Verdict

Pros

• Good sound isolation
• Decent sound quality
• Detachable cable

Cons

• Tight fit needs to bed in
• Gigantic - not a cool look
• Treble and mids not the smoothest

Headphones can be split into several categories. Some are small and discreet, perfect for travelling out and about with. Some should stay at home because they leak sound. The Lindy Premium Hi-Fi headphones should also stay indoors, but not because they’ll annoy people around you. It’s because they’re absolutely massive.

There are plenty of great headphones out there that will make you look anything but cool though, so let’s put aside our sizeist prejudice for a moment and take a closer look. The Lindy Premium ‘phones use over-the-ear pads designed to surround and encase your whole earlobes. One benefit of their size is that if you’ve found in the past that headphones tend to flatten your larger-than-average ears, you shouldn’t have such problems here.

They come with two sets of pads as well, one with very thick padding and another with even thicker padding. They don’t scrimp on foam. The pads, which are lined with pleather (plastic designed to look and feel like leather), fit over a plastic ring that locks into place within the main body of each can.

Made from tough, soft touch finish plastic, the headphones feel extremely strong. The back of each cup is covered by a plate of brushed metal, further reinforcing this sense of strength, while adding a spot of style to the design too.

At first, we found the pressure exerted on the head by the headband and its inner metal skeleton a little too intense, but this eases off as the set is used. Just as speakers have to go through a burn-in process to reach their optimum performance, so does the Lindy headband. If you get impatient, you can always give the headphones a more aggressive flexing, to loosen the clamping effect of the metal band a bit.

Give the Lindy headphones a little time to settle in and you’ll find them very comfortable. They give your ears plenty of room, also helping to avoid the overheating some over-the-ears and on-ears headphones can cause.

A secure fit makes the Lindys good noise isolators. They won’t drown out the low-end burble of the London Underground or a noisy train as well as the Bose QC3, but put on some tunes and they’ll easily contend with talking co-workers, public transport and other noises of modern life. The pads stop anyone nearby from being able to hear what you’re listening too as well. The Lindy Premium Hi-Fi cans may be a bit too big to help you look cool, but at least they’re socially responsible.

The large size helps them to fit in the standard 3.5mm mono removable cable that plugs into each earcup. There’s no special locking mechanism in use here – you just need to employ a hearty yank or push to remove them or shove ’em back in. This should make finding a replacement fairly easy, although the 3m supplied cable is just about perfect for at-home use – an extension cable is your best bet if you need more length.

The headphones come bundled with a screw-on 6.3mm adapter, and there’s a carry case included too. Like the headphones themselves, it’s not small, but a welcome extra.

The Lindy Premium Hi-Fi headphones aren’t cans for fans of massive bass, but as such they’re right in our wheelhouse. When you pay £80 for headphone, you deserve more than just a boomy bottom-end.

Here, the bass is restrained and thoroughly well-behaved, but has plenty of punch. We found the Lindy bass response similar to the excellent Sony MDR-ZX700. This measured bass is matched with a decent treble presence, affording these headphones and impressively balanced and analytical frequency response across the board.

However, the sound isn’t perfect. The treble and upper-mids lack the ear candy smoothness of some rivals, especially open-back rivals like the Sennheiser HD 518. To call it harsh would be overstating the issue, but we found this temperamental treatment of upper mids reduced the sonic comfort of longer listening sessions. It most commonly pops up as an over-insistent quality in vocal tracks. In a warmer, bassier set this might have been easy to ignore, but we noticed it regularly thanks to the altogether more mature sound signature of this pair.
 
Aside from this minor niggle, though, the Lindys perform very well. The sound is fairly wide and expansive for a closed-back set, the level of top-end detail is good and the relatively neutral sound signature can skip between genres with ease.

The Lindy Premium Hi-Fi headphones don’t do themselves many design favours, in comparison to some key rivals though. The 3m supplied cable and oversized design means they’re not as well suited to use out on the streets as the Sony MDR-ZX700 or Fanny Wang On-Ear Wang, and for at-home use they also have to contend with the fab, smoother-sounding Sennheiser HD range.

This set has serious competition, but if you find other headphones’ ear cups just too small or want a comfy at-home set that won’t let in exterior noise like an open-backed pair would, these are a solid bet. Not everyone can live in a blissfully silent house or flat, after all.

Verdict

The huge size and long cable of the Lindy Premium Hi-Fi headphones limits their versatility somewhat. We’d encourage you to think of these as home headphones rather than ones to wear out-and-about, in spite of the removable cable and good sound isolation. However, if your house is just too noisy for an open-back set, they excel. Their sound is fairly expansive and detailed, marred only by a lack of smoothness in the upper-mids and treble.

Trusted Score