JVC HA-S600 review

These over-ear headphones are fairly bulky but the two ear cups can be placed together and folded up towards the headband when they’re not in use. This makes them a lot easier to carry and lets them slip into your bag when you’re not listening to your music.

Over-ear headphones can be pretty odd looking, but these are reasonably stylish. The oval backs are finished in gloss plastic and have subtle silver accents that really makes the stand out.

While style is one thing, it’s comfort that really counts and these weren’t as comfortable as we were expecting. Wearing the cups low pressed on the neck below our ears, while wearing them higher pulled the headband down onto our crown. This didn’t make for a very nice listening experience.

JVC quotes a modest 102dB sensitivity for these headphones, but they sound massive. They reproduced music with gusto, punching out deafening volumes where other pairs needed to be driven far harder.

While this should be a good thing, the sound quality wasn’t very good at all. We found that the result sounded artificially saturated with bass and treble at the expense of clarity in the mid-range. Driving, woolly bass made rock an ordeal and hip-hop boomy. We also noticed some odd resonant frequencies, and after a few more minutes of listening our ears felt rather tired.

While these headphones look pretty stylish and fold neatly away, we found them uncomfortable and weren’t impressed with the sound quality. Our advice is to spend a bit more money and buy the Grado SR60i over-ear pair instead. These have far superior sound quality that makes them worth the extra expense.