Review: Urbanears Zinken

So we have the Urbanears Zinken here and in true Urbanears fashion we have a headphone that looks and feels like pretty much what we'd expect from Urbanears. But how does it sound? "Hear" are my thoughts...

Build and Design

The Zinken is built from sturdy plastic that's coated with a familiar rubbery texture also found on other Urbanears products. The ear pads are made of soft foam that's covered with leather and the entire ear piece assembly connects to the headband through a piece of metal that also functions as a hinge.

The hinge allows us to fold the ear pieces inward for a more compact profile thus making it a little bit easier to stow away. You will also notice how the ear pieces twist a little to allow a better fit on our ears.

Speaking of a better fit, the Zinken comes with a pretty standard approach for adjusting the headband.

The headband is lightly padded underneath and the padding is covered with the same leather material used on the ear pads. The build of the headband is pretty robust, I flexed the band really wide open a bit and it always returned to its original shape.

On the earpiece, we have a couple of ports with different sizes and the reason for this is what Urbanears calls their TurnCable. The TurnCable is actually quite clever because the cable has a 6.35mm jack on one end, and a 3.5mm jack on the other end. 

This design makes the Zinken easy to adopt for people that use their headphones for mobile devices like their smart phones or tablets with a 3.5mm port and easily switch to 6.35mm to use amplifiers, instruments, audio boards, and other more serious tools for sound or musical producers without the need for an adapter.

The TurnCable also has a controller that can be used as a mic and controller for basic phone operations like answering calls and playing music. And the coiled part of the cable allows some slack for those accidental tugs. A nice added bonus to the Zinken design is that the 3.5mm port also functions as an extension that we can use to share whatever it is we are listening in on to a fellow with another 3.5mm listening device. Urbanears calls this feature the ZoundPlug...sounds like a jejemon inspired moniker (look it up at wikipedia).

The Zinken comes in a myriad of color options and the color palette used for the color options are sort of a trademark for Urbanears. There's cobalt, clover, dark grey, indigo, pumpkin, black, tomato, white, coral, and the color we have here is lilac.

All this looks and feels really nice, but I noticed some imperfections on the unit that we got. There is a slight discoloration on the inner side of the headband which might suggest that the entire headband might discolor at some point. And based on my experience with an Urbanears product, the rubbery texture tends to melt away and become sticky overtime, specially in hotter places like Manila during summers. I also found that the 3.5mm jack had some white dots...I'm not entirely sure if it was damaged somehow or if it came out the factory like this.

Sound Quality

The Zinken is a pair of cans targeted for the DJs...and imaging what a DJ might need (since I'm not a DJ) I came up with noise cancellation, sound isolation, and sound accuracy.

Noise cancellation isn't done actively by the Zinken, but the closed ear piece design and the ear pads help keep the music in and the noise out. That said, it is easy to crank up the volume to totally kill ambient noise.

Sound isolation is quite good; it's easy to spot the different sounds and instruments in most cases, but the bass muddies the sound profile some times. Since the bass can muddy the sound a bit, sound accuracy isn't exactly a strong point for the Zinken. Actually, the trebles and mids are not as crisp as I might like it and this might be because the Zinken is a fairly bassy headphone.

Comparison

That said, the Sennheiser On-Ear momentum delivers better sound accuracy over the Zinken, and the Zinken's bass quality (not the amount of bass) is better than my own extra bass Sony MDR-XB400. Also the Sony MDR-XB400 muddies the other ranges of sound more than the Zinken ...so that's a good thing for the Zinken.

Specifications

For more information you can checkout the official Urbanears Zinken page here.

Conclusion

The Zinkens are locally sold for PHP7,950.00 and I think that it's an OK price. If you can live with the potentially sticky future that typically happen to products with this type of finish, need the flexibility of the TurnCable, and want a good bassy headphones, this is probably right up your alley. You can sound test the Zinkens at Podium, they have an Urbanears store there where you can also explore their other products. I'll leave you with a cool advert from the Urbanears site that was made for the Zinken.