Beats Solo 2

By now, headphone enthusiasts should know the drill with Beats: If you love big, booming bass, read on, and if you want a flat-response, critical listening-appropriate headphone pair, move on past the Beats Solo 2 (maybe to the Editors' Choice Sennheiser HD 558). The $199.95 Solo 2 is all about streamlined design that's focused on being lightweight and comfortable over long listening sessions, and with very few design flourishes. The drivers deliver seriously deep bass that balances out against heavily tweaked high frequencies. Beats headphones often feel a bit overpriced, but the Solo 2 manages to offer compelling value—even if you're still paying a bit of a premium for Dr. Dre's name and the allure of wearing the same headphones you see on celebrity athletes and musicians.

Design
Available in glossy pink, blue, or gray along with the more traditional Beats colors of red, black, or white, the Solo 2 looks similar to other Beats headphones. The on-ear (supra-aural) fit is extremely lightweight, with plush earpads and enough cushioning under the headband to stay comfortable. You can fasten on a little too tight and create some unnecessary pressure on the ears; loosening them a bit eliminates any tension issues without making them less secure on the head as it might with most headphones.

While not really marketed for it, the Solo 2 is a decent passive noise eliminator. The earcups block out a healthy amount of ambient room noise, and while you shouldn't expect anything close to active noise cancellation, it's a nice fringe benefit of the comfortable earpads. 

The removable audio cable, which connects to the left earcup, includes an inline remote control and microphone for mobile devices. The three-button remote has dedicated volume controls and a center button that answers and ends calls, or plays, pauses, or skips tracks depending on how many taps you give it and whether you're on a call or not. The Solo 2 ships with a carabiner and a black zip-up, padded protective pouch into which the headphones, which fold down at hinges on the headband, fit inside.

Performance
On tracks with intense sub-bass content, like The Knife's "Silent Shout," the Solo 2 delivers a subwoofer-like assault with absolutely no distortion even at maximum, unsafe listening levels. At moderate levels, the sense of bass response is powerful, but well-balanced with the rest of the mix to produce a sculpted, tweaked response. Purists won't love it, but the Beats brand is a trailblazer in the big bass headphones era.

On Bill Callahan's "Drover," a track that doesn't have much in the way of deep, subwoofer-style low-end, the Solo 2 refreshingly doesn't try to create it out of whole cloth. The drumming gets a decent dose of low-end with some definite boosting, but not to the point that the drums sound unnatural or overpower the mix. Callahan's baritone vocals hardly need any help in the lows, and though they also get a little boosting, they don't sound muddy even if I would've liked to hear a tad more high-mid presence to bring out a treble edge. The highs are boosted enough to give the guitar strumming and the consonant sounds of the vocals more presence, but they're never overly sibilant or too bright. 

Jay-Z and Kanye West's "No Church in the Wild" is the kind of track that really tells us about the Solo 2's sound signature. Here, the sub-bass synth hits that punctuate the drum loop are intense, delivered with the kind of power we expect from a club PA system. The attack of the kick drum loop, however, lacks the treble edge (like with Callahan's voice) it gets with some other pairs. That edge is what allows it to slice through the dense mix, so it sinks into the background without it. Meanwhile, the highs are boosted enough to really bring out the crackle of the vinyl, which on some headphones would be an afterthought. The vocals are delivered with strong clarity and manage to float over the mix.

Classical tracks, like the opening scene of John Adam's "The Gospel According to the Other Mary," have a slightly unnatural sound to them through the Solo 2. They don't sound bad at all, just a bit boosted in the aforementioned bass and high frequency ranges, which lends transparently recorded pieces like this the feel of a cinematic score. The lower register strings at the opening of this track have an immediately strong presence through the Solo 2, which is too much for some classical purists to take when the lower register instruments increase in depth and intensity later in this track. It's an exciting sound, to say the least.

If $200 is your budget for on-ear headphones, you have a plethora of options. If you'd rather have a more dialed-back bass experience without foregoing bass response completely, both the Sennheiser HD 558 and the Marshall Monitor offer excellent, rich sound signatures with crisp, clean highs. If you're looking to spend far, far less money, the Scosche Lobedope SHP451M delivers big, deep bass response on a serious budget, while the Skullcandy Crusher allows you to adjust bass levels yourself. The Beats Solo 2 sounds and feels like one of the least overpriced options from Beats, which normally prices its headphones at a premium. I suppose they could be sold for a bit less than $200, but even at that price, the Solo 2's comfortable, well-made design delivers thunderous lows without a hint of distortion.