A headphone company Skullcandy has a reputation for poor sound quality. For the past year or so, it has been on a mission to improve that reputation.
His efforts began with a Bose cooperation in 2025 and the release of Skullpipi 360 ANC technique$130 pair of wireless earphones which have amazing sound quality and noise cancellation for the money.
Next on the upgrade list are Skullcandy’s Crusher headphones. These wireless cans have been around for over a decade, and are known for allowing users to crank up the bass vibrations using a thumb wheel on the ear cup. Spin that wheel every time, and the Crushers rumble and vibrate against your skull, thanks to the special design of the driver.
The company announced the new pair, the Crusher 1080 ANC, during an event in New York City on Wednesday evening. They are on sale now.
Headphones mimic the feeling of a booming subwoofer—as if you were in the front row of a concert—while usually sacrificing mids and highs. But that’s what Skullcandy wants to correct with the new headphones, once again relying heavily on Bose’s audio expertise.
.jpg)
Skull candy likes to tout that its first product was born on a ski chair in 2003 near its headquarters in Park City, Utah. Since then, the company has mainly served the board game community.
“From snowboarders to snowboarders,” Brian Garofalow, CEO of Skullcandy, tells WIRED. Although private equity firm Mill Road Capital now owns the company, Skullcandy is still seen more as a lifestyle brand than an audio company with serious audio chops.
“We’ve been really good at building community and fostering and helping push culture forward — not the best at the engineering side of innovation and product,” Garofalow says. “So we’ve been honing our chops over the last few years.”
Garofalow says it’s been an engineering challenge to pair Crusher’s bass-boosting and noise-cancelling technology. He says the team worked with Bose engineers to decouple the Crusher from the rest of the acoustic tuning profile so that the low end sits alone. In theory, this means that when you increase the bass effect by dialing in, “the highs and lows are still very sharp, versus in the past, when they tended to be muddy,” Garofalow says.
The Sound and Bose the app adds three other improvements to Skullcandy’s new Crusher headphones: Bose’s noise-cancelling chops, which will work well even if you have the bass cranked up to 11; Bose spatial sound profile for surround-sound-like conditions; and an array of six microphones for phone quality that Bose has come to be known for.
