2 
Sony’s been making quality headphones for donkeys — hell, I’ve owned at least five pairs of Sonys over my lifetime. But these days all the cool kids seem to be wearing Beats. Sony wants to change that with its MDR-1 range with wired, wireless and noise cancelling variants for your aural work-out.
The bog-standard, wired MDR-1s pack 40mm drivers with “liquid crystal polymer film” diaphragms; an inline remote for iDevices, and a wide frequency response of between 4 and 80,000 Hz, which should be good for all your high fidelity musical listening — bit of a contradiction having an iPhone remote and hi-fi quality drivers, but whatever you’re into, I guess. They’re closed backed, too, which should help those sitting next to you on the tube from screaming in pain at your horrendous choice of music, plus they’ve got some fancy non-tangle cable, which I’ll believe rids you the mess of wires when I see it.
Things get a little more interesting with the MDR-1RBTs, which add Bluetooth and NFC into the mix for some instant pairing, and should last you a not-too-shabby 30 hours per charge, according to Sony. If you’re after noise-cancelling in your ‘phones, Sony’s MDR-1RNC swap Bluetooth for active noise cancelling, with dual microphones for both inside and outside monitoring. They’ll apparently reduce some 99.7 per cent of ambient noise for 22 hours between charges, like the drone of the tube or plane, just don’t expect it to nuke the guy jabbering on his phone next to you.
All variants of the MDR-1 will be available from the beginning of October for an undisclosed, probably quite high, price. Here’s a little piece of advice, Sony: if you want to beat Beats, give your headphones a name as well as a model number, preferably something catchy, because “MDR-1″ just isn’t.
chuck these in at a sub beats price, and let them be in the same league as my sony studio earphones, and you sony, have a sale
Defiantly, I love Sony headphones. I have XBD-500′s £40.00 and they are awesome, defiantly on par if not better than the Beats Solo’s.
currently i have sony mdrex510′s and a set of jvc ham5x XX 50mm headphones.
the sonys are amazing, and the jvc’s though my Fiio headphone amp are pretty good too.
i would like to try beats studio, and beats on tour, so far ive only heard beats solo, and i was less than impressed for the cost, considering, my two, cost £54 and £30 respectivly
It’s not hard to out beat beats – they are utter crap. Unfortunatley with good marketing they are not the first company to brainwash a high percentage of the population into believing otherwise. They are popping up on the street as fast as other style over substance brands.
I think if you paid £50+ for a pair of headphones from any company they would be better than beats – they might not look as cool though..
http://www.innerfidelity.com/content/monster-beats-dr-dre-solo
They’ve styled them like the studio-quality MDR-V6/7506, two of the best sounding headphones I’ve ever tried… AND they’ve given it enough padding to replicate the classic Beyerdynamic pad replacement, so there’s a huge cavity there for big sound.
A respectable price and these could be some damn fine headphones.
Beats headphones are more chic and cool. http://www.beatsheadphonesmonsterbeats.co.uk/