Performance -
With audio gear it is hard to be objective. After all different people like different music and even people that like the same music might like to listen to it in different ways. To make sure that I cover the audio products that we get here at DecryptedTech I like to have more than one opinion. Usually I gather 5 other people to listen to different audio types (gaming, movies, MP3 and CD-Audio). I then ask for a rating of one to five with one being the worst and 5 being the best for each category. As an added item I also ask for a single word to describe the audio quality. I then follow up with my personal feelings and observations. The HOM Redemption Song headphones are meant more for music reproduction. We also wanted to try them out in our other environments so we will cover them hear, but will focus on their performance with music and in particular digital music.

Music (MP3 and CD-Audio) -
For Music I have a few favorite tracks that I like to use. These are not always other people’s favorites but they serve as a baseline and have some impressive audio features to them that can distinguish between good audio and bad. One of them is Stevie Ray Vaughn’s rendition of Jimi Hendrix’s Little Wing. It is an amazing track. Others are A Day in the Life by the Beetles, Are you Experienced by Jimi Hendrix, and Cage the Elephant’s Ain’t no Rest for the Wicked. To this listing we added some jazz, funk, and of course Reggae (Bob Marley’s Stir it Up of course).The numbers for this along with their corresponding one word comments are below.


The audio reproduction on the Stir it Up is exceptional. The separation is great for a $200 set of headphones that are meant for use with portable audio players. The deep bass was evident in songs like Is This Love and Stir it Up while not taking anything away from the high clear tones of Bob Marley’s voice. The mid-range sounds were not left out either as you can hear the crisp sounds of the brass instruments in there as well. The left right balance was brought out in music like Cage the Elephant’s “Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked” which uses the left and right channels to blend music into a single piece (following in the footsteps of pioneers like the Beetles, Jimi Hendrix and Cream).






Gaming -
So for this test we did something a little different. As we have mentioned (and you can see from the box) these are meant for portable personal media players like the iPhone, iPad iPod and even other tablets. We decided that in addition to our normal gaming tests with a few choice PC games we would also throw in a couple of games on our EVO 3D just to see how good the audio reproduction is there.

In gaming on our smartphone (the HTC EVO 3D) the Stir it Up headset actually brought out some of the flaws in the audio for the games we tested. We heard his and pop long with what is obviously over sampled audio clips in games like Fruit Ninja and even in Spiderman 3D (hey it’s a 3D phone after all). It also highlights an issue that some may overlook. If the audio controller (CODEC) used on the device is not good then you will not get good audio even with a good pair of headphones.

On the PC our Asus Xonar was able to push the Stir it Up headset properly. In playing Medal of Honor we felt the explosions and the nearby gunfire. Although it can never be the same it was startlingly close to the real thing. The only thing missing was the feeling of the concussion in your chest. Other than that the sound reproduction really brought a new level to the game play even for older titles like Half Life 2.


Movies/Video -
Movies was an easy one also, I have several Blu-ray titles that are great for this including Pirates of the Caribbean. So I loaded up this title and then dropped in a couple of other movies that have good surround effects. The numbers and words are shown below.

The sound during video playback was solid with full and vibrant sound. What many felt was missing was a sense of surround sound. There was also a slight clipping effect on the iPad 2 (running the latest firmware) with movies downloaded from iTunes in HD if we were to try and put our fingers on it we would guess that the lower frequency range on the iPad is causing clipping on the high end frequencies. We also saw something of this in transcoded video if the AC3 5.1 was left as the audio choice. Again this appears to be more an issue with the audio CODEC on the iPad than the headphones as we did not see this on our Transformer or the Zune HD we have. Again moving to the PC the Stir it Up headset was very solid with good highs, lows and mids. The only thing really missing was surround sound.

Comfort -
The padded ear cups, head strap and the weight all combine to make wearing the Sitr it Up headset comfortable. We did have two people that reported that the left ear piece felt heavier than the right, but we did not get a sense of that during our time with them (which was about 8 hours). We can say that after 8 hours of having them on your ears do feel like they have been pushed back a little, but nowhere near as bad as most of the other on-ear headsets we have tried out.