Hello there, today we have reviewed the new wired budget earphones from Sony named MDR XB 55 AP. The Price is around 2000 INR. I don't know when will Sony make their naming conventions easier, This name sounds like a a chemical formula, anyways so we have tested them and I also had burned them for 15 hours before doing critical listening.
Whats in the Box?
So let's go over them but before that lets show you what else comes in the box. You get the Earphones itself, we also get a nice pouch that this is actually surprising, this was nice the Sony branded nice pouch and we also get some extra ear tips a total three of them and one is already attached and I think it's a good idea to change the ear tips because the default one was slightly more uncomfortable to use.
Build Quality
So coming back to the earphones, they actually are slightly big and angular in nature and they have the Sony branding on them also denotes left and right as we generally have and they are slightly on the bigger side.
These earphone have a 12 mm driver and when I saw written on the Box "Extra Base", I was actually too much worried because I thought the base will be just too excessive and it will be just boom and something like that but that was not the case
The Rubber quality is slightly different, it's still a rubber based one but over that they have a sort of a plastic coating on it so feels a little bit better I would say.
Moving forward we have a microphone on this earphone with just a single button.
I was a little bit disappointed because at this price point we have a lot of other ear phones that also have the volume up and down buttons, but here we just have a single button and a microphone
The Microphone is good basic stuff again, If you use it outdoors and if it's windy it will catch that sound but for regular stuff in office the mic is fine
We have the same sort of a cable again it has light plastic coating, it's still rubber beaneath but has that slight plastic coating which is a new thing and we have an angular headphone with a 3.5 mm so I did listen to a lot of music on this one
Sound Quality
Lets talk about the Bass, which is definitely enhanced and the good point here is that its not over Booming. And for a surprise, about four or five years ago I had reviewed one more of these earphones similar to them those also had extra base rate but those were kinda irritating due to the extra boom, Those I did not like.
These Sony MDR XB 55 AP have a bass that most of you will actually like it.
but again i would say but if you are sort of a bass head you would say that the base is slightly lacking but for most I would say and even I enjoyed the pace on this one so I would give it a very high rating in this category.
Moving to the mid tones and vocals you're never surprised that Sony did not tweak the sound signature that much it's sort of neutral neither is forward or lacking so the vocals actually sound very good but again it's not enhanced or anything like that. Going to the high tones here I would say I missed a little bit some of the higher frequency Sparkle were missing on this most of you won't recognize this if you haven't used high-end headphones or earphones but that is something that I felt was lacking for example on the Sennheiser CX 235 s that I reviewed a month ago the higher tones are actually much better produced than this one but most of you will actually like it so in the treble department I will cut some points.
Conclusion
I would say I like the sound signature on this one and the wire quality is also semi decent I wished it was a braided cable it would have been a lot more durable so if I have to actually read this one overall for the price point of about 2000 rupees and considering it's from Sony I would give it a rating of about 8 out of 10.
Price
We Purchased these Sony MDR XB 55 AP budget earphones from Amazon for 2000 INR thats around 30 USD
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