Manufacturer: Degauss Labs
Current Retail Price: 24.95 USD (one-button), 34.95 USD (three-button)
The headphone market these days is completely swamped with products of all shapes, sizes, and prices. While many of them are mediocre and interchangeable, there are brands like Dr. Dre’s beats and SkullCandy that have at least managed to make a name for themselves among the large corporations like Sony, Klipsch, Sennheiser, and Creative. Degauss Labs’ Pocket Couture (PC) line of headphones, while oozing with style from the packaging to the logo printed on their flat cable, are very obviously attempting to make a name for themselves by catching some of the sizable crowd of consumers flocking to the redesigned EarPods that Apple launched in late 2012. From the earbud design to the exact same price this smaller Swedish headphone company is aiming straight for the top of the midrange earbud market with its Pocket Coutures, but are they really a viable alternative to the intensely engineered Apple devices? Read on to find out if we think the PCs successfully blend style with function.
When I first received our black review PCs I was impressed with the packaging even though I had previously seen images of it on the Internet. It was moderately difficult to get into, but darn if it wasn’t a shame to harm with my tearing. The headphones themselves are easily as stylish as their packaging too.
While I have no complaints with the physical construction of the PCs, the myriad differences between them and Apple’s EarPods become clear the moment you try to put them into your ears without the accompanying silicone earbud covers. The most obvious difference between the two is that the PC’s earbuds are roughly 15-20% smaller than those on the EarPods. For my ears anyways this made aligning them so that the speaker openings were comfortably in my ear canals a major hassle and I found that even if I was able to position them well for a moment that they would slide around in my ear too much to keep them like that for very long. With the silicone sleeves on the PC’s earbuds the fit was significantly more stable, but it definitely left me wondering why the earphones weren’t shaped that way to begin with and more “defined by the geometry of the ear” like their Apple counterparts.
My first aural test with the PCs was actually the day after I had ear tube surgery. While you could very easily argue that this was an unfair time to try out new headphones, I think that it was the perfect opportunity for me to see how they perform in sensitive hearing scenarios especially when compared to the other headphones I had at hand like my Apple EarPods and my Creative Aurvana Live (CAL) headset. The EarPods and the CALs are easily the leaders of their respective headphones types and price ranges and are both known for being quite versatile “all-around” performers, so they served as a good baseline from which to measure the PCs performance. After having used the aforementioned two headphone sets for a number of weeks, the first time I listened to some familiar lossless music on my iPhone like the Doobie Brothers’ “Listen to the Music”, The Eagles’ “Hotel California”, and Alan Parsons Project’s “The Turn of a Friendly Card” the PCs sounded overly bright almost to the point of being sibilant and shrill. As I broke the headphones in more over the next week these bright leanings mellowed a great deal and settled in at a more neutral (but still brighter than I am generally accustomed to) tone. The other thing that really stuck out during my first couple of hours with the PCs was that they sport really notable instrument separation when you’re listening to more acoustic music, a lot more than you’d expect from a pair of midrange earbuds (and certainly more than the EarPods). Instrument separation can be a great feature of headphones, especially when accompanied by a larger soundstage, but the benefits of this separation in the case of the PCs are diminished by the PCs’ relatively small soundstage. The equivalently priced EarPods, while missing the modular definition for such clear instrument separation, have a much more spacious soundstage which most audiophiles would probably rank as being more important. The PCs’ bass reproduction was also quite lacking in every context we tried them in from movies to video games to many genres of music. So while most headphones (including the PCs) claim to have “deep bass”, in the case of the PCs this is certainly not true, as their base can only be described as “kind of lacking”. I generally don’t even like bass-heavy headphones, but everyone knows you need at least some if you want to have a good overall sound.
Even though the PCs on average perform only tepidly when compared to sets like the EarPods or the CALs, they have a couple physical features that are unique and handy. The flat cable design of the PCs is nothing short of excellent. Having tossed them into my general fray of headphones, cords and cables the PCs always remain tangle-free and they very satisfyingly wind up for storage or pocket transportation. The three-button inline microphone/controller is also at least as good as its equivalent on Apple’s EarPods. While the inline controls are not overdesigned like they are on the EarPods, there is much to be said for the usability of the PCs’ clear 3-button design.
Overall the PCs are not a bad set of earphones by any means. Their audio reproduction with quite bright highs, average mids, and weak lows cater better to people that listen primarily to pop or light EDM than those wanting an all-around set of earphones for many genres, movies, and games. If you have smaller ears and lighter tastes in music then the Pocket Coutures could be the earphones for you as their flat cable and inline controls easily rival their competition’s, otherwise if you’re just looking for a solid all-around set and audio performance matters for you more than style and physical functionality then you’re probably still better off with a set of EarPods.
[taq_review]
A review unit was provided to us by its manufacturers.