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Hi! Welcome to Lachlan Likes A Thing, a show where I take a thing and see whether or not
I like it. Now the thing we're looking at in this video is the Skullcandy Navigator
portable on-ear headphones. Now before you say anything, yes, I know, Skullcandy has
historically not had the best of reputations when it comes to audio quality. However one
thing that made me start paying a bit more attention to the brand was the article over
at Tyll Hertsens site, Innerfidelity, where he interviews Skullcandy's new head of audio
engineering, a Doctor Tetsuo Oishii. The guy does seem like he knows what he's doing, they've
done more testing and they do seem to be listening, and as part of that new effort towards improving
sound quality they've released new revisions of a lot of their products including the Skullcandy
Mix Masters and the Skullcandy Aviators. And the new revisions all say "Supreme Sound"
on the box so you know that they're new versions. I'm actually a bit of the fan of the Skullcandy
Aviators. I've always thought that ever since I've heard a friend's pair that they have
a warm but a pretty nice, tight and balanced sound. So I got the Skullcandy Navigator's
out of curiosity, because I wanted to know whether they could get the sound in a smaller
package. But first off, let's look at the design. So the Skullcandy Navigators have
what I think is a really well thought out design for a pair of portable headphones.
You have all these solid metal parts throughout the frame of the headphones. So even though
it's light weight it feels very solid and durable. You have relatively subtle Skullcandy
branding here which I actually think is quite a nice little touch. Now one thing to note
about these earpads is that they are not replaceable, so if you do wear them out unfortunately you
might have to get a new pair of headphones. Now with the Skullcandy Navigator unlike the
Logitech UE 4000 which is another headphone I looked at with a similar price they fold
up into a smaller shape for storage, so that's really quite convenient. Another thing cool
about the Skullcandy Navigators is that they have a detachable cable with iPhone remote.
Now one thing unfortunate about the detachable cable is that it just does terminate in a
- sorry - it's pretty stuck in there - it does terminate in a 2.5mm jack and the socket
is fairly recessed so it might be hard to use any other aftermarket cables. If you break
the cable you might have to ask Skullcandy for a replacement. Now I don't know if the
Skullcandy Navigator was designed for people with smaller heads or I just have an unnaturally
large head because I found that I actually basically had to use the largest size of the
headband adjustment to get them to fit right on my head. So if you have a bit of a bigger
head it's worth checking out to make sure these will fit before you buy them. The Skullcandy
Navigators just pop on here, they're quite comfortable, they do a good job of blocking
out external noise, they do a better job than the Logitech UE 4000. However they are a bit
less breathable than the UE 4000. So if it's hot weather you might find that they get a
bit stuffy. So how do the Skullcandy Navigators sound? Well unfortunately they're not nearly
as balanced sounding as the Aviators. They have a really thick, warm, bassy and kind
of wooly sound to them. They're even less balanced than the Logitech UE 4000's which
at least had a bit of energy to the vocals. These just have a slight dryness to the treble,
but not particularly any great amount of energy. It sounds fairly dull actually to my ears.
The only time I found myself enjoying the sound of the Skullcandy Navigators is when
I was on the train, because of all the external noise I didn't have to turn up the volume
very high on the navigators to get a good sense of the rythym. But apart from that overall
I just found them a bit congested. And I feel like Skullcandy could have aimed for a bit
more of a balanced sound like the Skullcandy Aviators or even something like the UE 4000.
This is a real shame because I was really relly - sorry - I was really ready to love
these headphones especially because I quite liked the design, it's all quite nice and
portable and it's really well thought out. So do I recommend the Skullcandy Navigators?
Well unfortunately just like with the Logitech UE 4000 I couldn't really recommend these
if sound quality was your main priority. However if you do do a lot of travelling in noisy
environments these are a really good option because they do fold up into that compact
shape, they are very isolating from external noise, so they're a good little package and
they're quite reasonably priced. If sound quality was your main priority I'd recommend
looking at something like the Audio Technica ES88 or the Audio Technica ES10. Now those
are two portable headphones that I'm currently making reviews for. So if you subscribe to
my channel you can get an update for when those videos are uploaded. Anyway thanks for
watching this video, thanks to everyone who's Liked my other videos and subscribed to my
channel. If you want to talk to me about gear I'm on twitter @lachlikesathing - and happy
listening!