It's That Time

Arguably it’s the beginning of the holiday season and, for many, that also means gifts. Some people buy presents all year round but most of the folks I know start shopping around this time of year. Me, I just received an early Christmas present. Now, I know I usually go on and on about Bluetooth ear buds, particularly open ear buds but there are occasions when I reach for a good set of “cans” (an often used colloquial term for over the ear headphones). I have a favorite and, since I’m often asked what my favorites are and why, I’ll deal with that this time.

My Criteria

I’ve written about my criteria for the “perfect” ear buds and my idea of the perfect headphones isn’t much different albeit with a few additions that are specific to cans. I’d like them to be able to connect to multiple devices at once (often known as multipoint capable). I want them to have a long battery life. i would like physical buttons. They should have a recent Bluetooth version (preferably 5.3 or 5.4). Ideally they would support multiple codecs (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codec for definitions if you missed or can’t find my article which discusses codecs). I really would like them to provide some sort of transparency mode whereby I can hear things going on around me. They should make my voice clearly heard on phone and zoom calls while rejecting other sounds. And they should be capable of low latency (often by way of support for the aptX Low Latency codec). I’ve explained low latency and the aptX Low Latency codec before but, briefly, latency is the delay between when the sound leaves a source like your TV and makes it out of a speaker like your headphones. The aptX Low Latency codec is specially built to reduce that delay so when you see someone’s mouth move on your TV your hear their words in sync with their mouth.

Additional criteria specific to headphones is that they provide truly exceptional sound, they provide really good isolation by way of active noise cancellation (i.e. the headphones emit sounds which cancel out external sounds), and they can be worn for many hours at a time without hurting my head.

All of that typically calls for something well out of the less than $200 range. Indeed, out of the $200 and $300 range. Which makes it perfect for a special gift this holiday season!

My criteria is usually different from a reviewer. They tend to devalue other voice rejection on calls in favor of passive or active noise isolation, passive isolation being the fact that they cover your ears.. Me, I prefer to have ONE set of cans that I can use in pretty much any situation, much like my preference for open ear buds. Because cans are so much larger than ear buds they have more room for electronics and battery. Consequently they can squeeze more functions into cans including removing most of the need for an external boom microphone. That doesn’t mean you can’t find cans with a boom mic but they are often built primarily for gaming and deemphasizing a lot of the other features that I want.

My preferred headphones

I did quite a bit of looking around and comparing various higher end cans (I can’t call them “high end” because audiophile headphones can easily cost over $1,000). Because of my requirements I was happy to look at a selection of headphones that cost between $300 and $500 and I narrowed it down to 3: Sony WH1000XM5 (Amazon link https://a.co/d/1hgxUik), Sennheiser Momentum 4 (Amazon link https://a.co/d/hAxn0Ay), and Bose QuietComfort Ultra (Amazon link https://a.co/d/aPrC4ng). The Bose are the most expensive costing $429 on Amazon not on sale. The Sony are the next most expensive at $399 not on sale, and the Sennheiser are the least expensive at $349. They’re all on sale at Amazon for their Black Friday week and are also undoubtedly on sale at other stores.

Well, my choice and the ones I got as a present were the Bose. It satisfies all of my criteria and includes a feature that I really like but wasn’t on my list of requirements: I can keep its version of transparent mode on almost all the time so I can hear the sounds around me. I recently used it on a Zoom call and not only could the others on the call not hear my music or conversations around me but the transparency mode continued to work so I could hear the music coming from my nearby speakers! The controls on the headphones are not overly complicated - 2 buttons (power on/off and change from noise cancellation to transparency mode to no enhancement at all) and a volume slider. Their app gives you the ability to change equalization (bass, treble, etc), and set the only changeable option for the controls on the cans - long press on the volume slider. There are other options but, really, I didn’t find the need to change anything. There’s none of this swiping or tapping on the ear cup which some cans use and I find annoying because I invariably tap or swipe when I don’t mean to. The physical buttons are well placed along the bottom edge of one of the ear cups. They don’t get in the way but I can easily find them if I need them.

Lower cost options

I’ve recently written about my new favorite lower cost open ear buds so I’ll just briefly describe them and put a link to their Amazon pages here.

I also use the Lingo headset (https://a.co/d/dBW0xRC) for Zoom meetings because it has a boom microphone so it can better focus on just my voice and not any surrounding noise or discussions. And it can easily do double duty for listening to music because of the size of its speakers. It has really good battery life, on the order of 10 hours and it charges with a standard USB C cable. It’s from Avantalk which is a spinoff from Avantree, a company that I’ve purchased from many times in the past. Right now they’re selling for just under $50

The V20i (https://a.co/d/f1ntFrx) is from Soundcore, another company that I’ve bought from many times in the past. They provide about 8 hours of battery life and their case provides another 25-30 hours of charge. They use the absolute most recent version of Bluetooth (5.4) and have an app that provides the ability to tune the sound and you can adjust how they sit on your ears. They normally cost just under $50 but are available right now for around $30.

That’s all for this time

I hope I’ve given you some ideas for gifts for this holiday season and my personal favorite Bluetooth headphone and ear buds. Don't hesitate to write to me if you have questions!

As always, my intent is to help you understand the basics and equip you to search for more detailed information.

Please feel free to email me with questions, comments, suggestions, requests for future columns, to sign up for my newsletter, or whatever at [email protected] or just drop me a quick note and say HI!

If you like, you can read my most recent newsletter in the Hillsboro Times Gazette at https://go.ttot.link/TG-Column - I should have that link updated shortly after this edition of the newsletter appears in the online version of the newspaper.