Crutchfield

For more than thirty years, Crutchfield has been the destination of choice for car audio enthusiasts. It is the world’s leading online retailer of car audio. Crutchfield stocks the best products available and offer them at very competitive prices. Its service department is a wealth of practical advice. It has also become one of the leading retailers of top quality home video, offering an enormous selection from Pioneer, Panasonic, Sony, Samsung, Sharp, and many others. Crutchfield offers a wide selection of home and portable audio products, including headphones from Sony, Bose, Shure, and Sennheiser. The selection from these four reputable headphone manufacturers is limited and leans toward the more affordable models in the respective catalogs. Top of the line models from Sennheiser were not offered at all. If you are looking for value-priced quality headphones, Crutchfield is a good place to shop.

The website is very well organized and set-up. Categories are clearly defined and broken-down making it easy to locate specific products. It took just three clicks to locate the Bose QuietComfort3™ noise cancelling headphones that we were looking for. This ease of use proved to be consistent across all of the various categories and brands. We tried locating specific products using only the model name/number and the correct product was the first product listing each time. Crutchfield offers ‘free shipping’ on select portable electronics and headphones, but not everything. Your order must exceed $249 to receive free shipping, which explains why the expensive headphones from Bose came with free shipping, while less expensive models from Sennheiser did not. Crutchfield also offers free return shipping and does not charge the ridiculous restocking fee that bothers so many online shoppers. The site does offer ‘Live Help’, which we tested to gauge response times and quality of information.

Our experience shopping online was generally positive. We were disappointed to discover that many popular, top quality headphones from Sennheiser were not even offered. Crutchfield seems to have ample stock of the inexpensive models, however. One area where we were impressed was in the ‘Live Advice’. Our question was answered correctly, within two minutes. While we would have liked to see a greater selection of brands and some better models from the available manufacturers, Crutchfield has earned the right to call itself one of the best online retailers and we highly recommend it if you are looking for a reliable and safe place to shop for value-priced headphones.