Maxell Drumsoundz review

Maxell’s Drumsoundz are surprisingly chunky for a pair of in-ear headphones. The drivers are housed in large, thimble-shaped cases with earplugs protruding from the base. This looks rather ungainly and can make the plugs difficult to settle into your ear canals, although they’re comfortable enough once in position.

The wired headphones have a short 50cm lead, but a 70cm extension is provided to give you enough cable to connect to an MP3 player in your pocket. Also supplied are rubber earplug tips in a variety of sizes. The earpieces are advertised as being made of anti-bacterial materials. This might soothe the minds of the hygiene-conscious, be we’re pretty sure we’ve never caught an ear infection from a pair of headphones.

The headphones kick out plenty of volume and audio quality isn’t hideous, but the bass is far too loud compared to the treble and mid-ranges, which made some of our favourite dance and industrial tracks painful to listen to. Mid-tones are also a little fuzzy and indistinct, particularly at volumes low enough to keep the bass down to a reasonable level, while higher notes often lacked emphasis.

If you like your music very bassy, then these headphones may be for you, but we found the effect to be excessive. Maxell also claims that the headphones create a ‘3D sound effect’ – we weren’t provided with any details of how this is supposed to work, although the sound the headphones produced did have an excellent sense of space, which we particularly appreciated on instrumental tracks without a lot of bass to overwhelm the sound.

Although you could do much worse for your money when shopping for budget headphones, we aren’t fans of the overpowered bass. All except the most extreme bass fans will be able to find significantly better audio quality from cheaper headphones, such as Philips’ SHE2550 Extra Bass earbuds.