Gallery: The Best of CES 2012

There are always tons of headphones at CES. So why'd we pick out these wireless ones from Parrot, a company known for fun flying drones rather than audio equipment? A few reasons: Designed by Philippe Starck, a well-known industrial designer, the headphones look awesome, all black leather and curved silver metal. The way you use them is really, really cool: they have controls built in, but not in any boring way like an inline remote or (and here we utter a bad-design shudder) some play/pause/forward/back buttons on the outside of the ear cups. Instead, it uses a proximity sensor to figure out when you're wearing and when you've taken the headphones off, and it pauses automatically when you remove them.

To change the volume, you gently stroke the ear cups up and down, and to go to the next or previous track, you stroke left and right. (You can see in this picture that our own John Mahoney got pretty into the stroking part of this.)

The ZIK has a bunch of other features too: it's got self-contained noise cancellation (Parrot says the batteries last about five hours with the battery-draining cancellation turned on), Bluetooth to connect, and even NFC, which to my knowledge has never been implanted into a pair of headphones before. And they're super comfortable. Audio nerds: we only tested them in the midst of a raucous western-themed press event, so we can't vouch for audio quality in any respectable way. They sounded pretty good but we can't comfortably say much more than that. They'll be available sometime this year for an undisclosed (but undoubtedly steep) price.