We saw the Pineapple Rumble K headphones at two booths during our trip to CES 2010. Both times the sound of the crowd was too noisy to really give the headphones a good review.
When Pineapple sent us a pair to review, we were excited. The Rumble K headphones use “bone conduction” technology to create sound using air and vibration. The claim is that this technology creates deep bass and no harm to your ears.
In all honesty, we were less excited to see how they sounded in our ears than against our teeth. Since the sound is generated via vibration, the sound can not only be heard by putting them in your ears, but you can also hear the sound via “bone conduction” when you place the backs of the headphones against your teeth. Yes, it’s weird, but impressive to kids of all ages.
Once the coolness of holding them against our teeth was over, we began to use them in our ears.
Sadly, the $80 Pineapples sounded worse in our ears than a $5 set of Koss headphones we purchased at Wal-Mart. At low levels the Rumble Ks were alright, but at higher volumes (anything over 50 percent) distortion was so bad we couldn’t understand the lyrics of Chris Isaak.
The headphones were better for podcasts, but there was still obvious distortion.
These headphones would be great for someone with sensitive years who lives or works in a very quiet environment, but if the sound needs to play over even moderate ambient noise, these headphones simply won’t work.
We thought that maybe we just received a defective pair so we read several reviews around the web and it appears that this is typical of the Rumble Ks.
For $20 they would be cool simply for the “bone conduction” aspect, but at $80 we were unimpressed. It’s too bad, because we really wanted to like them.
