Recently I bought a pair of Skullcandy Smokin' Buds, basically earphones designed by Skullcandy, for about £12 from HMV. On face value they looked amazing for the price, great bass with well balanced treble, from a well respected company and they looked good too!
As a design, the ear phones themselves were great; looking good and delivering great sound, combined with ear buds that were well rounded and perfectly sized so that they didn’t fall out of your ears, no matter what you were doing. In addition they were easy to change over, if the size wasn’t right, or if they broke.
The cable as well, was well thought out; at 1.3 meters it was the perfect length with just enough exes that when you pulled your music player out of your pocket you could hold it at a comfortable angle to see the screen. As well as the length, the cable also had a volume control wheel built in, which was a little unnecessary as the target audience of the product likes there music loud, but a usefull thing to have, all the same.
But the thing that let these headphones down was the build quality, where the cable met the 3.5mm jack plug. Within weeks the cable had frayed and broken away from the jack, first leaving me with full sound in one ear and fragmented sound in the other and the cable frayed further, leaving fragmented sound in one ear but none in the other. If Skullcandy had only though about the quality of there cable ends and the driection that they meet the jack, not on a right angle but straight on, these would have been brilliant headphones.
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