Skullcandy Grind

Comfortable on-ear headphones are hard to come by, as they either have a very strong clamp or a set of thin, small-diameter headphone pads. The Skullcandy Grind is the exception: an on-ear pair that, unlike its competitors, comes with a large 40mm driver that has a flat ear pads, a detachable cable, and also have the ability to take calls and control your smartphone’s music.

Design

The build quality is good, and it’s a surprise to see a detachable 3.5mm cable at this price. The Grind is terminated by a gold-plated rightangled 3.5mm jack that plugs into them on the lefthand side.

The cable of our review unit was made out of a colourful braided fabric, which looked great but caused microphonics (undesirable noise caused by the components of the earphones) when brushed against clothing. This isn’t normally an issue for most headphones which, unlike earphones, often negate cable noise through their headband assembly. Unfortunately, that’s not the case here.

Skullcandy’s Grinds come in a variety of different colours and therefore the cables also differ based on the headphones’ colour scheme. We can only comment on the cable we tested.

Moving to the headphones themselves, we found them to be well designed, especially with their one-button control, which Skullcandy calls TapTech. This can be used to answer or reject calls, play and pause music, and skip tracks. The button is placed at the bottom of the headphone’s left-side driver, where it’s easy to press and use. This is great for those using the headphones with mobile phones, as it makes listening to music easier and less of a hassle through busy commutes.

The headphones have a set of soft, rounded pads, which don’t have an indent as other on-ear headphones do. This means the Grinds are very comfortable, since no matter the size of your ears they sit softly on them. However, when it comes to noise isolation and sound leakage (when music can be