Skullcandy Crusher ANC
These cans aim to do a lot, but crush very little.
Skullcandy’s entry into the premium noise-cancelling market doesn’t do enough to threaten the likes of Sony or Bose.
The simple and clean aesthetic of the Crusher ANC is spoiled a little by the brand’s logo, and the build quality feels decidedly plasticky given the price tag. The large main control buttons are a welcome change from the trend of fiddly touch interfaces, although the dedicated bass slider is wasted space. Turning this slider up will cause bass frequencies to vibrate your head with increasing intensity, but it’s fatiguing even at the lower settings and quickly gets ridiculous, even distorting and muddying the overall audio.
In their defense, the default audio sounds great – good clarity, well separated frequencies, and rich bass. You can improve on this via the Skullcandy app which allows you to make a simplistic personalised EQ setup, although it’s not as potent as the Nuraphone’s customisation. Clever features like an integrated Tile tracker and an LED battery indicator (that you can check even when the cans are powered down) are great to see, but they don’t make up for the gimmicky nature of the aforementioned features. The noise-cancelling is relatively powerful but is let down by a lot of introduced white noise.
Even if you’re only chasing the personalised audio and sensory bass that these cans promise, the Nuraphone offers much better versions of both these features and, again, manages to do so at a lower cost.
At their current price-point, there’s little logic in recommending the Crusher ANC over Sony’s WH-1000XM3, which are better in every way and can be found much cheaper at this stage.