Moonrop makes some of the most revered IM in the audio game, but they've
struggled to make their headphones really sing. But maybe, just maybe,
they'll do that with this bad boy, the Moonrop Skyland. And it comes in this
over-the-top kind of noisy case. And here it says Quasil Lap outed, which
apparently means something nice from Guliver's Travels. It also says caution.
And while this case looks all metal, it is, I can assure you, mostly plastic.
And inside of it, our headphones. Ooh,
the Skylands right away. Very, very
heavy. But before we get there, let's take a look at what else is in the box.
The QC card and the headset comes with a few cables. The cable terminates in a
4.4 mm balanced output, which gives you
an indication of the kind of people that they're marketing this to, but the side
that does connect to the headphones are just 3.5 mm jacks, which means that you
can easily swap out cables should you so desire. You also get two adapters
included in the box, a balanced XLR and
a/4in jack. So 3.5 mm fanboys, uh, see
you later. You get nothing. Like, it's so annoying. I just don't have the
option by default to plug these into most of the devices that I own. And
anyways, balance connections are kind of dumb for headphones. But if you're
somebody who maybe has a nice powerful amp, then I guess you can um use this.
Balance connections are for increased signal integrity, which matters over
very long distances, not the like four,
five ft that this is. And also, if you care about signal integrity, why'd you
make it flat? that has worse shielding. But this is all a minor unimportant
crash out for something that doesn't matter. What does matter is the
headphones. They're heavy and worrisomely not rigid
and bouncy. The headband itself is
carbon fiber, but this little headband support, it's 3D printed. We've seen
similar designs like this on headphone modifications. We actually did a video
uh with DankPods on LT where we used a
very similar type of mesh with a flexible polymer to uh create a headband
for some 3D printed headphones. It's interesting to see it in this scenario.
Uh we'll see how it feels when I put them on. But let's talk about the rest of the headphone. Outside of that, you
have a aluminum alloy construction pretty much everywhere else. The ear
pads are going to be made of lambkin leather. Yeah, innocent baby sheep
leather. And the drivers are planer magnetic. If you don't know what that
means, you can check out a previous video we've done with like the Moon Drop Venus where we will explain that in more
detail. Basically, it's a speaker in a different form. Instead of having like a cone and a magnet at the side, the whole
driver itself is magnetic and it moves like this. What that means for you is up
for debate. Often times people will say that these will have better bass
reproduction and they have the ability to move more sound. Some people say that
they have a punchier, more rapid and responsive quality. But what I do like
about planer magnetics is that I think they look pretty neat. And let's take the ear cups off which are look at that
magnetic though. This is some uh it's not very smooth. Kind of got cheese
grater vibes. But that'll let us take a look at the driver. So these are not the
drivers. This is housing for magnets I believe. But the actual vibrating part
is this silver part. You see these thin little lines? Basically have a bunch of
wires going through a thin membrane and then magnets on either side will push it
back and forth to make sound. marketing departments have to work really hard to
sell a headphone, especially when there's not smart features. And they
have some pretty uh funny claims about their uh drivers. For example, they
refer to their 500 nanome thick drivers as nanocale ultra thin diaphragms. But
calling 500 nanome nanocale is like calling a foot and a half millimeter
scale. It's not even close. They have a
low defraction smooth structural woven metal protective grill that should help
with resonances at certain frequencies compared to a venting that I've never
seen on another headphone. It's this they that's an aluminum alloy storage
case. This is not aluminum alloy. This might be aluminum. This is this is
plastic. A Honda. Okay. Aluminum alloy
design. I get that it's hard to sell a headphone based on anything other than
their sound. They also comment on their high strength structure with uh CNC
aluminum, but also I guess there's the carbon fiber up here, unless that's fake
carbon fiber. It feels like real carbon fiber. I'm not going to find out. And
they didn't say anything about comfort, which kind of worries me because uh they
are really heavy. Apparently like half a kilogram, which is in gram scale. That's
gram scale. But let's try them on.
They're so loose. There's like very little clamping pressure on my head,
which might be nice for comfort, but it's like almost to the point where like I feel like it's not actually like
sitting on my ears. Also, very open back. Uh, it doesn't sound like I'm
wearing anything. It almost sounds the exact same with these on or off. I will
say the cushions are comfortable, but that might be because there's no clamp
force, but it's like wobbling doing this. Can you see them? Like reco, do
you see the recoil on that? I don't know why they keep jiggling and it's
horrendously distracting and not very comfortable. If I sit like this, which
is the best way to enjoy music is completely still. Maybe it's a a sizing
thing, but like that'll be the the biggest. If I go to the size where I get
enough clamp pressure, it's almost like pulling the head set up. This might just
not be good for my head. You might have to have a You have a big noggin bell. Do
you want to try them on? >> Uh, you know what? They're cool looking. I think it might be your head. I don't
know. Do they wiggle? >> Yeah. >> Not really. Like when I'm actively
shaking, but when I stop. >> Yeah. Okay.
I don't know. These feel pretty normal. I do have big head and I have uh like
flat ears, but I found this pretty comfortable to be honest. And there's a little bit of wiggle, but like I don't
know. I'm shaking my head. My whole head's >> for me. It was like
>> Yeah, for you it was it would bounce around. >> It was crazy. So, I mean, good news if
you're somebody who struggles to find a comfortable pair of headphones because you got such a big head.
>> It's normal big. It's big. >> It's still It's still so heavy though.
Like even with the wiggle, it's like
These could be the most comfortable headphones in the world, but if they don't sound good, then doesn't really
matter. So, let's take a listen after you listen to this message from our
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>> Yes. >> Yes. >> Jesus. >> Yeah, it's really really visible. Now
that I've plugged the cables in, I will say there is like zero cable noise in
that which is really nice cuz that's super annoying when you have a headphone and you can hear like a nothing.
Nothing. Zip. I currently have them plugged into a JDS Labs Element 3
headphone amp. You probably don't need something quite as beefy as this to drive these. Lab said that they were
able to drive them satisfactorily off of a MacBook. But if you're somebody who
wants their music loud, then you might need to consider a headphone amp. That's
too loud. That was too loud. I don't That was too much for me.
Yes, you can really hear everything. First impressions, they got an
interesting tuning. Often people like planer magnetic headphones because of
their great bass reproduction and their ability to create thumping and loud
bass. These are not tuned that way. In fact, I believe that these are tuned
incredibly like literally flat. You get very little subbase. The mids are not
scooped at all. You have a couple of like treble spikes, but on the whole,
these sound pretty good. Listening to songs that have a lot of guitars or
voices in them. Uh, they really shine on this kind of headphone. They sound
really, really great. But this would probably be lacking if you're somebody who preferred say like EDM or hip-hop
stuff with a lot of focus on like rumble and low-end bass. It also doesn't sound
very good for stuff like rock and metal. There's like almost a lack of of warmth
in the sound that kind of makes things sound tiny. It lacks the kind of punch
that you would want from metal and rock music. To me, it also just sounds like
something that you could probably just get away with putting a little bit of EQ
on and it could make a big big
difference in terms of comfort. When I was wearing it, it was totally fine. I
was able to get a pretty consistent seal uh after fiddling with them for a little
bit. I would be worried about the heaviness of this headphone for
prolonged listening sessions, but honestly, they're technically a really
good headphone, assuming that you want actual flat audio, which we know from
science that people don't usually actually prefer that. Speaking of science, let's take a look at the lab's
results. What we're looking at is a frequency response and variation graph.
The white area is where most people will find an enjoyable sound from their
headphone. Any headphone that falls mostly in the white area is going to be
probably good to the average listener. The red area is the variance across
different measurements that we took on different devices. Large amounts of
variance isn't always a bad thing. That can be something that just comes down to
how they fit on the mounting rigs and how they might fit on your head. Open
backs tend to have less variance than closedback headphones. Closedback
headphones are going to be things like AirPods Max, your Sony XM6s. Those have
a lot more variance because the seal sitting on your ear and sealing properly
is far more important to their sound response than an open back headphone.
These headphones have quite low variance and are incredibly flat, like almost
exactly a flat line across the graph.
Now, you might notice that average listener preference is not typically a
straight line. And in the bass region, these really drop off compared to
average listener preference. And the mids are basically right in the middle
and will please most people. And then the treble is where it gets a little
weird. Often people prefer a little bit less treble because we're pretty sensitive to those higher range
frequencies, but for the treble, this remains pretty much flat. Basically,
they don't really sound what most people would prefer, but I think they did a
great job of executing on the target that they were trying to hit. They have
great reproduction overall, just good sounding headphones, and if you slap an
EQ on these, I think you'd be pretty happy until you looked at the price tag.
These are $799, which is honestly heinously expensive
for what they are. I think that the build quality is, you know, it's robust,
but eh not great. They're so so heavy
and they bounce on my head. I don't know. It seems like you're paying a lot to have these in a big box and uh you
don't get a lot in terms of features. Consider this. If you like a planer
magnetic driver and you want to have something that has mid to bad build
quality, you can buy the Hi-Fi Man Sudara and those are like $200. And then
you can take $600 of these and buy a pair of Sony XM6s for when you're on the
go. >> Treat yourself to like a massage for 600 bucks. >> These lack the premium comfort, the
ergonomic design, and the features to justify their price. And they don't
sound so mind-bogglingly good as to exist. Like if you want a really really
great sounding headphone, you can go much cheaper and get the HD550s from
Sennheiser. They're not planer magnetic, but they're open back. They sound great.
Comfort, obviously, >> for small heads like me. comfort. They
clamp a little bit, but there's a robust modding community. There's aftermarket
stuff you can do. They're more repairable. These are expensive, and in
a vacuum, they seem excellent, but in the broad scheme of the market, they
just kind of don't matter. But what does matter is that you subscribe or maybe
watch another video. How about the uh Sennheiser HD550 video I did just a
couple months ago? those.