What Hi Fi Sound and Vision
02 SEP 2008
Philips SHE9850
With their comfortable buds and lightweight, but stylish design, these new headphones from Philips seem, at first, like a nice proposition.
Indeed, if you read the blurb about ‘balanced armature transducers’, and ‘angled acoustics’, they would appear to do everything but make the tea.
First impressions,then, are favourable, and the silicon buds fit neatly inside the ear. So far so good.
We tested these SHE9850’s with a variety of songs through an iPod Classic. And our first impression took a pounding in no time at all. Detail on these buds is excellent, it has to be said, and there’s a real sense of spaciousness in the sound, which is really to their credit.
Brittle sharpness to the bass
Give them a bass-light song such as The Beatles’ If I Needed Someone, though, and you soon discover that the sound is painfully treble heavy, with not even a hint of a plausible middle or bottom end.
No matter what kind of style you give these, from folk to dub and everything in between, there’s always that sense of brittlness, and after a while the sharpness really does start to wear you down.
These headphones will set you back nearly £90, and at that price, there’s very little to recommend them. For this money, (and less), there’s better out there; so these ’phones can only score three stars at best
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