Technics EAH-A800 review

Read Time:5 Minute, 27 Second

The Technics EAH-A800 over-ear headphones have everything they need as far as looks, pride of ownership, and on-paper specification go. In terms of battery life, they have as much as anyone will ever need. And where sound quality is concerned, they have some real strengths — not least the amount of detail they reveal and their impeccable top-to-bottom tonality.

They can be bettered where out-and-out noise-cancellation is concerned, though, and that price tag could be problematic.

Find out which models rank among the best active-noise canceling models we’ve seen. And for the ultimate in sound quality, check out our pick of the best-sounding headphones for audiophiles.

Price and availability

The Technics EAH-A800 is on sale now at $349 on Amazon. In the U.K., you’ll find them priced at £299 at Technics dealers or with a slight discount through Amazon where they’re currently on offer at £286, while in Australia the asking price is AU$549 or so.

You don’t have to look long or hard to find plenty of similarly specified alternatives from equally auspicious brands. The obvious alternative is Sony’s acclaimed WH-1000XM4 (and if the rumors of an imminent replacement are true, then there may be some authentic deals to be done). But why stop there? Everyone from Bose and Bowers & Wilkins to Sennheiser and Shure has competitive, well-turned-out models competing for our attention.

Design

The EAH-A800 follows the classic on-ear headphone design built for comfort and performance. They’re available in black or silver and are reasonably compact by prevailing standards and fit into an egg-shaped semi-rigid carry-case that’s also reasonably compact. And that’s really your lot as far as visual ‘design’ goes. Which is just as we all want it.

On the inside, Technics has fitted the EAH-A800 with a pair of 1.6-inch dynamic free-edge drivers. Each one is supplemented by an acoustic control chamber designed to regulate airflow and, consequently, offer improvements to spatial expression and low-frequency precision.

Comfort and fit

Technics has deployed faux leather-covered memory foam for the earcups and the inside of the headband here, and it proves both tactile and comfortable. Clamping force is nicely judged too, and at 10.5 ounces the EAH-A800 is reasonably light. So comfort is assured for even the longest listening sessions — and the fact the contact points manage to avoid getting uncomfortably hot from the wearer’s own body heat is quite helpful for long-term comfort too.

Controls

The bad news for left-handers is that the EAH-800 keep all their physical and touch controls on the right-hand earcup. The good news is that they’re well-differentiated and reliable in operation.

As far as physical controls go, there’s a three-part button handling ‘play/pause’, ‘skip forwards/backward’, ‘volume up/down’, and ‘answer/end/reject call’. Another button takes care of ‘power on/off/Bluetooth pairing’, and adjacent to these there’s a USB-C input and a 3.5mm analog connection.

The touch surface on the right earcup is equally responsive but rather more restricted in its functionality. You can specify it to deal with engaging or disengaging noise-cancellation, activating ambient sound, or handling phone calls — but that’s about it.

Telling the touch surface what you want happens in the Technics Audio Connect control app. It’s also where you specify the degree of noise-cancellation or ambient sound you want, where you can fiddle with a five-band EQ adjuster, where you can specify your preferred voice assistant (choose between Amazon Alexa or Siri), check for software updates and stuff like that. On the plus side, the app is stable and logical; on the downside, it’s not as wide-ranging in its functionality as, say, the Sony equivalent and it’s a lot less fun to look at too.

Sound quality

The list of things the Technics over-ear get right is considerably longer than things they don’t — so it seems the best place to start.

Tonally, they have nothing to learn from any nominal rival. From the bottom of the frequency range to the top, the EAH-A800 are beautifully judged — they’re never less than realistic and convincing, and they reveal masses of detail in terms of instrument texture and timbre making it easy to make a connection to your music. So no matter if you’re listening to the wholly analog, organic sound of The Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun” or the processed, never-existed-outside-a-laptop “She Just Likes to Fight” by Four Tet, the Technics seem to understand its requirements down to a microscopic level. The journey from the bottom of the frequency range (which is deep, controlled and endlessly varied) to the top (which is bright, shiny and very nearly, but never quite, hard) is smooth and even.

Active noise cancellation

Things are less cut-and-dried where active noise-cancellation is concerned. To their credit, the Technics don’t alter their tonality regardless of the level of ANC you’ve requested, and they don’t add anything (not that cabin-pressure sensation, not the faintest sound of hard-working ANC circuitry) either. But they just don’t deal with as much external sound as the best of their rivals do — and that’s not just Bose, which has always been supernaturally talented at this sort of thing. There are quite a few pairs of more affordable rivals to the EAH-A800 that will remove you more completely from your surroundings.

Battery life

The most appropriate word here might be ‘ample’. The Technics EAH-A800 has a bottom-end battery life of 30 hours (when listening to the hi-res LDAC codec with noise-canceling switched on) and a best case of 60 hours (listening via AAC with noise-canceling switched off).

It hardly needs emphasizing that these are deeply impressive numbers, and are bolstered still further by the fact that the Technics can go from ‘flat’ to ‘full’ in around three hours. Just a quarter of an hour on the juice is enough for 10 hours of playback (AAC, no ANC, etc). If you’re the sort of person who’s always on the go and not always next to a mains power supply, the EAH-A800 is made to look even more enticing by these figures.

Read More: https://www.tomsguide.com/reviews/technics-eah-a800