Disclaimer: Jays sent me this headphone for the purposes of review at ohm. It goes for about 230$ USD. You can find out all about it here: Jays u-Jays.
Subject: Jays u-Jays
Holding my reviewer’s breath long enough to do a pictorial closeup on the Jays’s latest headphone is no mean feat. The reason is simple: the u-Jays is, in my opinion, Jays’s best and most cohesive-sounding product. It shares the brilliant warmth of Nuforce’s HEM2, which sweetens every spin of New Order, of Iggy Pop, of Joy Division. But it follows it with fractionally more high-frequency extension and stereo detail. The smooth is balanced with the scrupulousness. In now way am I suggesting that audiophiles looking for reference quality pick it up. It’s not that phone. But where it comes to HiFi sounds, u-Jays knock it out of the park.
In general, its design is similarly brilliant. For an on-ear, it hardly clamps. Its cups rotate enough to fit heads which angle to the nose range from obtuse to acute. Unfortunately, the vertical angle of its cups adjust from the top down, leaving them perpendicular to the floor on all but baby heads, and opening space between pleather and lobe of both glasses wearers and even the mildest of meat heads. Need I go into the itchy and anti-anatomic evils of pleather pads? No. Apart from that, they work and work well.
And while I wouldn’t dare treat the u-Jays the way I treated my DT1350, they are sturdy and sit firm. Typical of most Jays’s products, u-Jays’s cable is reassuringly thick, robust, and resistant to body oils and sweat. I expect it to outlast the headphone.
Finally, modern Jays branding eschews tech jargon and flash for simplicity. Focus on the product, and the importance of the company and image behind it reassure the customer that u-Jays is unique to a single manufacturer. Its box is almost as assiduously laid out as a Leica box. It is easy to open, easy to remove and replace items, and easy on the eye. It is almost as beautiful as the headphones themselves. In conjunction, the two speak volumes about the respect Jays have both for their customers and their company.
Relevant links:
ohm image: instant ohmage: Jays new q-Jays
ohm image: How big is the Lear NS-U1 earphone?
ohm image: A little about insertion angles
headfonia: Review: Nuforce HEM2 – Bizarre Love Triangle