About Shinola:
Shinola is a Detroit-based luxury lifestyle brand that’s made a strong name for themselves in the last few years for their Men’s wristwatch lineup. They recently broke into the headphone market and one of their first in-ear headphones is their $495 Canfield Pro In-Ear Monitor headphones. Much like a luxury watch, these aren’t for your average customer. They’re positioned for professionals, audiophiles, and musicians. For such a price and brand, our expectations were high; especially for a pair of wired headphones in 2018!
Oh right, there’s a cable, time to dig up our lightning adapter! At least it’s a really nice cable wrapped in braided fabric, with an in-line 3 button ControlTalk and microphone. The cable can even be removed from the earbuds if you ever need to replace it.
The cable is molded to wrap above and around the back of your ears, which is an ideal design choice to keep these headphones comfortable and in-place. The Canfield Pro In-Ear Monitor headphones come with a good assortment of different sized silicon and memory foam eartips. Memory foam for the win! This really adds to the long-wearing comfort.
How do they sound?
Well, they sound fantastic, but they weren’t what we expected. They still sound premium and high quality, but for monitor headphones, we expected a very flat and accurate profile, instead, we found them to be pretty bassy. The midrange audio falls a bit behind the low range, as most popular headphones do these days.
The website said they are supposed to “focus on detailed vocals”, and while the vocals are detailed, they’re not as focused as we’d like. Aside from that, they are really fun to listen to and have next to no distortion at all volumes. We recommend hooking them up to an amplifier to really get the most out of them. We felt the sound profile is actually designed more for consumers looking for higher quality headphones, and less for professionals and audiophiles.
The headphones also come with a hard zippered carrying case. The case is a handy addition, but sometimes it can take a little effort to get the headphones in there and zipper them without clipping the cord.
Bottom Line
Are you specifically looking for wired headphones with a 3.5mm headphone cable? If not, then you might want to consider something with Bluetooth or with a built-in lightning cable. However, if you don’t mind that these are wired, Shinola’s Canfield Pro In-Ear Monitor headphones won’t disappoint – as long as you don’t mind the high price tag.
Overall, these are great everyday headphones that are jam-packed with rich audio quality that’s a little bassier than you may expect from typical in-ear monitors. The long-lasting comfort is one of its best features; you can easily wear them for hours on end. The memory foam ear tips and the wrap-around design keeps them perfectly in place.
The Shinola Canfield Pro In-Ear Monitor headphones are currently available from Shinola for $495 .