A minor but significant upgrade to a home studio staple, the Shure SRH840A are some of the better-looking affordable reference headphones around. They’re tonally flat enough for monitoring and enjoyable enough for casual or critical music listening – but the 3m cable means they’re not ideal for portable use.

Excellent workhorse headphones that will do the job for recording and monitoring in the studio.

Overall, the SRH840A Professional Studio Headphones from Shure offer a really great sound, but not without some limitations. The ideal person for these headphones would most likely be someone who’s entering into audio engineering and wants to get the most out of their money, which means a pair of headphones that can be good for mixing as well as casual listening rather than needing two pairs with two separate agendas.

For me, the SRH840A really scores points when playing guitar music. Here, they expose a lot of detail in the midrange. In addition, the ear cups provide good isolation, high wearing comfort and a modern look. The price-performance ratio of these headphones is good. As monitoring headphones for vocal and guitar recordings, they are ideally suited to provide musicians with the details of their performance. In the field of content creation, they can also be used to assess voice recordings. And last but not least, with their full-bodied sound profile, they also make a good pair of hi-fi headphones.