Sony MDR-ZX300

If you're looking for a spare pair of headphones for use in an emergency or to lend to a friend, you clearly don't want to spend a few hundred pounds.  But if you're on a budget, how do you avoid ending up with an ugly hunk of plastic that only makes a half-hearted attempt at reproducing the sound of your favourite tracks?  Maybe a big name like Sony is a guarantee of reasonable quality?

Design: Your choice of colours

For years now, the bottom end of the headphone market has been inundated by designers who put out products with stylish good looks that are totally hopeless in the audio department (and that goes for the visual design in many cases too).  Sony has decided to take a stand, and the firm's engineers clearly haven't been slacking.  To start with, there are four different colour schemes (!): black and silver, black and blue, dark red and light red and white and silver.  We've really never seen anything quite like it ... To be serious for just a moment, at least it makes a change from the big German brands who offer any colour you like as long as it's dark grey.

The ZX300s weigh just 120 g and won't be a burden on your skull.  The headphones are light and don't grip very much, but still manage to keep your ears warm.  We have no complaints about the hardware quality for a product at this price: the materials aren't the very best quality, but we didn't feel like we had a bargain basement product in our hands either.  The fixtures are reasonable and we couldn't find any particular weak spots, even if these clearly aren't the strongest headphones we've ever seen.

Let's finish by looking at the bundle of accessories that Sony throws in, something which won't take very long given that the packaging includes the headphones ... and nothing else.

Audio Quality: nice and warm

There's no denying the classic V-shaped response curve produced by the ZX300s, which produces a very warm sound.  The bass and the top end of the mid-range get as much support as you like, leading to a problem that's all too common with dynamic transducers: a wall of bass that washes over the listener.

It sounds pleasant enough to start with, and can be bearable if you don't know any better.  But if you're already used to more advanced headphones, it can soon become irritating.  One thing you can't be picky about is the overall accuracy or the way the soundscape is reproduced.  The mid-range sounds like it's being played in a heavily carpeted room while the treble is coming from outside, which makes spatialisation rather tricky.

The MDR-ZX300 headphones clearly aren't the audio product of the decade (or even the year), but at least they're capable of reproducing sound, something that other rivals—sometimes even at twice the price—can't claim.  There's one more advantage: you really shouldn't have any trouble finding them, even outside of specialist technology stores.