There is a slider on the side of these headphones that makes the bass vibrate against your skull, and whether that sentence delights or horrifies you is basically the whole review. The Crusher ANC 2 pairs two 40mm drivers with a second set of dedicated bass drivers producing haptic rumble, dialled up or down on a physical slider. List price is $229.99 to $239.99. Battery is rated 50 hours with cancelling on and 60 with it off, ten minutes of charging buys four hours, and there’s multipoint, a 3.5mm option, a hard case, and 332 grams of headphone.
Turned down, they sound like a decent bass-forward headphone. Turned up, they become something else entirely. At around 80% the slider adds roughly 20dB at 50Hz, which is almost unbearable at maximum and enough to bury vocals entirely. That’s not a defect, it’s the product. The genuine criticism is that the bass is hard to tame even with EQ, and that the app gives you three overlapping ways to adjust sound, the Crusher slider, a five-band EQ, and a personalised hearing test, which interact confusingly. There’s no aptX or LDAC either, just AAC and SBC.
The Crusher slider is the reason to buy, and for the right person it’s genuinely joyful in a way no other headphone manages. Comfort is good, with pleather and memory foam that need no break-in, and physical buttons I’d take over touch controls every time. Battery measured 45 hours 23 minutes against the 50-hour claim, which is close enough. Where it falls down is the cancelling. It’s not the best out there, much of the reduction is really passive isolation, and it struggles once several noise frequencies stack up in a busy place. At this price that’s a real problem.
Bluetooth 5.2 with multipoint, plus a 3.5mm cable for planes and dead batteries. The Skull-iQ app handles the EQ, the personalised tuning, and extensive control remapping, and firmware updates arrive often. Two absences to know about before ordering: there’s no auto-shutoff and no wear detection, so these will happily drain the battery sitting on your desk all afternoon. The plastic build also attracts fingerprints and the notched headband feels less premium than the price suggests.
Buy these if you love bass in a physical, unreasonable, grinning sort of way, and you want a party trick nothing else offers. Skullcandy built this for exactly one person and that person will adore it. Skip them if you want serious noise cancelling, because at this price the competition is far better at it, and the Sony WH-XB910N and the Sennheiser ACCENTUM are better all-rounders for similar money. These are one of the most fun headphones I’ve put on in years. That’s the correct review, both halves of it.
Pros
• Haptic bass slider that genuinely nothing else does
• Around 45 real hours with cancelling on
• Physical buttons and heavy control customisation
• Comfortable straight out of the box, no break-in
Cons
• Noise cancelling is weak for a $230 headphone
• Bass at high settings buries vocals completely
• Three overlapping sound settings that fight each other
• No auto-shutoff, no wear detection, no aptX or LDAC
Our score: 7.0/10