When I saw Greg Kumparak‘s facial reaction while he demoed Skullcandy’s new Crusher headphones yesterday, I had to go try them myself. When TechCrunch TV director Jon Orlin saw my resulting facial reaction, he decided we needed to get one fresh on camera. 10 minutes later, we had our own Elin Blesener in front of the lens, and her reaction was just what we expected.
With the Crushers, Skullcandy promises something that many a headphone company has promised to do before: to physically rattle your head as a subwoofer might. Unlike the past attempts we’ve seen, these ones actually seem to do it. We sat down with Skullcandy Acoustics Engineer Sam Noertker at our big ol’ CES broadcast booth to chat about how it all works.
Rather than trying to fake a bunch of bass with digital signal processing, the Crushers use an individually powered second driver to trigger a proprietary (and rather hush-hush) vibration system. Even in the sub-optimal audio testing environment that is the parking lot outside of CES, we all walked away pretty impressed.
Will the $100 Crushers smoke your $300 Sennheisers or your $500 Shures? Of course not. With that said, the vibration system has a much bigger effect than I expected from something I’d been quick to write off as a gimmick.
Look for a full review of these in the coming weeks.
