After being impressed with the House of Marley’s Redemption Song On-Ear headphones we have now spent some time with their Zion In-Ear head phones. These follow in the same style as the Redemption Song headphones and are made of recycled or renewable materials. They also follow in the trend of being tuned for high quality sound and are designed for use with Apple’s lineup of products (iPad, iPod, iPhone) but will work with just about any media player or smart phone (with a few exceptions). With a price tag of $99.99 we are hoping that these headphones give us the same level of performance that we saw with the Redemption Song. Follow the bouncing ball and sing along as we tell your just how well they perform.
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. Although the House of Marley Zion in-ear headphones are primarily meant for music and video we wanted to make sure we covered all of their audio capabilities and still tested them with all of our normal tests.Gaming -Gaming was the easiest one test and also the easiest one to observe. Although you typically would not use in-ear headphones for gaming (Although Steel Series and IceMatt did for a while) we still wanted to make sure we covered everything. To do this we used to of our favorite games Modern Warfare 3 and Medal of Honor. Both of these games have good quality sound and with the explosions and multiple layers of audio running they can quickly find holes in your audio gear if you know what to listen for.The numbers are shown below, while the words used to describe the gaming quality were; CleanAliveCoolNiceGoodOur gaming experience was much better than we thought it would be. I was surprised at the quality and volume of audio we found with the Zion in-ear headphones. Explosions, gunfire and other sounds that generally need lower frequencies sounded great. There was no positional audio effect that we noticed, but that did not matter as the sound felt like it was coming from inside your head. One of the most impressive things was the way the Zion in-ear headphones made the ringing from close grenade explosions (in Modern Warfare3) seem more realistic. Movies/Video -Movies was an easy one also, I have several Bluray 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 response was not as good as the gaming, but still the surround piece did seem to impress. The numbers and words are shown below. The movie and video quality was every bit as good as the gaming quality, perhaps a little better. Again there is no surround sound or positional audio effect, but that did not matter as much as we would have thought. The sound was just good. Listening to the battle scenes in Pirates of the Caribbean showed us that the Zion in-ear headphones are more than up to the job of playing back the audio for your favorite movies.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. Other 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 keep in line with the spirit of the House of Marley we also added in some Bob Marley to our normal testing. The numbers for this along with their corresponding one word comments are below.The musical performance was also very good; we found that it trounced even our IceMatt Siberia in-ear headphones that we have been using for years. In fact we will be retiring those old headphones and replacing them with the Zion after this review. Comfort -With five different ear pieces to choose from it is hard not find a comfortable fit for the Zion headphones. We found that we were able to wear these for very long periods of time (over four hours) before we started to feel any discomfort. The soft rubber of the ear pieces help this as does the design of the back of each ear piece. With the way it is designed you can simply twist the ear pieces into your ears without needing to apply much pressure.
