BEYERDYNAMIC HS300 HEADSET

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PRICE £197 approx

AS a headset manufacturer, how do you make your product stand out in an increasingly crowded marketplace?

For beyerdynamic, part of the answer is to provide customers with the capability to personalise their headset by specifying the colour and materials used.

A couple of 10-character lines of laser engraved text can also be specified. This customisation is done using a nice graphical application on the beyerdynamic website that allows the personalized headset to be viewed from different perspectives.

However, if the performance and comfort of a headset is as important to you as appearance then you’ll be pleased to learn that the HS300 Individual that we tested has a lot to offer.

The HS300 is a passive headset with a claimed noise attenuation of up to 30db, and weighs in at a svelte 325g. It comes with a five year warranty, cables to attach a phone or music player, and a case.

We tested the HS300 with the optional gel ear pads. These are enormous – 10cm in diameter and almost 2.5cm thick – and designed to completely surround the ears.

We found they sealed very well, even while wearing glasses – and they were able to accommodate some fairly big ears!

In the air, the lightweight construction and big ear pads contribute to a very comfortable experience. Even after a couple of hours we felt no discomfort or headband ‘hotspots’.

Subjective comparisons of noise attenuation are difficult to make, but we thought the HS300 was on a par with the best passive headsets we’ve tried. The microphone boom is easy to adjust, and stays where it is put.

The HS300 comes with an audio box that provides an interface for an MP3 player or a mobile phone and houses the volume control. The box also contains the two AA batteries that are required to power the auxiliary input interface.

Unfortunately this audio box is unnecessarily bulky. This seems to be because it is the same audio box used to house the active noise electronics on beyerdynamics’s ANR headset.

We used an iPod to try out the auxiliary input, and found the sound quality to be excellent. A switch on the audio box allows automatic muting to be enabled or disabled.

When enabled, the muting feature automatically drops the volume of the external device by 90% when there is an incoming nav, comm, or intercom signal. Overall, the HS300 seems to be nicely put together. We particularly liked the thin aluminium yokes that retain the ear cups. We were less keen on the leatherette headband pad, which looks like it could split. For an extra tenner, we’d go for the genuine leather headband.- Phil O’Donaghue

BRILLIANTLY ENGINEERED
LOOP was invited for a tour of the beyerdynamic factory. The level of engineering that goes into the headsets is impressive – as you would expect from a company that is based in the same region as Audi! All the components are made within the factory. David Thimm, who heads up the aviation division used to work at Sennheiser. His idea of manufacturing personalised headsets has given a point of difference in the headset market – couple that with a headset packed with features at a price that doesn’t bust the bank and we think they’ve got a winner! You can build your own at
w. www.beyerdynamic.com/avi

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