Fender Headphones Review: Fender Stunning new headphones are worth their 500$ price tag?
The best headphones transform the music. They reveal notes lost and whispers hidden and the rub of a finger down the string of a guitar.
They expand the music and transport you. Whenever you move up a price point, the sound should move too. And that's exactly what happened with the Fender FXA7 in-ear monitors (IEMs). The last in-ear headphones in the $500 range I tried didn't do that. They were a pair of Shure 535s. I loved my Shure 215 Special Editions and wanted to chase the lost bits of my music again, to find all the things I'd been missing. So I spent $455 (plus change to get them delivered in a day) and I queued up a mix of some of my favorite songs.
I was underwhelmed. Within a week the 535s were on their way back to Amazon, and I was on the hunt for a pair of IEMs that would reveal what the 215SEs were hiding from me. Making the jump from more conventional earbuds to professional-grade IEMs, the more sophisticated devices that musicians tend to use on-stage, should offer better fidelity. But I didn't anticipate that Fender's new IEMs would be so stunning.
Earlier this year, Fender bought a small boutique headphone company (Aurisonics) and started making Fender-branded headphones. That's not as bad as companies that slap their names on subpar products to catch a little of an emerging market-but it still left me a little wary.Thankfully, Fender has created a really solid series of products-from the $200 FXA2 to the $500 FXA7 I've been wearing. Fender's also produced a "budget" pair, the DXA1, with a more traditional Shure-like form factor.
Those retail for $100, and Fender has made it clear that they're the cheapest pair of headphones the company will produce. "We don't want to compromise quality for price," a Fender rep told me.Fender instead wants to get into the parts of the live music scene that it's been missing out on. That's why these are IEMs. While audiophiles like myself love IEMs for the high-quality sound-musicians prefer them for their highly accurate rendition of whatever the hell they're playing.
