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- Open, poised and unthreatening sound
- Comfortable design
- Good range of well-implemented control options
- Lacking sonic dynamism and drive
- Ridiculous charging case
- Bog-standard codec compatibility
The Skullcandy Method 360 ANC are priced aggressively, styled even more aggressively and arrive in the most unnecessarily large charging case for wireless earbuds you’ve ever seen.
They look and feel very similar to the Bose QuietComfort Earbuds II, which is great news where comfort and stability are concerned. They’re voiced by Bose, in fact, and except for their rather limited codec compatibility, they’re specified to make the most of the bigger brand’s input.
Battery life is decent, control options are more decent still, and in some ways the Method 360 ANC are a spacious and inoffensive listen; they certainly extract a gratifying amount of detail from a recording and make its position in the overall presentation easy to understand. They are painfully short of dynamic impetus, though, and sound quite unwilling to dig in when the intensity of a recording would seem to demand it.
What do you get for the money?
A £100 price tag puts the Method 360 ANC in firmly accessible true wireless territory, and you get a pretty robust feature set for the money. The buds support Bluetooth multipoint, have active noise cancellation, very decent battery life and sound that’s been fettled by Bose.
Your outlay also gets you a choice of five racily named finishes (True Black, Bone, Leopard, Plasma and Primer), a charging case that’s so large it almost defies description, good control options and a properly comfortable fit.
You get a couple of 12mm full-range dynamic drivers with a claimed frequency response of 20Hz – 20kHz to do the audio business too, and earbuds that also feature four mics each to take care of telephony and active noise cancellation. However, wireless connectivity seems to have been specified to be as inexpensive as possible, with Bluetooth codec compatibility limited to just the basic SBC and AAC options.
What did we like about them?
If you’re au fait with the Bose range of QuietComfort true wireless headphones, and the QuietComfort II in particular, you’ll find the Method 360 ANC quite familiar.
Skullcandy has included its little skull logo on the earbuds, but the overall shape, as well as the use of swappable stabilising fins and ovoid eartips, has QuietComfort Earbuds II written all over it (metaphorically speaking). This isn’t a criticism; the selection of fins and eartips means getting a comfortable, secure fit is easy. At 11g each, the earbuds are not exactly light, but they’re comfortable over even very long listens.
Wireless connectivity is via Bluetooth 5.3, and there’s Google Fast Pair and two-stage multipoint connectivity available too. There’s an IPX4 rating for the earbuds, which means they should be fine if you take even a little care with them – there’s no IP rating for the charging case, but that’s hardly unusual.
On the face of it, battery life is very decent – there’s certainly no arguing with 9 hours (ANC on) and 11 hours (ANC off) from the earbuds if you listen at moderate volume. With the charge available in the accompanying case, you’re looking at a total listening time of roughly 23 hours with ANC on and 29 with ANC off. Just 10 minutes on the mains via the case’s USB-C slot should hold you for a couple of hours of ANC-less listening.
The Skull-iQ control app that lets you explore your ANC options is a very worthwhile (and gratifyingly stable) interface. Choose between ‘Stay Aware’ transparency, ANC off and ANC on, with the latter option unlocking a slider that enables you to adjust the ANC intensity. The app also lets you audition three EQ presets, and there’s a five-band equaliser if you want to create some custom settings. You can also check battery life, switch ‘Low Latency’ on or off, and rearrange the meaning of taps and presses on the capacitive touch surface at the top of each earbud.
The touch controls are just as reliable and stable as the app, and you can control all major playback and telephony functions this way. Additionally, you can use the touch controls for Spotify Tap to wake your player’s native voice assistant or to take a photo using your phone’s camera, which is a neat option.
Where sound quality is concerned, where the Skullcandy are good, they’re very good indeed. They deliver a spacious, open sound and organise a soundstage smartly to make things easy to follow, even on a reasonably hectic and involved recording like English Teacher’s The World’s Biggest Paving Slab. Detail levels are high, and the quite carefully neutral tonality means a tune gets to reveal itself on its own terms rather than having the headphones stick their oar in too obviously.
In many ways, the Skullcandy are an unflappable listen. They never lose the run of themselves, and are always composed even when a recording like The Fall’s The Container Drivers is doing its best to goad them. They resolve every area of the frequency range expertly, giving bass, midrange and treble the correct weighting and context in every circumstance.
What could be improved?
I say “on the face of it” where battery life is concerned, because there’s very nearly an elephant in the room where the Skullcandy Method 360 ANC are concerned: the charging case. In the simplest terms, it’s massive: way, way larger and, at 77g, heavier than any case from any alternative brand I’ve ever seen, and utterly impractical. Inexplicably, the earbuds are tricky to remove and replace, despite the fact that there’s so much space for them to be positioned. And given the size of this case, its numbers for battery life are underwhelming.
Underwhelming works to describe codec compatibility, too. Unlike a few alternatives at around the same sort of money, the Method 360 ANC only get along with the bare-minimum SBC and AAC codecs. So, if your source player can handle LDAC or any of the aptX codecs, you might want to think about other options. The Cambridge Audio Melomania A100 I reviewed recently fit the bill very nicely.
In some ways, the sound of the Skullcandy is underwhelming, too. For all the poise and balance of their presentation, the even-handed nature of their tonality and their insight into the finest details, the Method 360 ANC sound strangely unbothered.
Some of this is down to a lack of dynamic impetus. Even when playing a recording with the variations in intensity and volume of All Things to All Men by Cinematic Orchestra, the earbuds seem unwilling in the extreme to track these fluctuations with any sort of conviction. The result is a rather flat and undemonstrative rendition of a recording you know has more light and shade to it than the Skullcandy can reveal.
This lack of energy and excitement leaves the Method 360 ANC sounding rather pedestrian and uninvolving. Those who value balance and insight over everything else might consider it a trade-off worth considering, but anyone who’s interested in the energy and excitement in a piece of music, of its value as entertainment, is going to be disappointed.
Should you buy the Skullcandy Method 360 ANC?
Ultimately, it’s difficult to make a case for the Skullcandy Method 360 ANC. If they didn’t look so lairy, their laid-back and undemonstrative sound wouldn’t be so jarring; if they didn’t sound so polite and unthreatening, their looks would make a bit more sense.
They also don’t do enough where codec compatibility is concerned. And even though you can attach that enormous charging case to a belt or a bag, or use it as a keyring, why would you? Wouldn’t you rather have a charging case that just slips into a pocket and doesn’t take up as much space?
