The Rs 11,999 earbuds with two very different sounds inside them
Because it explains nearly everything the Method 360 ANC does well at Rs 11,999, and every place it comes up short, hold that division of labour in your head for the next thousand words,.
So the reasonable position on the Method 360 ANC, which carry “Sound by Bose ” across the front of the box, was scepticism. We have learned, correctly, to ignore the second name on a pair of earbuds. Some studio, some producer, some legendary audio brand lending its logo to a spec sheet it had nothing to do with. Both parties call it a collaboration and everyone moves on. That’s not what happened here. Bose supplied the drivers, the acoustic tuning, the ear tips and the stability fins, and the app running everything shares its bones with the QuietComfort software. Which is, more or less, everything that decides how a pair of earbuds behaves in your ear. What Skullcandy kept for itself is the plastic and one enormous charging case carved out of it. You will hear Bose’s half of this eventually. You have to get past Skullcandy’s first. It’s a cylinder roughly the size of a fat highlighter, with a carabiner ring up top that doubles as a pull. Tug it and an inner column slides out carrying the buds, with a click that I enjoyed far more than I expected to. Nothing else on the shelf looks remotely like it. That’s clearly the brief. It’s also big in a way no amount of charm quite talks its way out of. Slim jeans are not happening. The buds seat upside down relative to the logo, in slots where left and right are mirrored from instinct, and the lettering is faint enough that I was still doing a little rotate-and-squint routine after a fortnight. Skullcandy’s own support page carries a five-step answer to the question of how to put the earbuds away, which is the sort of detail a design gives up about itself without meaning to. Against that, the clip isn’t decorative. It hangs off a bag strap and stays there, the sliding action means the buds can’t scatter if you drop it, and I never once had to hunt for the thing down the side of a sofa. Five finishes, including a leopard print I’d never buy and am pleased exists. If you’re in the bag-charm phase of life, this is the only earbud case built with you in mind. If you’re not, price the inconvenience in before you commit.
Touch panels are broad and dependable, which sounds like small praise until you count how many Rs 10,000 earbuds still ignore half your taps. Instruments occupy separate positions rather than a shared middle, the stage widens well past what Rs 11,999 normally buys, and the tonal balance settles into something close to neutral, which is the last word anyone expected to write about a pair of earbuds with a skull on them. A fit borrowed from a Rs 25,000 pair that refuses to budge. So, is this worth Rs 11,999?
Because the fin takes the weight instead of your ear canal, each bud runs about 11g, which reads heavy and feels like nothing,. Past the packaging argument, the hardware is very good. Three sizes of fin, three of tip. Once you land your combination they hold through runs, a gym session, a flight, a long edit at the desk. Nothing shifted. None of that dull ache larger buds usually start delivering around the two-hour mark. All of it remaps through Skull-iQ, four gestures a side, and the app is one of the better ones going: three EQ presets and a five-band custom curve, an ANC intensity slider, low-latency mode, wear detection, Fast Pair, and multipoint that juggled phone and laptop without ever losing the thread. The voice prompts arrived at launch loud enough to make you flinch. A firmware update has walked them back, which counts as somebody paying attention. Out of the box the tuning is pure Skullcandy, and it is not subtle about it. Sub-bass sits on top of everything, the mids fall back a couple of rows, and there’s a lift in the upper treble that keeps vocals above water at the cost of turning glassy when you push the volume past two-thirds. Divine’s Kohinoor is a great time in this configuration, the low end landing like a fist and the vocal cutting clean over it. This is the sound the brand has sold for twenty years and there is nothing dishonest about selling it. If your listening lives mostly in hip-hop, house or Bollywood dance production, you could leave the EQ untouched for the life of the product and never feel short-changed. You’re not choosing between a right answer and a wrong one here. The default is the more fun of the two and the corrected one is the more capable, and having both live inside a single pair, separated by a slider you’ll touch once, is a better outcome than most rivals manage with the one voice they’ve committed to. The order is the strange part. Skullcandy went and bought some of the best tuning work in the business, then buried it under a bass curve to reassure the people who already knew the brand. The codec sheet is the sour note. SBC and AAC, nothing high-resolution, at a price where high-resolution support has quietly become the expectation. In practice the tuning is strong enough that I stopped noticing after the first week, and AAC on a phone is a perfectly reasonable place to listen from. But it’s a saving you can see on paper, and if you keep a library of proper files and a player that deserves them, you will bump into the ceiling eventually. Suddenly there’s air. Norah Jones on Don’t Know Why has the warmth of her voice fully intact and the piano sitting a clear step behind it, not smeared into the same plane. Prateek Kuhad’s cold/mess holds together the same way, the close-miked vocal staying separate from the guitar rather than sharing a lane with it, and small things you would not expect at this price stay legible: the decay on a cymbal, the shift in a singer’s position between verses, the room a recording was made in. The 12mm drivers were always capable of this. The default tuning was simply standing in front of it. It’s worth being clear that neither setting is wrong. My only complaint is that the good one isn’t what you hear first. A brand this confident about sound could have led with it. The bottom end goes properly flat. Metro rumble, ceiling fans, aircraft drone, the low hum a city makes without meaning to, all of it recedes. Skullcandy has never been in this neighbourhood before, and for a commute, which is what most people at this price are buying, it does the work that counts. Climb higher and it softens. Horns, platform announcements, a conversation two seats over, these come through with their corners filed rather than gone. Wind is the sore spot; I switched ANC off on runs. Stay Aware transparency does its job with a faint hiss riding along and, at middling intensity, doesn’t distinguish itself from ANC as sharply as it might. The very best cancellation still lives on products costing three times as much, which is what you’d expect and no reason to feel shortchanged. Battery is uncomplicated. Nine hours claimed with ANC on, eleven without; I saw around seven and a half at moderate volume, plus two and a half more charges from the case. Ten minutes on the cable returns two hours. No wireless charging. Calls hold up in a quiet room, sound processed but clear, and surrender to a breeze. It’s a crowded slot. There are half a dozen capable noise-cancellers sitting within a thousand rupees of this one, several of them with high-resolution codec support and cases that vanish into a pocket, and if those two things sit at the top of your list, go and buy one of them with my blessing. None of them assembles this particular set of virtues, though. A sound with two moods, both worth having, separated by one slider. An app that does more than toggle noise cancelling. Battery that outlasts most of the field. And a case carrying more personality than the rest of the category combined, charged against your pocket space. That’s not an accident. Knowing your limits clearly enough to go looking for help, then building the fit, the features and the software to make the most of what comes back, is sharper product thinking than the skull logo invites you to credit. The badge is doing work here. So is everything Skullcandy arranged around it. If you want the most technically complete, most compact earbuds the money can find, something else here will suit you better. If you want the pair that sits best, lasts longest, and sounds better than a brand with this history has any right to, these are worth your time. You will make peace with the case. It takes about a week, and then you will notice you have stopped thinking about it, which is more or less what happened with everything else here.
Instruments occupy separate positions rather than a shared middle, the stage widens well past what Rs 11,999 normally buys, and the tonal balance settles into something close to neutral, which is the last word anyone expected to write about a pair of earbuds with a skull on them. What the corrected version still won’t do is lunge. The trouble starts when a recording gets busy. Play Radiohead’s Weird Fishes and the bassline and drums begin crowding the guitars that make the track worth playing; by the time the whole thing opens up, the layers are stacked rather than spread. Acoustic material suffers a related problem, where the body of a guitar arrives fine and the string detail above it gets thinned out. And there’s sibilance, not constantly, but enough that an hour of anything with a bright vocal starts to nag at the top of your ears. This is also, notably, the setting in which you would never guess Bose had anything to do with the product. None of which is the interesting part. The interesting part is what happens when you open Skull-iQ, find the five-band custom curve, and pull the lowest band down four or five notches. It takes about ninety seconds. What comes out the other side is a different product. Suddenly there’s air. This is where the family resemblance finally surfaces. Anyone who has spent time with Bose’s own earbuds will recognise the shape of it immediately: the same unhurried presentation, the same instinct to get out of a recording’s way rather than editorialise over it. Norah Jones on Don’t Know Why has the warmth of her voice fully intact and the piano sitting a clear step behind it, not smeared into the same plane. Prateek Kuhad’s cold/mess holds together the same way, the close-miked vocal staying separate from the guitar rather than sharing a lane with it. Small things you would not expect at this price stay legible: the decay on a cymbal, the shift in a singer’s position between verses, the room a recording was made in. The 12mm drivers were always capable of this. The default tuning was simply standing in front of it. Two things hold up under conditions where cheaper earbuds usually give something away. The first is volume. These play loud, louder than you should be using them, and the tuning holds its shape rather than hardening as you climb. More usefully, it also holds at the other end. Bass-heavy buds tend to hollow out at low volume, so late-night listening turns thin and you find yourself pushing the dial up to get the music back. That doesn’t happen here; at whisper level the balance stays intact. The second is what noise cancellation does to the sound, which is close to nothing. Plenty of earbuds around this money lose low-end weight or narrow the stage the moment ANC engages, so you end up choosing between silence and fidelity. Switch between the modes here and the presentation stays put, which is the sort of consistency you only notice a week in, and then stop thinking about entirely. What none of it will do is lunge. This is the one real limit, and it doesn’t move wherever you set the sliders. Loud passages and quiet ones turn up wearing similar clothes, so music built on contrast comes out levelled off. The long build on Kashmir wants to arrive somewhere, and here it takes a gentle slope instead of a climb. Orchestral material has the same issue, where everything is audible and properly placed and nothing quite swells. Composed rather than gripping. Whether that’s a deal-breaker depends entirely on how much of your listening depends on a track getting bigger.
Our rating: 3.5/5
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