Used and Abused: Skullcandy Crusher Wireless Headphones

If you want brain-battering bass piped directly into your ears, then the Skullcandy Crusher Wireless headphones are for you. With an adjustable bass slider, you can tweak the boom to fit your mood. Want your earth shaken? Slide the adjuster all the way up and let the stereo haptics with directional bass do their thing. Want a well-mixed equalizer ratio of bass, mid, and high? Slide it all the way down. Regardless of music style, I found the sweet spot to be somewhere just south of halfway.

Using Bluetooth functionality, the simple wireless touch controls are more intuitive and decipherable than some other wireless headphones I’ve used: a plus-sign for louder, a minus-sign for quieter, a circle for pause—among other lesser used options, of course. The built-in microphone works great for quick calls on the go as well.

While, admittedly, I haven’t timed it, the Crusher Wireless headphones reportedly have a 40-hour battery life—and I wouldn’t doubt it. If you’re in a hurry, however, you only need to plug in these bad boys for ten minutes to get about three hours of playtime, a perfect feature for tight flight transfers. But even if the battery dies unexpectedly or you want to watch a movie on a long flight, you can plug them via the supplied AUX headphone cord to any device with a standard headphone jack.

More super-friendly travel options include passive noise isolation, even when the phones are turned off—no more crying babies, yay!—and they fold down to the size of a Nalgene bottle when not in use. While I loved the reduced outside noise and wallet-friendly price, the passive sound isolation is due to an over-the-ear design that can be annoyingly tight. All this technology comes in at a reasonable $150 on Skullcandy’s Website.

If you don’t want the extra-bass option, check out the Skullcandy Hesh 3 Wireless headphones, which earned SKI’s pick for Editor’s Choice in 2018. They are a touch cheaper and have mostly the same features, minus the bone-rattling booms.

Looking for more great headphone options, including the OutdoorTech Rhino headphones? Flip through our Used and Abused Gear Review Gallery, which is updated every week.