Unboxing the Samson SR850 Over-Ear Headphones

In this post, we have a text and pictures practical unboxing of the over-ear semi-open Samson SR850 headphones. A review will follow at a later date. I am posting the unboxing before I even listened to them, so how they sound will not color my unboxing 🙂 Because the unboxing is the most objective part of a review. It sounds silly but when you think about it, it’s true 🙂

What’s Included?

This is a spartan kit. Everything arrives in an easy-to-dismantle and recycle cardboard box. Inside there is white molding that holds the headphones in place and in shape. I also put in a Sennheiser HD-4XX over-ear headphone in there, and it actually fit, so this may be a poor man’s case for these and other headphones 🙂 Here’s what you get:

  • the headphones with the cable twisty-tied in a loop
  • a 1/4″ to 1/8″ shiny gold-color adapter
  • a short user guide and warranty card
  • that and nothing more; tell me truly I implore…

HEADBAND

The headband is an AKG “homage”, a two-tier self-adjusting system. The part with the vertical red arrow in the picture below self-adjusts as the inner headband gets pushed upwards by the listener’s head. It independently adjusted on each side. As youc an see, there is no fluffy padding on the headband, it’s just the flat material.

If you look at the two red circles on each side of the metal headband, there is an angular twist point as it curves up towards the temples. This is on both sides. It is not a defect, it just looks odd in the picture 🙂

EARCUPS

Some of the included material call these open-back, but the conventional wisdom on these is that they are semi-open (their specs page in the manual also agrees to this). As you can see in the annotated picture below the earcup is only partially open, thus the semi-open 🙂

CABLE MATTERS

The cable is non-detachable. It is connected on the left side, making it easy to tell Left from Right – as long as you can remember that the cabLe goes in on the Left 🙂

Both the headphone plug and the 1/4″ adapter are two-ring, so you do not get remote control features. There is NO mic, and NO remote on these. It’s just an audio cable from the plug to the left earcup.

BIG EARPADS

The earpads are indeed big. They look smaller in the pictures but the ruler doesn’t lie 🙂

SAMSON SR850 SPECS

This is from the user manual, with points of interest highlighted:

WHERE DID THEY COME FROM?

I purchased these on impulse when they were on sale at Adorama.com. Both these and their closed-back cousins, the SR950 go on sale for around $25 with free shipping on a recurring but unpredictable basis.