Introduction

Most of you probably know Zalman for their aftermarket CPU coolers and case fans. Not long ago Zalman started to produce headphones which featured a pretty radical design and were aimed at gamers due to the fact that they supported true 5.1 surround sound through 8 individual speakers inside the cups.

The headphone I will be taking a look at today was first displayed at Computex 2007. It is called the "Zalman ZM-DS4F" and represent Zalman's first approach on how to make an ultra transportable headset. With the ZM-DS4F Zalman has managed to fit two individual audio drives in each ear cup (one 40 mm PEI woofer and a 28 mm tweeter) into a small headset with ear cups that measure only 55 mm across!

This should enable the headphones to reproduce both high and low frequency tones without much distortion compared to other compact headphones.

The Package

The Zalman ZM-DS4F ships in a stand plastic and cardboard box. The headset is held in place by a plastic case inside the cardboard box. So the headset should arrive in perfect working condition at your location no matter how rough it gets handled by the shipping company. On the package you can read about how the headphones are built, right from which types of audio drives are used to how they are positioned within the ear cups. This is nice to give you a first impression what to expect. Inside the package you find a brief "User's manual" and of course the headphones.


On the side of the package you can read about the positioning of the audio drives within the ear cups. The setup is pretty ordinary where you have the tweet mounted in front of the main woofer. By mounting the drives this way you get a completely neutral sound scape. This is nice because it means that the sound will be entering your ear just like if you sat in the front row in a concert hall.

One of the things worth noting about the ZM-DS4F is that they can be folded to save space. This is especially neat if you need to store them in a backpack.


The specifications for this pair of headphones look nice considering their size. The frequency response is quite normal for a decent pair of headphones. On the front of the package you can see what uses Zalman recommends for these headphones.