One of the latest products on the market with the “Beats by Dr Dre” marque is the Beats Executive headphones. Designed to take you from the boardroom to the tarmac and everywhere in between.
When I was sent a pair of these quality headphones to review for a week it was hard for me to say anything nice about them without using words like “gimmick” and “waste of money”. The reason for this though, is that a lot of headphones come into the market branded with “big names” that actually mean nothing. When purchasing a set of quality headphones you need to look at what you’re actually going to use them for.
I checked the packaging just like I would with any product I would like to purchase. I couldn’t see the frequency response that you’d expect to see on the packaging of headphones in this price range. (This is something you should always look out for, good headphones will go as low as 20 Hz, the lowest limit of our hearing and will reproduce frequencies up to 20 kHz, the upper limit of the human hearing range).
Ok, the actual test. The Beats Executive headphones have a sleek aluminium body making them strong and durable pair. Running a magnitude of tests from playing music through my laptop, playing music through an iPhone and finally finishing off with mixing a set of different genres and levels of bass.
The Beats Executive feature active noise cancellation using 2x AAA batteries to do so. Personally, I experienced no sound coming from the headphones when the batteries went flat, but apparently the headphones will operate with the active noise cancellation switched off.
My conclusion – I can’t say I disliked them, they have a quality design and fold up to 90 degrees to fit into the nice zip-up pouch. But they retail for R3999.99 which, to be honest, is a bit steep considering other headphones on the market of the same calibre.
If you’d like a pair,  order them directly from Phoenix Software, one of the leading suppliers of consumer-related lifestyle products and accessories leading brands.