Soul by Ludacris SL150

Soul Electronics SL150 Headphone Review

Celebrity endorsements provide no assurance of product quality; in fact, they too often signal that a product isn’t good enough to pass muster on its own merits. So we didn’t have the highest of expectations for these headphones endorsed by second-tier rapper Ludacris. After listening to a number of tracks from Accidental Powercut volumes 1 and 2, however, the Soul SL150 mostly won us over. The acoustic tracks on these albums were recorded binaurally live at St. Barnabas Chapel, in the UK. Binaural recordings are typically made using microphones mounted inside a dummy head, and they’re produced specifically for headphone listening. The intent is to give the listener the sensation that he or she is in the room with the musicians. These two albums were commissioned by Bowers & Wilkins’ Society of Sound subscription music service, and they’re available encoded in either FLAC or Apple Lossless with 16-bit resolution at a sampling rate of 44.1kHz (we used the former). Given the Ludacris connection, we assumed the SL150s would beat us about the head with thumping bass response, and if that’s what you’re looking for in your next set of headphones, steer clear of these.