
The whole thing comes across a little special, and it’s hard not to feel that AudioQuest wants to see your experience with the NightOwl Carbon as something other than special.

Two pairs of pads are included, comprising of either protein leather or a micro-suede material, and AudioQuest includes a massive case to hold this all in, not to mention two little cases inside, one each for the headphone and for the cable.Īnd all up, it’s snazzy little package, and much more interesting than say just getting a big pair of headphones in a box with a plushy case.
NIGHTOWL HEADPHONES DRIVER
Inside, AudioQuest is reliant on a 50mm driver made from organic bio-cellulose materials, similar to what other headphone brands have used in the past, and the headphones rely on a unique band construction that means they don’t need to adjust to your head at all, flexing along a fairly rigid circular band to fix to your head size comfortably and effortlessly.Ī thick yet short 1.3 metre cable is included in the box with a button and microphone for use with a smartphone, as is a 3.5mm to 6.25-inch jack converter. That potentially offers two benefits, with the durability of using wood as a material, as well as the warmth wood provides as an audio casing.

Under this paint job, however, it’s a similar construction to the NightHawk, with a casing made from liquid wood, a material that can be super confusing to understood and essentially uses plant fibre and processes wood in such a way where it can be turned into a liquid and pushed into an injection mould. The “Carbon” part of the name comes from the paint job, because while AudioQuest’s headphones tend to offer a very wooden finish, the NightOwl Carbon uses a carbon grey paint job. Similar in design but much less open, the NightOwl is basically the closed-back equivalent of the semi-open NightHawk, a pair of headphones that reduces the amount of sound leakage, blocking much of it up with a grill that encases the audio instead of allowing it to breathe and be shared with everyone else. Not its first pair, AudioQuest is a name that is gradually making its mark on the headphone world.Īfter engineering its first pair of big headphones in the “NightHawk”, a pair of headphones built from the research of other headphones and arriving with a liquid wood casing and a 3D printed grill, the company is at it again building a slightly different pair. In this category, you’ll find a number of players, includingSennheiser, AKG, Fostex, Audeze, Aedle, RHA, and many others, but one that might not have popped up so obviously is AudioQuest, even though it definitely deserved to be in there.

Every pair of headphones is therefore suited to different environments, and amazingly, the most expensive headphones usually aren’t made to go outside with.īuilt instead for pure listening pleasure, headphones that generally approach or exceed the $1,000 mark are often engineered to take the place of high-end speakers, the sort of things that you might normally sit in a nice room and just space out while you listen to a high-resolution audio file or a nice piece of vinyl, the crackling grooves warming you up from the inside out.
