Can Bose Help Skullcandy Shake Its Bargain-Bin Reputation?

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.