Sometimes you want your headphones to block out the world around you. Sometimes, you want to be able to hear important things — like alarms, burglars, small children/animals making worrying noises and spouses trying to talk to you — but not sacrifice sound quality to do so. That’s where the EPOS H6PRO Open Acoustic headphones come in, and I’m happy to have had a chance to give them a spin.
Open-acoustic headphones, unlike their more usual closed counterparts, let air flow between the inside and outside of the ear pieces to a certain degree. This means more external sound can come in and more internal sound can get out — useful if you need to hear things around you and won’t be bothering anyone with your listening choices. It also, apparently, makes the audio sound more natural, though I couldn’t claim to judge that unless I had a closed variant of the same model to hand to test. The H6PRO comes in both versions, so you can pick whichever suits your purposes best.
The first thing I noticed about the H6PRO was its sleek design. The green-and-gold variant in particular makes the most of that classic colour combination, with a smart black leather-textured headband and comfortable fabric-covered ear cups. It also comes with two cables, so you won’t have to worry about converters to match the inputs on whichever device you plan to use it with — although the fact that it should work with phones is made somewhat defunct by phone manufacturers’ newfound avoidance of headphone jacks. Thanks, Apple. One particularly useful feature is that all you need to do to mute the microphone is lift the arm — a vast improvement on headphones with switches underneath their microphone foam and a more intuitive motion than those with switches attached to their cables.
It would be entirely possible for the H6PRO to have all this and still feel cheap, but the build quality appears excellent. You can remove the microphone quite easily just by pulling it off, as it attaches magnetically, and there’s a little cap you can replace it with. The microphone itself has a handy bendy segment so you can fine-tune its position and the cable slots very smoothly into a port behind the left ear. The ear cups move in two directions, so it conforms quite naturally to the shape of your head. The ear cups look like they’d take a little longer to fray than plastic- or rubber-coated variants, and they are replaceable if needed.
I’ll admit I’m a cheap-and-cheerful headphone person. My usual headphones are cheap but surprisingly functional, so I was interested to see how the H6PRO compared in terms of sound quality. I started with music, finding a selection that would test the full range of sound, and I was very happy with the results. It’s very well balanced, with noticeably stronger but well-defined bass compared to my usual headphones. The higher ranges are nice and crisp without grating my ears. It’s an all-round far superior experience, and I would splash out a little extra for headphones like these in a heartbeat (especially as I imagine they would last longer, to boot). I spend pretty much all day listening to music, and it was a joy to experience my favourites again in what felt like another level of definition. The bass in NEONI’s Darkside is beautiful on these headphones. Its surround sound also works very well, as I can confirm with great surety after venturing into Alien: Isolation to test it out. Those squeaky shoes have never sounded so ominous.
As for the open acoustics, I can confirm they let sound in well. I can be listening to my music at a normal volume and still hear well enough to hear all the words in Duolingo practice phrases, as well as any weird noises the dog makes at the other end of the house. This is, of course, somewhat dependent on whatever you’re listening to not being louder than other noises. I had hoped they would be the holy grail that stopped my husband shouting ‘what?’ at me when I tried talking to him with headphones on and they sort of did, but obviously only at sensible volumes. Speaking of which, my main quibble with the headphones is that you don’t get a full range of volumes. My usual headphones can lower all the way to nothing, but these have a hard floor beyond which you have to use your PC settings.
I had issues with the microphone at first, though I believe this is mostly due to my setup. Because the mic and headphone ports on the top of my PC stopped working a while back, I use a jack-to-USB converter, then plug that in via USB. I could hear perfectly well plugged in this way, but the microphone would only pick up very garbled fragments of my voice if I put it so close to my mouth that I had to take the ear cups half off my head. I’m not sure why that was, as my other headphones work fine with that setup. When I moved my cables around so the H6PRO was plugged straight in at the back of the PC, it worked perfectly. According to my friends on Discord, the quality isn’t quite as crisp as my usual headphones with a foam-covered arm, but it’s still good, and I’ll take the convenience of lift-to-mute and not dropping the foam bit on the floor and getting it covered in dog hair any day. You can also buy one of EPOS’ external sound cards and plug it into that for enhanced performance, which appears to then connect to the computer via USB.
Overall, the H6PRO gives excellent sound quality in an easy-to-use package. You don’t have to download anything special to get it to run, and while it does feel like it’s squeezing the top and sides of your head at first, you soon get used to it. The ear cups aren’t quite as comfortable as some spongier ones I’ve tried, but this is likely made up for by being more durable. And they’re by no means the most expensive headphones I’ve seen out there — these are absolutely worth the price.
You can find the EPOS H6PRO Headphones on GameByte.
*Review opportunity provided by GameByte Shop
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