Denon PerL earbuds: music to your ears

Denon, famed for its audio equipment, dates back to 1910 and it even it has roots going back further as the Japan Electric Sound Company. This rich heritage means its latest products are, as you’d expect, bang up to date, with the Denon PerL headphones offering personalised listening that adapts to, and optimises music for, their wearer, unlike any other headphones before them.

They can do this thanks to ear calibration, known as Masimo Adaptive Acoustic Technology, which helps to make every instrument sound even more distinct and present while you’re listening, as if you were actually there in front of the musicians as they play.

This is all made possible through the Denon Headphones app, which will take you through a setup process that measures how well your ears can respond to different frequencies, building up a personalised profile that will go on to inform how all music and speech is played through the earbuds. You can flip back and forth between your personalised profile and the default one to see the difference. And you should.

Customise your experience

Going through this process is a big part of owning the Denon PerL earbuds. First, as they come with five sets of tips, you’re sure to find some that fit your ears perfectly, and the app will help you out here to ensure the tips are well-suited and sealing out extraneous noise. There’s also a choice of wings, which sit behind the earbuds and help to support them, so you really can mould them to the particular shape of your head.

Personalisation is a big part of owning the Denon PerL and PerL Pro earbuds (the Pro models offer spatial audio and lossless codec support, but all PerL earbuds come with 10mm triple-layer drivers and a circular design that exposes a flat, touch-sensitive surface). Many earbuds allow you to tap them to pause music or take calls, but few do it with the levels of customisation offered by Denon. From within the accompanying app, it’s possible to assign functions such as switching active noise cancelling between its various modes or skipping to the next track, to various combinations of taps. Or you can keep things super simple and have a single tap to pause. It’s up to you.

That active noise cancellation is the result of a lot of tech packed into each small earbud. There are four microphones in each bud, plus bone conduction tech too, meaning they can not only filter out the ambient noise so you can hear your music more clearly, but also make your voice clearer when you’re making a call. There’s also a ‘Social’ transparency mode that will let all the noise back in again, when you need to be more aware of your surroundings. If you’re wearing them in the gym, you’ll appreciate the sweat resistance, which translates as IPX4 weather resistance if you’re wearing them in the great outdoors.

Sounding great

And once you’ve got the PerL earbuds dialled in for your ears, you can experience Denon’s vivid and spacious signature sound in all its glory. Their Immersion Mode allows you to adjust the bass level depending on the genre of music you’re into right now, while the large dynamic drivers make sure you don’t miss anything. Vocals have a clarity you might not have heard before, which carries through to the spoken word in things like audiobooks and podcasts. Denon’s engineers have tuned the buds so they sound great even before you start adjusting them to your ears, and this process only makes them sound better.

The Denon PerL Pro earbuds are a step up from the standard PerL set. They add in lossless and spatial codec support, and increase the buds’ battery life to eight hours on a charge, or a whopping extra 24 hours if you use the charging case. The standard set are no slouches in this department, clocking up six hours of use from a charge and 18 from the case. There are two colours available, black and white, and Bluetooth quick switching allows you to use them with multiple devices.

Denon’s PerL and PerL Pro earbuds look great on paper, with the kind of features you’d expect from earbuds of this pedigree. They are amazingly customisable, allowing you to make a perfect fit for your ears from both the buds themselves and the way you interact with them to the music they play.

 The eureka moment, however, comes when you actually try them for yourself, and realise just how excellent music played sounds when customised for you through Denon earbuds. They’re available from either Richer Sounds or Denon direct.