Skullcandy VenueImage used with permission by copyright holder
Skullcandy Crusher 360Image used with permission by copyright holder
While some of Skullcandy’s best-known offerings reside in the sub-$100 market, the company makes a variety of different types of headphones at a number of different price ranges. While neither the Venue nor the Crusher — both unveiled on Wednesday, August 22 — are as affordable as some of Skullcandy’s offerings, both of them are worth a look for different reasons.
With the new Venue noise-canceling headphones, Skullcandy seems to be aiming at a more youthful market, not surprising given that this is typically the company’s focus. Saying that most noise-canceling headphones are “only seen in the business-class section of an airplane,” the company says that the Venue headphones are for everyone.
For a fairly affordable price, the Venue headphones are packed with features. The headphones feature up to 24 hours of playback, with Rapid Charge technology gaining you five hours of battery life on a 10-minute charge. While noise-canceling is intended to keep out the noise of the world around you, these feature a Monitor Mode, letting you hear the outside world with just a simple push of a button. Skullcandy has also partnered with Tile, letting you find your headphones with the Tile mobile app. The Venue headphones are available in black and white color varieties.
Following up on the Crusher Wireless, which was released in 2016 and built on the earlier Crusher, the Crusher 360 is the latest generation of the bass-booming headphones. In addition to standard features, these headphones feature a haptic engine that rumbles the headphones, letting you feel the bass instead of simply hearing it. These headphones are also wireless, providing up to 30 hours of playback time on a single charge. These will be available exclusively via Best Buy in Black/Tan and Black/Black color varieties.
The Venue noise-canceling wireless headphones will retail for $180 and are available for pre-order now, while the Crusher 360 will retail for $300 and will be available for pre-order beginning September 5. For more information or to pre-order, see the Skullcandy website. If you want to see how the competition stacks up, take a look at our list of the best headphones you can buy or our list of the best noise-canceling headphones.
In what's been one of the worst-kept secrets of the year -- mostly because subtly putting a product into the hands of some of the biggest stars on the planet is no way to keep a secret -- the Beats Pill has returned. Just a couple of years after Apple and Beats unceremoniously killed off the stylish Bluetooth speaker, a new one has arrived.
Available for preorder today in either black, red, or gold, the $150 speaker (and speakerphone, for that matter) rounds out a 2024 release cycle for beats that includes the Solo Buds and Solo 4 headphones, and comes nearly a year after the Beats Studio Pro.
Ifi’s latest DAC is the first to add lossless Bluetooth audio
Ifi Audio's new Zen Blue 3 wireless digital-to-analog converter (DAC) will officially be available to buy for $299 on July 9. When it is, it will be the first device of its kind to support a wide variety of Bluetooth codecs, including Qualcomm's aptX Lossless, the only codec that claims to deliver bit-perfect CD quality audio over a Bluetooth connection.
Admittedly, there are very few devices on the market that can receive aptX Lossless (and fewer that can transmit it), so it's a good thing that the Zen Blue 3 also works with the more widely supported aptX Adaptive, LDAC, and LDHC/HWA codecs (all of which are hi-res audio-capable), plus the three most common codecs: AAC, SBC, and aptX.
The new Beats Pill might replace Sonos on my back porch
If I were to build an outdoor stereo in 2024, I'd do it with a pair of portable Beats Pills instead of Sonos speakers. Phil Nickinson / Digital Trends
In 2017, after more than a decade in our home, my wife and I added a pool. With it came a covered deck, making what basically was a new outdoor room. Not uncommon at all in Florida, but new to us.
