything less would be - here it comes - compromise.
At the other pole are the people who do all their listening while they’re in motion. For them, only earbuds will do. Why bother with subtle distinctions of sound when they’ll just be lost amid the noise of your footsteps, your breathing, and the jostling of the earbud cord? Adding some bulk to your headphones would be - that’s right - compromise.
What if neither of these apply to you? Is there any hope for the great mass of listeners who appreciate both sound quality and portability, and who maybe don’t want to shell out three figures for a couple of little speakers and the stuff that holds them together?
As so often happens when we ask questions like these, the answer is the thing we’re selling. A good pair of on-ear headphones will give you a much fuller, richer sound than earbuds in a much smaller, lighter package than over-ear headphones. We’ll stake our hard-earned reputation for crotchety skepticism on this: this is a very good pair of on-ear headphones. And since they fold up along their titular hinges, they’re even more portable than most on-ears.
We are no respecter of brands, but Polk Audio has enough history behind it to be taken seriously. We’ll even take them at their word on “Polk Optimized Electro-acoustic Tuning”, because it was probably created by people in lab coats, not the people in the marketing department.
Their only misstep was to maybe overestimate the appetite for high-end headphones, and to set the price for these a little too lofty. But hey, that’s what we’re here for. Now that the price has settled into what is, by any account, a ridiculously good deal, only a true zealot would pass them up because of their on-ear pedigree. If this be compromise, let’s have some more of it.
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Polk Audio Hinge Headphones 54
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