Have you been looking for an affordable pair of noise cancelling headphones that don’t suck? So have I. It seems like everything is either super high priced or has really poor quality. I decided to take a chance on the Cowin E7 headphones to see how well they’d replace my skullcandy set that just broke unfortunately.
What’s in the Cowin E7 box?
Of course the headphones are in there, and a charging cable as well. What was a little unexpected is that there was a pretty decent manual and a nice leather carrying case with it. Although I don’t personally use carrying cases, it was a nice touch for a budget pair of headphones. Also included was a cable to manually hooked up your headphones if needed. I did a short video below showing the headphones and what comes with them.
How well do the headphones work?
There are three options for the power switch, off, bluetooth, and active noise cancelling. I originally started off with bluetooth which worked really well. Actually compared to my skullcandy pair, they connected up much better and quicker. I was having this intermittent problem with my skullcandy pair where they would connect to my iphone but then not actually trigger the iphone to play. That isn’t a problem with the Cowin E7, the bluetooth performance is much better than I had previously.
The noise cancellation part also seems to work pretty well. Even without turning on the active part, the majority of noise is cancelled out. The sound quality is somewhat affected by the activation of the active noise cancellation, it’s a little more fuzzy.
Battery life and operation
The battery life is surprisingly strong, even better than my skullcandy pair. The volume control is a little weird though, at least with my iPhone. On my previous pair, I could start/stop/up volume/down volume with the side buttons. The up and down volume buttons would control the iPhone volume level.
On the Cowin E7 though, the up and down volume actually controls the volume of the headset and not the phone. This means that if you want to adjust the volume of the iPhone, you’ll have to do it manually. This hasn’t been a problem for me so far, but I just wanted to make a note of it for people in case.
It does have the ability to skip forward and backward, which is unusual for any headphones to have. I wish there was an option to switch the ‘skip’ and ‘volume’ controls around, the volume controls are done by ‘holding’ the button, while a press skips 30 seconds.
There’s also a built in microphone should you want to take phone calls on it. That’s a pretty nice feature as well that my previous pair didn’t have.
Final Thoughts
The Cowin E7 are a pretty good pair of budget headphones. I was looking for something that was comfortable and reliable, the flaky bluetooth part of the skullcandy stuff was starting to annoy me. And at 1/2 the price of the previous pair I had, it’s a win. About the only thing I would change is the volume button stuff.
