INTRO
Full disclosure here, I was contacted by Noontec asking if I’d be interested in reviewing their new flagship headphone the Hammo which I agreed to. They subsequently sent me a pair of Zoro HD 2’s instead. Wait! Zoro? This headphone has actually received a fair amount of praise from the likes of Grandpa Headphone himself, Tyll Hertsen at Inner Fidelity, and Steve Guttenberg of Audiophiliac fame. To be fair though, Guttenberg likes everything, (except Pono), so we’ll have to take his praise with a grain of salt.
INFO
While the phones were in transit I perused the Noontec website to see what the company is about. A few clicks in and I found that Noontec was founded in Australia (that’s a surprise!) and they have some other interesting products as well. A NAS streamer for video and audio, a number of USB power banks for smartphone and tablet charging on the go and also have a noise cancelling headphone along with a couple different dynamic in-ear monitors. All good stuff so far. Then I got to the headphone section of their website and was left a bit dismayed…. Fashion headphones… Wait Wha?
Noontec markets their Zoro and Hammo headphones as “Fashion” headphones to excite your ear. Also a little nit here but multiple words on their website are misspelled. Being that your website is your global storefront and your front door to the rest of the world, Noontec’s website seems just a bit… off? Half baked? I am not sure I can pin down what it is, but it seems to lack the spit and polish of a finalized product that is ready for prime time.
Noontec calls their headphones ‘Fashion Hi-Fi’ (ugh!) and call out some interesting proprietary technical innovations. Like their SCCB “Surround Closed Cavity Body” which appears to be a convoluted way of calling it a closed back headphone. They also employ Votrik HD400 drivers. I found a few gamer tags for online role playing games when I search the name Votrik, so the Votrik driver and SCCB tech are likely clever if a little disingenuous ways that Noontec is seeking to differentiate themselves in a crowded headphone market. But how does the saying go?
Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game!
IN HAND
The Zoro 2 HD arrived (henceforth referred to as Zoro) and like I said I was taken back a bit since it wasn’t the Hammo I’d been expecting… Mike from Noontec said they decided otherwise last minute. OK… BTW I don’t do packaging reviews, if you need that angle, go to YouTube and watch an unboxing or something like that. I will say the Zoro is packaged like a retail class product ready to stock the shelves of you average big box store. In the hand the Zoro II HD are clearly an attempt to mimic the Beats by Dre aesthetic for significantly less spend. They have the same colorful plastic housing and large logos emblazoned on the cups. Maybe not as many premium finishes or materials in the build but still they evoke a Beats by Dre aura at a glance. While this was obviously their intent, I don’t know that I am a fan.
For one, I am not all that crazy about Beats so a company mimicking their design doesn’t strike a chord with me. As far back as Tyll’s original review I’ve always dismissed these headphones as pretenders, despite Tyll’s claim that they sounded excellent. As far as I was concerned a headphone purposefully copying the appearance of another headphone to garner attention was just an indicator that it wasn’t a serious product on its own. I clearly had a ‘prejudice’ against this headphone, and this whole train of thought revealed itself during the review period and it took some consideration on my part to call it what it was… I was being an audio snob.
In the box, sundries are minimal but get you going. They include a velour storage bag and a single color matched ribbon cable with smartphone mic and volume controls. The cable is relatively short but on point with the design intent (smartphone/ MP3 player). One trouble area I had was with the headband fully extended I could barely get the headphones to sit properly on my head. I wear a 7 5/8 hat so my head is on the larger side, even so an extra ¼” of travel would be nice. I often felt like I needed to readjust to get them to sit properly. To be fair though, I have taken them on multiple 3 and 4 mile jogs and they seem to work perfectly fine.
HEY HO LETS GO!
After running the headphones in for the weekend on my vintage rig I plugged them into my desktop setup first (portable impressions later) which is an April Music/ Stello HP100 MK2 with iFi iDSD Micro handling D/A Conversion from an HP Envy laptop running JRiver.
Obscene as it is, I compared the Noontec Zoro II HD to my daily desktop headphones… My Sennheiser HD800 and Audeze LCD2. I know, I know, and while it isn’t fair it gives me a good understanding of the Noontec’s strengths and weaknesses against the greater landscape. I will stack it up against my Porta Pros and my daughter’s Creative Labs Aurvana while rolling portable to drill down on how the Noontec performs within its own segment and intended use but for now sonic performance writ large.
So to start off at the end… Is this headphone any good? Yes… It is better than I expected.
I didn’t want to like it, and if I was going to let myself like it I was going to put a bunch of qualifiers on it like: It’s good for a
‘hundred dollar closed headphone’ but still isn’t a something I would be interested in…. pisha pisha! I mean for a hundred bucks you could have a Sony MDR-7506, Grado SR80 or AKG K240. But that snooty predisposition didn’t hold up. The Zoro bucks a modern trend in consumer grade headphones towards bloated bass, sucked out midrange and spiky treble, otherwise known as a V shape or ‘Fun’ sound. Instead the Zoro has a remarkably even handed and linear presentation that has enough meat on the bone to play very well with most modern genres.
Against the HD800 and LCD2 it has obvious acoustic limitations. The closed back design creates a dramatically more close up, closed in and crowded stereo image that lacks air, width, and depth of an open back let alone $1k+ flagships. The HD800 and LCD2 can offer a presence and depth of field that energizes the space around your head. The Zoro sounds narrow and crowded by a large margin.
I then set up 3 way listening session to parse out sonic deltas between the Zoro, my Porta Pro and Creative Labs Aurvana using the iFi iDSD Micro, ALO Audio National and a couple different Apple devices. All music was 16/44 Rips of CD’s from the Golden Silvers, The Strokes, The Clash, Daft Punk, Lorde, The Ramones, Blur, Amy Winehouse and a few others.
First off in terms of acoustics, the Zoro plays the same song with the Aurvana and Porta-Pro that it did with the HD800 and LCD2. Only difference is that the margin of victory was not nearly as great this time. The Aurvana and Porta Pro both offer more natural and open presentation against the Zoro, the Porta Pro especially, being an open design. However once you move past imaging and acoustics and dig into tone and sonics the Zoro starts gaining ground fast.
The Zoro is very natural and balanced…. I was actually taken aback by it a little when I first listened to it. It appears to be fairly linear across the frequency range and it’s only clear sonic deficiency is a somewhat early roll off point in the low bass and similar roll off in the high treble.
The Creative Labs Aurvana has too much mid bass. Vocals sound hollow or canned like the singer is singing through a tube and it doesn’t resolve as well as the Zoro. Listening to both side by side there were these distortive artifacts or spots of poor resolution in the Aurvana where music and vocals had grain and grit and crunchy static where the the Zoro presented things cleanly and clearly. And the Aurvana had this gaping chasm in the midrange making vocals muffled and hollow. The Aurvana has always sounded OK on its own but against the Zoro it suddenly sounds bloated, grainy and sloppy.
Against the Porta Pro the Zoro lacks the open sense of space that the Porta Pro provides while sonically they are pretty similar… Neither lacks mid range and neither over cooks bass… The Zoro is darker by design and also has less shimmer and illumination because of the roll off point of the treble coupled with the closed design. And the Porta Pro doesn’t not suffer the same low end roll off so gives you that lowest octave bass power that the Zoro lacks. But the Zoro plays it more forward and has a sense of immediacy and presence that the Porta Pro lacks. The Porta Pro also has faint little artifacts that detract from the experience. The Zoro doesn’t break form like this. Everything that it does do, it does well. Also the Zoro feels better on your head. Yes it is heavier but it doesn’t pull your hair, has soft ear pads with a padded headband and doesn’t feel so fragile.
The Zoro is not a bass heavy or bass-head can per se. As I said it has an early rolling off point at the lowest octave of bass which is only obvious when compared against other headphones, but this frequency level isn’t where you find bass lines, and drums hammering away at your ear drums. This is more about acoustic feedback, venue resonance, etc… It’s the frequency that explosions happen on in movies, not the frequency that bass drums kick at on a Roland 808 or 909 drum machine. Those are still on tap.
LET ME BE CLEAR! I know that the words “EARLY ROLL OFF OF BASS” is like giving a headphone the kiss of death…. Oh Hell No. I need my bass!
You don’t lose bass like Hip Hop or electronic drum beats… There is plenty of that punchy subwoofin goodness on tap. But that deep explosion, jet engine, earthquake bass from movies and video games is beneath the roll off point so even though it is heard, the impact is less dramatic and clearly non-linear when taking into account the fullness of tone above 100hz.
Mind you, this is not a lifeless, anemic, or thin sounding headphone. This is a rounded, nourishing, fulsome headphone that happens to do a lot of things really well. If you wanted to parse details on a DSD track, the Zoro won’t give you that unnatural level of magnification power. But those who want a headphone to play naturally without invoking frequency driven fatigue will find a lot to like here. It gives you a natural mid-range presentation, a good helping of bass and a softer treble. All three of these are good qualities (especially with smartphone use) and are also presented in a forward and engaging way with plenty of body and weight making it a satisfying experience at the price point.
It sounds very good for the price and I am using it daily for my workouts and sometimes during my drive home because the closed design coupled with the smartphone mic makes it a good headphone for taking phone calls on the road.
That said, I still don’t like the physical design and am uncertain about its durability. I think the copycat aesthetic detracts from the headphones inherent value. If Noontec were to develop their own design from scratch and couple that to their sonic successes, I think I would take it more seriously and Noontec’s reputation would track along the same path as Master and Dynamic. As it stands though, I think there is a LOT of competition in the $100 headphone market and given what I said earlier about the competition in this market… I can’t say the Noontec is a slam dunk. Realistically with $100 bucks in hand you can buy the Sony MDR7506, Grado SR80, AKG K240 or K142, Audio Technica ATHM40 or A700x, VModa Crossfade LP, Sennheiser Momentum (On Ear), Philips L2, etc… With all those choices would I spend my money on a Zoro? I don’t know.
I think it will provide outstanding sound quality for the spend… If that is all you are looking for, then it is up to the challenge. It is a “fashion headphone” with an audiophile soul. But there are other places that people ascribe value to a product. I don’t know that the Zoro ticks all these other boxes.
But… Big But! If you are comfortable with or even find the Zoro’s design attractive then have no fear about sound quality, you can proceed with full confidence.