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Harman Kardon Fly Wireless Over-Ear Active Noise Cancelling Headphones – Black

Harman Kardon Fly ANC headphones, no matter how much the manufacturer wants the opposite, are boring – they are far from the first in this category, they have many competitors, their sound is not outstanding, the design does not cause controversy, and they sit on the head as many others headphones.

Harman Kardon Fly ANC Review: Design

You have seen similar boxes on many Harman Kardon devices. For example, a year and a half ago, I reviewed the Esquire Mini 2 portable speaker system of the same brand. And her box design was very similar:

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Inside you are greeted by a box with documentation and a wardrobe trunk. Everything you need is stored in the wardrobe trunk: the headphones themselves, a USB charging cable, an AUX cable and an airplane adapter. As you can see, the package is better than the AirPods Max:

As I said, the headphones look pretty typical for their class of devices. Moreover, the outer part of each of the cups is trimmed with leatherette. This reduces the feeling of “plasticity”, and the headphones look a little more expensive than the amount that is asked for them.

The ear cushions are made of pleasant soft material. They are also covered with leatherette. Good or bad, you decide. I don’t like this decision – I love the fabric (like AirPods Max) or velor ear pads (like my Beyerdynamic DT 990 Pro).

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The weakest side of these headphones is controlled. It’s not sensory, which is good. There are buttons. And a bunch of them: six buttons on the right cup! Six! In this case, the left one is empty. Why make such a jumble, it is not clear.

For example, I disconnected the headphones often when I tried to turn off the noise reduction – the buttons are nearby. The pause/answer button cannot be accessed the first time. So instead of pausing, I would switch the track to the next or previous one.

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In general, the headphones get a big minus for control.

And then there’s micro-USB:

Harman Kardon Fly ANC Review: Convenience

The headphones fit very snugly on my head, but my ears are not under strong pressure. However, our uncle Zhenya put them on and said: “They’re crushing.” Natasha, on the contrary, found them very comfortable.

The most inconvenient place is the bow. No matter how you place it on the head, it will press, which is why the skull begins to bother its owner slightly.

Harman Kardon Fly ANC Review: Noise Cancellation

He is there. It crushes some low-frequency hum, so in airplanes they will save you a little. But a miracle does not happen here: this is not Bose, which have the best noise reduction on the market, and these are not AirPods Max, which occupy second place in my rating. But let me remind you that these headphones are much cheaper than the ones mentioned.

Out of oddities: when you turn on the headphones, the noise reduction will always be on even if you turned it off.

Harman Kardon Fly ANC Review: Application

The headphones have an app. You will find it with great difficulty. It’s called My Harman / Kardon Headphones. And I found it definitely not by the QR code from the instructions (it was not there).

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Why Harman Kardon doesn’t want you to use this app is unknown. Probably due to poor functionality. Here you can turn off or turn on the noise reduction, although this can be done with the headphones’ physical button (well, either you break the connection with the phone). You can also customize the equalizer in the application.

The latter has three presets, but you can add your own version. By the way, the equalizer is well tunable.

In theory, in this application, you can still update the headphone firmware, but I don’t know how this happens – in the three months that the headphones were in our office, it has not changed – v0.6.0.

Harman Kardon Fly ANC Review: Conversation

Microphones pick up speech normally, but if the wind blows, they won’t hear you.

Harman Kardon Fly ANC Review: Music

There are no problems with the sound of the headphones. You will be thrilled if you are not very picky about the sound. Let’s move on to the audition, where I will directly find fault with the sound.

My streaming service threw me a song from my youth. I wiped away my tears of nostalgia and began to take it apart:

Timpani is such a huge drum that is often used in orchestras. In the intro, they draw a lot of attention to themselves. Extreme lows emanate from them, which unpleasantly hit the ears. And this is not at all the velvet that I would like to hear!

Let’s go further. I remembered here Willie Moon’s cool single – this guy, apparently, has already stopped his musical career.

There is a very noticeable deficit in the headphone stage’s width: the sound is concentrated somewhere in the centre, then there is a void covered by backing vocals at the very edges.

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My checklist:

Having started listening to it, I can say that these headphones work out bass many times better than the Sony WH-1000XM4. Overall the song sounds great; everything is fine. But I would very much like a wider scene – at the moment with the harp, it is very much missing.

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The headphones work out the bass very well – they are intense. It should also be borne in mind that the track “Endless Shop” is very well mixed. But the readability of the words that Dmitry pronounces, I would like better.

Harman Kardon Fly ANC Review: Outcome

For some reason, for many, the word “boring” sounds like something negative. I don’t see him that way. To me, boring means not particularly outstanding. Also, boring often means predictable.

Harman Kardon Fly ANC headphones are predictable: they have a good sound, relatively good noise reduction, are comfortable and look good.

I want a wider scene and an automatic pause when removing the headphones from your head. But all this goes in the headphones of the more expensive segment. And so for$249, you get an excellent product that will delight you for a very long time.

Harman Kardon Fly Wireless Over-Ear Active Noise Cancelling Headphones – Black

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