JBL headphones: Looks good, sounds fantastic

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Sharad Raghavan: Dec 13 2012, 01:27 IST

One of the main complaints about listening to music in India is that there is too much ambient sound—coolers, fans, TVs, etc—that either takes away from the listening experience or forces one to blast the music on headphones. Even while using headphones, though, the most common experience is of external sounds interfering with the music, or the blaring music being heard by people around you.

JBL’s J55i headphones seek to address this problem, and do a commendable job. The close-backed design of the headphones go a long way in noise cancellation—either coming in or going out. In fact, I tested the headphones in what is arguably the loudest ambient atmosphere Delhi has to offer—peak-time traffic in an autorickshaw. I was pleasantly surprised to find that, forget the noise of the traffic around me, I could not even hear the sound of my own auto’s engine! An added, though probably unintended, benefit of full-ear covering headphones is that they double up as ear-muffs in winter, which is invaluable in an auto.

As far as the sound is concerned, the J55i justify their quite reasonable price of R5,490. During the autorickshaw tests, I played soft, melodic classical music by Bach, bass heavy rap songs by Jay Z and everything in between, to test the range of the headphones. The experience was great. The treble notes of Bach’s violin pieces were as easily audible as every thump and boom of Jay Z’s songs, as were the swirling melodies of The Beatles and the up-tempo hits

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