What are they?
The Creative Zen Hybrid SFXI is a set of over-ear, noise-cancelling wireless headphones from Singaporean company Creative Technology. We wouldn’t call them ‘budget’, by they are a lot more affordable than the average premium option. At £89.99 they are priced at about a third of something like a pair of Bose Quiet Comfort SCs.
They can be connected to your device either using a traditional 3.5mm removable headphone jack cable or Bluetooth. The headphones use a pair of 40mm drivers (a pretty typical diameter) made from a metal called neodymium.
Creative Zen claims the headphones have a noise cancellation rate of 95%. You can pick between three modes - ANC, Adaptive ANC (Active Noise Cancellation) and Ambient. ANC simply blocks outside noise, whereas Adaptive is a bit smarter, reacting to ambient noise as it sees fit. Finally, ambient picks up outside noise from a microphone and feeds it into the headphones along with whatever you’re listening to, so you’re more aware of what’s going on around you.
The ‘SXFI’ bit of the name is short for ‘Super X-Fi’, Creative Zen’s spatial audio technology. Or as it describes it, as an "immersive soundstage of a multi-speaker system right in your headphones." It can be switched off via a dedicated button on the right-hand cup if you’re not a fan. Should you want to fiddle further, it’s possible to connect a Creative app to tweak the EQ.
The battery life is up to 70 hours, although with ANC turned on, that drops to 40 hours. You can buy them from Amazon or directly from Creative Zen with free shipping.
Are they any good?
Our expectations weren’t exactly lofty, given the price of these, but the sound quality is impressive, with good low-end punch and plenty of clarity in the middle and top end. Although the possibility of tweaking the EQ is nice to have, we didn’t feel the need to make changes from the base settings.
SXFI we’re more on the fence about – it very much depends on what you’re listening to, with the setting sometimes making audio seem excessively reverb-y. If you put anything on that’s mostly just speech, a podcast, for instance, it sounds like they’re all in a big, echoey room.
It could do with being a bit easier to turn off on the fly, too. Yes, there’s a specific button for it (and it can be turned off in the app) but the headphone’s design has placed all the buttons – volume up/down, ANC, power and SXFI – on the left-hand cup, making things quite cluttered. It takes a bit of time to learn where everything is, but in the meantime, there is at least a polite-sounding voice telling you if you’ve powered on/off or hit the ANC or SXFI buttons.
While we’re moaning about all the buttons, we might as well have a pop at the LEDs on that side too (white/red for power, blue for ANC). They’re quite small and hard to see, although again, a voice prompt does let you know.
Those are our only real grumbles. The Creative Zen Hybrid SFXI seem like a quality item and have yet to show and premature signs of wear while the folding mechanism makes for easy transportation. We had worries about the app given its 2.4-star rating on the Google Play Store, but other than a slight reluctance to connect, it works just fine.
The battery life we’ve experienced seems to tally with Creative Zen’s claims and the noise cancellation is perfectly acceptable for the price.
Should you buy a pair?
If you have a limited budget for noise-cancelling headphones but don’t want to unduly compromise on sound quality, absolutely. Creative Zen is far from a household name, but it is more recognisable than a lot of the random brands you tend to find at this end of the price spectrum. That's reassuring and the product does more than enough to back that up.
The listening experience of headphones can be quite a personal thing, of course, so that could be one problem – so far as we can work out, there aren’t any brick-and-mortar stores stocking these with the option to try before you buy. Judging by our experience of them, though, we don’t think you’ll be disappointed.
