Skullcandy Ink’d Wireless Earphones Review

Skullcandy’s recently launched Ink’d Wireless earphones can easily be called one of the lightest and comfortable ones in the “wireless” category as they don’t exert any pressure on the head or ears and would work like any wired earphones with the little earplugs rather than having the cups. Not having the large cups comes with some pros and cons, but here in the review, we talk about how well does the Skullcandy Ink’d earphones perform for the price.

Wireless headphones are judged mainly based on three important points apart from the sound quality, which as always, stays the top one – Comfort and build, battery life, and the connectivity. Most of the wireless headphones take advantage of Bluetooth connectivity for keeping themselves connected to the smartphone for audio transfer. With the Skullcandy Ink’d wireless earphones, it is no exception with the Bluetooth connectivity, but it isn’t a flawless one all the time. The way it picks up the connection when started is quite swift, but at times, even at a close distance, the audio continuity is lost and that hit your experience a bit.

As for the build quality and the design, I like headphones to be light in weight, irrespective of how they are designed. For wired ones, you would see no big deal of the weight because they don’t have to house the battery and connectivity chips and this is for the in-ear options. And to tackle with the weight, Skullcandy has provided a collar unit or the neck band that houses the controls and battery. So in the end, what your ears have to bear almost no weight because the weight of the wire that connects this neckband to the earplugs is almost negligible.

While one advantage of having the collar band is to take away the weight from the earphones, the other one is to stick around your neck and not fall off, which is done by the ends of the band that have most of the weight.

The quality of the wire connecting the collar and the earplug seemed low because although it might have been made to keep the weight at minimum, the cord seemed easy to get damaged if it gets under stress. Also, we’re not told that this is a sweatproof earphone set, so you might want to consider that as a factor if you are an ardent jogger who happen to enjoy music while jogging. While the wires are long enough, you can shorten them by pulling the ring up from the ends of the collar.

Sound output quality: The lower bass levels in the music tracks seemed more aggressive than what one would be comfortable with, but the sensitivity goes up at low levels, which keeps it a bit balanced. But for someone who has to listen to the music for long hours, tracks always don’t have music with both the pitches together, and that’s where the earphones might seem going overboard trying to push the sensitivity levels.

If you are not an audiophile who puts a lot of emphasis on the minute details, these things are not easily noticeable so you should be perfectly okay with the audio output from the Ink’d headsets.

Battery life: The time claimed by the company to be offered by a fully charged Ink’d unit is about 8 hours, and although we didn’t get as much as claimed, the battery lasted for about 5 hours on continuous music playback. It was connected for hours more when no music was being played, but you should not expect it to go on playing music for over 6 hours.

Final verdict: For the price of Rs. 2999, you might expect more because of the competitor offerings around, but for a brand that is Skullcandy and its wireless earphones, the Ink’d Wireless headphones seem quite worth the price. While the sound seems quite perfect for regular users, there are some rare but noticeable Bluetooth connectivity issues, which could be a one-off problem with the unit that we received for review.

The best thing about this unit is the comfort offered, because most of the wireless headphones come with the added weight, but here, it is taken away by the collar strap. Also, even though this isn’t only the one with this unique design, the fact that it comes from a well-known audio accessories maker makes it a convincing choice.