Can Bose help Skullcandy shake its cheap reputation?

The helmet company Skullcandy has a reputation for poor audio quality. For about a year, his mission has been to improve that reputation.

His efforts began with a Bose partnership in 2025 and the release of Skullcandy 360 ANC Methoda pair for $130 wireless earphones which have surprisingly decent audio quality and noise cancellation for the money.

Next on the upgrade list is Skullcandy’s popular Crusher headset. These wireless cans have been around for over a decade and are notable for allowing users to increase the bass vibrations using a physical dial on the earcup. Roll that wheel all the way and the Crushers rumble and vibrate against your skull, thanks to a special driver design.

The company announced a new pair, the Crusher 1080 ANC, at an event in New York on Wednesday evening. They are on sale now.

The headphones mimic the feel of a powerful subwoofer, like you’re in the front row at a concert, while generally sacrificing mids and highs. But that’s what Skullcandy wants to fix with the new headphones, again leaning heavily on Bose’s audio expertise.

Skull candy likes to boast that its first product was born on a chairlift in 2003, near its headquarters in Park City, Utah. Since then, the company has aimed specifically at the board sports community.

“Snowboarders for snowboarders,” Skullcandy CEO Brian Garofalow told WIRED. Even though private equity firm Mill Road Capital now owns the company, Skullcandy is still considered more of a lifestyle brand than an audio company with serious audiophile credentials.

“We’ve been really, really great at creating and growing and nurturing communities and fostering cultures, but not at the engineering part of product innovation,” Garofalow says. “So we’ve really honed our skills over the last few years.”

Garofalow says pairing Crusher’s proprietary bass boost technology with noise cancellation was an engineering challenge. He says the team worked with Bose engineers to decouple Crusher from the rest of the acoustic tuning profile so that the bass would stand on its own. Theoretically, this means that when you increase the bass effect with the dial, “the mids and highs are still very clean, unlike in the past, where they tended to get muddy,” says Garofalow.

THE Sound by Bose The program adds three other improvements to Skullcandy’s new Crusher headphones: Bose’s noise-canceling features, which are supposed to work well even if the bass is turned up to 11; Bose Spatial Audio Profile for a surround sound feeling; and a six-microphone array for call quality that Bose has became known for.

Skullcandy wants to stand out from a very crowded headset market through price. The company has always been on the lower end of the pricing spectrum, and these new flagship Skullcandy headphones will continue that philosophy with a retail price of $280. This is significantly less than the high-end cans of the like Sony, Bose and Apple (and others newcomers like Daisy).

Skullcandy claims the Crusher 1080 ANC earbuds get 60 hours of battery life with ANC off, 50 hours with it on. There’s a Rapid Charge feature, so plugging them in for 10 minutes gets you four hours of playback. They also have modern amenities, like a feature that automatically pauses music when the earbuds are removed, then turns it back on when they return to your ears. There is a customizable EQ in the app, multi-point pairing with Bluetooth 5.3, And Auracast support.

“With the rise of true wireless and basically AirPods, we were a little bit behind, we didn’t have the best quality and we lost a little bit of market share,” Garofalow says. “The vision that I brought to the company was: Let’s get back to what we’re best at, which is being a truly unique brand, and then check out every part of the company that’s going to help impact that.”

The Method 360 ANC of 2025 was the first showcase, with a real desire to market the technological advances of headphones. It has also reportedly proven popular with consumers, with the company claiming to have captured 20% of the market for headphones in the $75 to $100 price range since its release (the Method 360 had an introductory price of $100), according to a third-party market report the company paid for.

This isn’t Skullcandy’s first attempt to repair its reputation. Read the first paragraphs from this WIRED headset review from 2011and you will feel like history is repeating itself. The question is whether these new Crushers – or the Bose support – will do the trick and help present Skullcandy in a new light for everyone who cares about the audio quality of their headphones.

Right now, headphones are an area of ​​great experimentation. Apple is rumored to be developing AirPods with built-in cameras to transmit visual data to the Siri AI assistant. Razer showed up a concept of such a thing at this year’s CES. There are even headphones on the way with brain analysis technology to monitor concentration levels. With Skullcandy’s new focus on technology in its products, I asked if we should expect similar radical gadgets from the company.

“When we talk about forward-looking technology, I’m not going to share any of that, but I’ll say yes to all of them,” Garofalow says. “You’ll see some really cool stuff coming out of us.”