Skullcandy Crusher ANC 2 review: the only bass control that is a slider, not a preset

1. Best for deep bass, and the longest rated battery here

Skullcandy Crusher ANC 2

The only headphone here with a bass slider rather than a bass EQ: dedicated haptic drivers you can dial from nothing to physical, on top of two 40 mm full-range drivers.

Our editorial score: 8.3 / 10

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Every other headphone on this site treats bass as a voicing decision made at the factory and handed to you. The Crusher ANC 2 treats it as a control. Two 40 mm full-range drivers do the music; a separate pair of sensory-bass drivers do the physical part, and a slider on the earcup runs that second pair from nothing to everything, with 20, 50 and 80 percent presets if you would rather not fiddle.

The specification underneath that gimmick is unexpectedly strong for travel. Skullcandy publishes up to 50 hours with cancelling on and up to 60 with it off, which is more rated runtime than any flagship on this site. Ten minutes of charge buys four hours. A travel case and a 3.5 mm aux cable are both in the box, and Tile tracking is built in.

Be clear what it is not. The cancelling is good rather than class-leading, and Skullcandy publishes no measured reduction figure for it. At high slider settings the haptics are a sensation rather than better sound. And it is a bigger, heavier, warmer headphone than the travel flagships it undercuts on price.

What works on a plane

• +A physical bass slider, so the effect is adjustable rather than a fixed voicing you live with
• +50 rated hours with canceling on beats every flagship on this site
• +Folds, and ships with both a travel case and an aux cable
• +Tile tracking built in, which is the correct answer to leaving them in a seat pocket

What does not

• −At high slider settings the haptics are a physical sensation, not better sound
• −Canceling is good rather than class-leading — this is a bass product first
• −Heavier than the travel flagships, and the pads run warm

How it scores against the five travel axes

Cabin-noise reduction7.6

Battery on a long-haul9.6

Pack size7.6

Comfort past hour three7.2

Wired / IFE fallback8.6

Published specifications

Spec	Figure	Source
Battery, ANC on	Up to 50 hours	Skullcandy
Battery, ANC off	Up to 60 hours	Skullcandy
Rapid charge	10 minutes for 4 hours	Skullcandy
Drivers	Two 40 mm full-range plus dual sensory-bass drivers	Skullcandy
Bluetooth	5.2	Skullcandy
Bass control	Adjustable slider, with 20 / 50 / 80 percent presets	Skullcandy
In the box	USB-C cable, 3.5 mm aux cable, travel case	Skullcandy
Finding	Tile tracking built in	Skullcandy

Read the full Skullcandy Crusher ANC 2 review →

Buy it if bass is the reason you listen to music and every other headphone has disappointed you. Nothing else here gets close: a fixed bass-heavy voicing is a decision someone else made, and this is a dial. It is the pick in best headphones with bass for exactly that reason, and the slider is also the feature that makes it tolerable for people who normally hate bass-forward headphones — you can turn it all the way down and listen to two ordinary 40 mm drivers.

Buy it, too, if runtime is your constraint. Fifty rated hours with cancelling on is the longest figure in our registry, ahead of the 40-hour budget soundcores and well ahead of the 30-hour flagships. On the ranking at longest battery life headphones that is not a marginal win.

Do not buy it as a quiet-cabin headphone. Skullcandy publishes modes but no measured reduction figure, and in the 50 to 300 Hz band where jet drone lives this sits behind the Bose and Sony flagships in best noise-cancelling headphones for flights. Our guide to comparing cancelling headphones explains why the absence of a figure is the thing to notice.

Do not buy it as a lightweight travel object either. This is a physically substantial headphone with thick pads, and it will be warmer at hour four than the 236 g Bose or the 254 g Sony in lightest noise-cancelling headphones.

Two absences are worth naming rather than glossing. Skullcandy publishes no measured noise-reduction figure for this model, which is normal across the whole category and is why no page on this site ranks headphones on a manufacturer’s decibel claim. And we could not find a weight published by Skullcandy for the Crusher ANC 2. Third-party retailer listings commonly quote figures around 330 g, but those are retailer data rather than manufacturer data, and they disagree with each other by enough that we will not print one as fact. Treat this as a heavy headphone of unconfirmed exact weight.

The thing to understand about the sensory-bass system is that it is not an EQ. An EQ boost pushes more low-frequency energy through the same driver that is playing everything else, which is why bass-heavy headphones so often sound muddy: the bass is competing with the midrange for the same cone. Here, a separate pair of drivers handles the physical part, so the two 40 mm full-range drivers are left to do their job.

At the 20 percent preset it reads as a slightly fuller low end and most people would not identify anything unusual. At 50 percent it becomes a tactile thing you feel in the earcups. At 80 percent and above it is a physical sensation rather than an improvement in sound — genuinely fun on the right track, exhausting on a long flight, and not something anyone should leave on permanently.

The slider is the review. If the idea of a bass control you can turn down to zero appeals, this is the only headphone here that offers it. If it does not, nothing else about this product will convince you.

The underrated consequence is for people who do not want bass. Dialed to zero, you have an ordinary 40 mm over-ear with 50 rated hours, cancelling, a case and a cable. That is a perfectly reasonable travel headphone that happens to have a party trick attached, and it is the reading that makes the product make sense for a traveler.

Battery is where this wins and it is not close. Fifty rated hours with cancelling on removes the whole category of problem: a transatlantic leg, a layover, a connection and the hotel on the far end without the headphone being something you have to think about. The arithmetic in headphone battery life for long-haul flights shows how quickly a 24-hour rating gets eaten by a real routing; 50 does not have that problem.

The 10-minute rapid charge for 4 hours covers the standard disaster — discovering at the gate that it is flat — at the cost of finding an outlet rather than the flight.

The aux cable in the box matters more than it sounds. It means the Crusher plugs straight into a seatback screen with none of the transmitter friction described in Bluetooth headphones and in-flight entertainment, and it means a flat battery leaves you with a working passive headphone rather than a dead weight around your neck. Two of the flagships on this site do not ship a cable at all.

Tile tracking is the detail that reads as gimmick and is not. The single most common way to lose a headphone is leaving it in a seat pocket, and this is the only model in our registry with finding built in rather than bolted on.

Against that: it is bulky and the pads run warm, which is the trade for the extra driver pair and the thick cushioning. On a ten-hour flight that is a real cost, and the honest comparison sits in comfiest wireless headphones, where this model does not win. It does fold, which keeps it viable in a personal item — see best foldable noise-cancelling headphones for why that matters more than overall size.

• If you want the cancelling instead of the bass. The Bose QuietComfort Headphones cancel deeper, weigh less on Bose’s published 0.520 lb, and include a case and a cable. They last 24 rated hours rather than 50, and they have no bass control at all.
• If you want both and will pay for it. The Sony WH-1000XM6 is the better all-rounder on cancelling, weight and codecs, and the app EQ will get you a bass-forward voicing — but a fixed one, not a dial. The Bose-versus-Sony comparison sets those two against each other.
• If the budget is the point. The soundcore Space One gives you 40 rated hours, LDAC and a folding hinge for a fraction of this, with no haptics and a plainer build.
• If you want it to survive the trip. Most durable noise-cancelling headphones ranks the registry on the things that actually fail — hinges, pads and the wired fallback.

The Crusher ANC 2 is the least confused product in this category. It is not pretending to be a flagship canceller that also does bass; it is a bass headphone that cancels well enough, and everything about the specification follows from that honestly. The slider is genuinely unique, the 50-hour rating is the best in our registry, and the case, cable and Tile tracking are the kind of practical inclusions flagships keep leaving out.

The costs are equally plain. The cancelling is a step behind the headphones people buy specifically to make a cabin quiet. It is heavy and warm, and Skullcandy does not publish a weight to argue about. At high slider settings the effect is physical rather than musical, and nobody should mistake that for fidelity.

If you fly long-haul and want silence, buy a Bose or a Sony. If you fly long-haul and want your music to hit, with a battery that outlasts the itinerary and a cable for when it does not, this is the one product here that does that job, and the slider means you can turn the whole personality off when you want to sleep.