Usage and Testing

 

Before you do anything with the Walker Junior headphones you’ll need to install the battery, which is just opening the door and putting it in.  For testing I listened to music and movies with the noise cancelling on and off for comparison.

 

Comfort:

The headband is thin if you noticed in the pictures so I wasn’t quite sure how comfortable it might be. Thankfully the headband has very thick padding on it making it just fine to rest on the top of your head for long periods of time. The earpads themselves have a soft and supple leather on the outside and memory foam inside making them extremely comfortable to wear. They are leather so your might sweat slightly depending on the weather, but not overly so, as they still let your ears breathe.

The headphones are adjustable, more than enough range to wear them with a hat on if you’d like to. The tension on them is fine, not too tight and not too loose, but they want fall off your head either.

 

Cord:

The cord can be detached and there is no noticeable cord noise with these headphones. The cord is four foot long and that should be long enough for most normal uses. The good thing about these headphones is that you can just go and buy a longer cord if you need to. Sure you could get an extension, but why when you can just swap cords and then there’s no connections to between the cables to worry about. I don’t see anywhere on the i-Mego site to order a longer cord but you can find them many places online easily. The cord is the tangle free style making it rather stiff so it doesn’t exactly lie flat or where you put it, not that big of a concern but just an observation.

 

Sound:

I listened to a variety of music for testing, country, rock, heavy metal, hip hop and even some classical thrown in for good measure. The sound from the Walker Junior headphones is very clear and clean, and they aren’t overly bass heavy. There is bass yes, if you listen to bass heavy music and crank up the volume the earpieces will actually vibrate slightly. I’d have to say there’s just enough, at least for my preferences anyway. There is a nice balance of treble and bass with the Walker Junior headphones which is something I can very much appreciate. Neither bass or treble is overly represented and that’s what I want in a set of headphones. The sound is crisp and clear especially when you turn on the active noise cancelling feature.

 

Noise Cancelling:

Obviously the big selling point with the Walker Junior headphones is their noise cancelling abilities and it really does work. The one thing I noticed about these is that when you turn the noise cancelling on the volume gets louder and clearer, better sounding really, it’s more full. You can still hear some outside noises but they’re more higher pitched, that’s the best way I can explain it to you, they’re more sharp but yet dulled by the noise cancelling circuitry. There is marked difference between using the noise cancelling and not using it. It’s starting to finally get really warm here, it’s 81F right now, and I haven’t got around to putting the air conditioner back in so I just have a fan in the window right now. With the noise cancelling turned off I can hear the fan, not loudly but I can hear it’s hum audibly especially on low parts of music. When I turn the noise cancelling on I can’t hear the fan at all, its sound is totally absent. The strangest or most remarkable thing happens when you take these off and finally hear all that noise around you, that’s when it really hits you that these really do work very well.

 

Like the Throne I just reviewed, the Walker Junior comes with cloth bag style carrying case that really doesn’t do much to protect them honestly. The bag is nice, but I would prefer a hard style carrying case that offers more protection than just cloth. These are meant for travelers so they’re going to be tossed in your carry on bag or other luggage with other things, so it’s possible that the cloth bag is not going be enough to protect them.

One small improvement I would make to these is using a rechargeable battery instead of a regular alkaline, but maybe not. There are pros and cons for both, sure you might not have ready access to charge the battery so that might be an issue. Using a a regular battery allows you to just swap out the dead one for a fresh one, but it might be costly overall having to buy batteries frequently. Battery use or life depends on how often you’ll be using the noise cancelling feature, so I guess it depends on your uses.

The price of the Walker Junior is $139.99 direct from the i-Mego website