Koss PortaPro Headphones – Retro look

Headphones — On April 5, 2010 at 7:29 am

Market is flooded with super cool and sexy looking headphones and we are spoilt for choice. What we have go here is a retro look headphones – Koss PortaPro Headphones. This will certainly take you back by quite a few years, it has that ancient look. On the bright side, you will certainly make heads turn and even hear some comments when you sport this on the street. The best part about it is the $50 price and it is hard to find a better set in this price range.

Koss made these exact headphones in 1984 (yes, the company is that old) and maybe they are giving us this to bring back the good old days. The Koss PortaPro Headphones have the same design both externally and internally. The earcups of the Koss PortaPro Headphones are secured on your head through a steel thin headband which adjusts along with the two sliders which loosen or tighten the tension. Once you put the set in place, you will find that it is very comfortable. They are feather weight with additional cushions on ear pads top which don’t let the headset slip. Koss takes one more step in making this set comfortable through “Comfort Zone” which gives you 3 mechanical settings. They allow the adjustment of earpieces on the head. The drawback for this is that you cannot lock the headband in place and sliders will get you in the hair. This problems continues even when you put the set on your neck, the bands sort of tightens up and the unit strangles you.

The set folds up nicely and gives you a good storage. The design of the set is hit or miss. We are not sure if you will like the design but we liked the look of the headphones. The touches are light blue and the hardware is extended in order to conjure the memories of Tron, Lobot and McFly days.

Apart from the looks, these headphones are still a classic due to their good sound quality. Remember that these had come out ages before sound isolating studio quality headphones were there in the consumer market. They don’t block a lot of noise in the ambience. We heard some sound leaking when we went past the one third mark on iPod’s volume bar but this is not surprising given the open ear design. Anyways, it wont leak so much that your neighbors will start complaining. Apart from that, we didn’t have a lot of complaints.

We compared this pair of headphones with Sennheiser’s PX100 miniheadphones which is a great set according to us. The only problem here is that it doesn’t have good treble range. Koss PortaPro Headphones had stellar sound quality and got really loud when we pushed it to the limit. We put the headphones through lots of songs on a variety of genres and each of the tracks produced good sound in midrange along with detailed resolution in highs and had head shaking, thick bass. We played Why?’s Fatalist Palmistry and the quality was much better on the Koss set, each instrument was separated with equal balance and sonic realism was maintained. Koss says that the output of the sound is handled through “neodymium iron boron rare earth magnet structures” which give you frequency range of 15-25,000Hz frequency range. This will sound jargon to a non-techies and for them, we will say that the for the given price range, this headphone set is unbeatable.

Koss PortaPro Headphones comes with a lifetime warranty with “no questions asked”. If the set gets damaged, the manufacturer will send a new one and all you have to pay is $6 for shipping.