The Octone dynamic duo are a little different to 'normal' budget headphones. Firstly the build quality is a fair bit better than others in the price range. The cable feels nice and strong and is reinforced by a spiralling wire around the exterior. This serves two purposes, both strengthening the cable and making its somewhat resistant to tangles, it also makes it easy to remove any tangles you do manage to create. The four pole gold plated connector seems to be fairly well made, but not much better than what other products have to offer, with a rather small and flimsy looking rubber strain relief. Up at the business end of the headphones is a really nice metal cable splitter, with a nice metal retaining ring for adjusting where the headphone wire splits. As you move further up towards the earbuds you find the plastic inline controls and microphone as well a a slide switch. This is all nice enough but given that all of the other components have been aluminium up until this point it just feels like a cheap late addition. That being said the buttons are nice and clicky and the microphone is very clear and good a picking up your voice in a busy and loud environment.
Now we move on to the buds themselves. They to are also made from aluminium and have a very nice grippy texture on the exterior. They are quite weighty but not anything that would bother you in use. The strain relief on the buds is far better than that on the connector jack and they do feel as though they would survive some ruff handling. 3 sets of buds in small, medium and large are included as well as a single pair of double flange medium sized buds. All of which seemed to fit me well, although for the purposes of the review and fair comparison I actually switched them to some memory foam buds that fit much better in my large ears and that I use on all my headphones.
On to sound quality, out of the box they sound ok.. I have high hopes when I got the headphones but they didn't seem to live up to it right away. Now it's a fairly common thing to let headphones 'burn in' after you purchase them and normally this can marginally improve the sound quality, so I gave them 48 hours of playing various tracks before listening to them again. In the past I've not really had much success with burning headphones in so I wasn't exactly expecting a huge change, however I could not have been more wrong. Two days later when I began listening to them it was like putting in a different set of ear buds. Now while these still sound like they cost a less than $100/£70 they do punch far above their weight.
The Sound
The sound from these buds are nice and rounded, their bass response is there, nothing too thumpy but its nice and crisp and definitely has good presence, the mids are nice and detailed but again retain a nice clarity, and the highs are very nice with minimal sibilance, for me though the mids are pushed back a little by the bass and crisp highs, this isn't a huge issue but everyone likes their sound different. The sound stage is very clear and as a listener they do a very good job of placing you in the room with the music. The dynamic duo's do a good job of covering all bases, after listening to a variety of music I cant find anything that they particularly fall down on, they definitely sound their best when listening to some complex electronic music like Porter Robinson or Alt-J.
In all the sound quality is very good and these earphones are great all rounders, perfect for the morning commute or even using in the office.
