Denon Globe Cruiser AH-GC20
Clearly built for executive travel, the Denons are big on smarts and style, though we spent a lot of time playing with their sound signature.
Denon delivers on both styling and features here — the headline abilities include cable-free Bluetooth in addition to active noisecancelling. The AH-GC20s are very plush indeed, executively attractive with brushed aluminium stirrups, screw-clamped hinges folding the matt black headshells flat for storage, and sliding up on an adjustment band that is both graduated and labelled, so you can extend to your perfect fit every time. The headband is leatherette on top and fabric underneath, the earcups are soft around your ears — the overall feel combines luxury with rugged build and highly comfortable fit.
You can use them with the supplied cable, which has no inline controls, and with a supplied airline adaptor for your inflight entertainment (there’s
also a quarter-inch adaptor, oddly absent from most others here). Controls are easy enough to guess without the manual (always a bonus) — a call answering button on the left headshell (there are mics built-in to the headset), then two longer buttons on the right headshell, one pivoting up and down for volume, the other sliding up and down for last/next track selection, or pressing for play/ pause, while a long press powers the headphones on and off. There’s a separate button for noise cancelling further around, just past a rubber cover over the microUSB charging socket. Charging time is good, quoted at only two hours to give the promised 20 hours of playback from the rechargeble lithium-ion internal battery. It’s worth visiting the online manual to find things the printed guide doesn’t tell you — for example you can change the alert noise from a beep to spoken word guidance, and you can even choose the language of this by holding down the call and control buttons together until your preferred dialect is pronounced.
And cleverness continues via your smart device. Denon’s headphone ranges are divided up by user type — here the ‘Globe Cruiser’ tag identifies your travelling nature — and there’s an app available for each group, here called Denon Travel. It’s a strange beast in four parts accessed along the bottom — ‘Music’, which accesses your on-device music in a slightly less convenient way than your normal music app, ‘Radio’ which provides an interface for TuneIn radio into which you can log if you have an account (again the standalone app has additional functionality, including trending tabs and Apple Watch access), then ‘Travel’, which points you at seven other apps such as Flight View and Trip Advisor, and will allow one-stop access to those. Finally ‘Settings’, and here we were pleased to find an EQ option, only to be slightly surprised that Denon wanted $2.99 for the privilege of playing with it — you might hope a voucher code or similar method of avoiding this small extra cost would come with the headphones to allow paid-up owners free access.
Well we bought it, because we figured the GC20s need it; they were sounding very strangely stodgy and lacking in top. Buying the in-app purchase of EQ control added a little EQ symbol by the side of songs playing in the app, which brought up a spectrograph and an EQ which appeared to show a default profile called ‘Restorer’ (middle screengrab above) with a significant low-end bass bump. It also indicated that ‘limiting’ was on, and there was a -1.5dB attenuation dialled in — a mysterious set of default settings. We ditched the attentuation to make the headphones go louder, turned off the limiter (which seemed to have little effect), and set to fixing the EQ. There are presets, including ‘flat’, which still sounded bloated in the upper bass, but the manual option proved nicely versatile — you can add additional adjustment points and mess quite accurately, and you can save your custom presets for future use.
OK, so, with the curve shown above right, we thoroughly enjoyed the Denons in general use; the midrange was now clear, lifted just short of sibilance, the bloated bass was tamed back to avoid intruding on the musicality of it all. We kept tweaking it, of course — a few songs later the mids were sounding a bit boxy, so we brought the mids back down. It’s fun to play, but when the flat setting is flawed, it’s difficult to achieve a perfect re-set across the board. Also, of course, it only works with music played through the Denon app — switch to your normal music app and you’re back to the default. Meanwhile invoking noisecancellation, adds a bit of level, a boost of upper bass, and a bit of energy overall.
There is quality in there — the drivers sound good, just muffled by the voicing. Without paying for EQ to dial up the higher frequencies, we thought the default balance rather strangely chosen.