The headphone company Skullcandy has a reputation for lackluster audio quality. For the past year or so, it’s been on a mission to improve that reputation.

Its efforts started with a Bose partnership in 2025 and the release of the Skullcandy Method 360 ANC, a $130 pair of wireless earbuds that have surprisingly decent audio quality and noise cancellation for the money.

Next on the upgrade list are Skullcandy’s notorious Crusher headphones. These wireless cans have been around for more than a decade, and they are notable for letting users crank up the bass vibrations using a physical thumb wheel on the ear cup. 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, during an event in New York City on Wednesday evening. They’re on sale now.

The headphones emulate the feel of a thumping subwoofer—as if you’re in the front row of a concert—while usually sacrificing the mids and highs. But that’s what Skullcandy wants to correct with the new headphones, once again by heavily relying on Bose’s audio expertise.

The new Crusher headphones are the next step in Skullcandy’s brand-reinvention efforts.

Courtesy of Skullcandy

Skullcandy likes to tout that its first product was born on a ski chairlift in 2003 near its headquarters in Park City, Utah. Ever since, the company has specifically catered to the board sports community.

“From snowboarders for snowboarders,” Brian Garofalow, Skullcandy CEO, tells WIRED. Even though 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 audiophile chops.

“We’ve been really, really great at community building and nurturing and helping push cultures forward—not the greatest at the engineering part of innovation with products,” Garofalow says. “So we’ve really been honing our chops in the last few years.”

Garofalow says it has been an engineering challenge to pair the company’s proprietary Crusher bass-boosting technology with noise canceling. He says the team worked with Bose’s engineers to decouple Crusher from the rest of the acoustic tuning profile so that the low end sits on its own. Theoretically, this means that when you crank up the bass effect with the dial, the “mids and highs are still way, way sharp, versus in the past, when they tended to get muddy,” Garofalow says.

The Sound by Bose program adds three other improvements to Skullcandy’s new Crusher headphones: Bose’s noise-canceling chops, which will supposedly work well even if you have the bass cranked to 11; Bose’s spatial audio profile for a surround-sound-like feel; and a six-microphone array for call quality that Bose has come to be known for.

Tony Hawk is a brand ambassador for Skullcandy.

Courtesy of Skullcandy

One way Skullcandy wants to stand out from a very crowded headphone marketplace is with price. The company has always sat at the low end of the price spectrum, and these new flagship Skullcandy headphones will maintain that ethos with a retail price of $280. That’s decidedly less than top-end cans from the likes of Sony, Bose, and Apple (and other newcomers like Daisy).

Skullcandy claims the Crusher 1080 ANC headphones get 60 hours of battery life with ANC off, 50 hours with it on. There’s a Rapid Charge function, so plugging them in for 10 minutes earns you four hours of playtime. They also have modern amenities like a feature that auto-pauses the music when the headphones are removed, then turns it on again when they go back onto your ears. There’s a customizable EQ in the app, multipoint pairing with Bluetooth 5.3, and Auracast support.

“With the rise of true wireless and essentially AirPods, we were a little bit behind the curve, didn’t have the best quality, and we lost a little bit of share,” Garofalow says. “The vision I brought to the business was, let’s go back to what we’re best at, and that is being a really unique brand, and then check every part of the business that’s going to help impact that.”

The Method 360 ANC from 2025 was the first showcase of that, with a real drive to market the earbuds’ tech advances. It purportedly proved popular with consumers, too, with the company claiming it has captured 20 percent of the market for earbuds in the $75 to $100 price range since its release (the Method 360 had an introductory $100 price), according to a third-party market report the company paid for.

This isn’t Skullcandy’s first attempt at turning its reputation around. Read the first few paragraphs of this WIRED headphone review from 2011, and you’ll feel like history is repeating itself. The question is whether these new Crushers—or the Bose assist—will do the trick and help paint Skullcandy in a new light for anyone who cares about the audio quality from their headphones.

Crushin’ it.

Courtesy of Skullcandy

Right now, headphones are a zone of great experimentation. Apple is rumored to be developing AirPods with built-in cameras to feed visual data to the Siri AI assistant. Razer has shown off a concept of such a thing at this year’s CES. There are even headphones on the way with brain-scanning technology to monitor focus levels. With Skullcandy’s newfound focus on the tech in its products, I asked if we should expect similar radical gizmos from the company.

“When we’re talking about future-facing technology, I’m not going to share any of that, but I will say yes to all,” Garofalow says. “You’ll see some very cool stuff coming out from us.”