cooperpwc
Headphoneus Supremus
- Joined
- Nov 20, 2006
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Funny timing. I'm at the Hong Kong airport and just heard these. They're not terrible. Boomy bass. Not especially clean. They certainly aren't great.
Funny timing. I'm at the Hong Kong airport and just heard these. They're not terrible. Boomy bass. Not especially clean. They certainly aren't great.
I got a set to evaluate, see if we might want to sell them as an HT accessory. I'm writing up a full review for the blog, but the short story is, SQ is decent, noise canceling is decent, touch control is cool, comfort is ok but can get hot, phone calls are adequate, the app is cool, but aside from using a little EQ to tame the bass, I don't find the perspective controls useful, though kind of fun to play with.
On the sound: I was initially disappointed with the sound quality. Nice deeply extended bass, if somewhat exaggerated, but the mids and highs were edgy, blurry, and just plain distorted. Then I found the problem was highly dependent on source quality. Perhaps because bluetooth uses a form of compression, compressed files are beat up a bit more probably because they get hit twice, once in their initial compression, again through bluetooth. FLAC and Apple Lossless files sounded pristine, and the highs cleared up, distortion gone, impact is where it should be. Plugging in a cord and shutting down bluetooth also made an improvement when playing .mp3 or .AAC files. You have to still use the on-board active electronics with the cord, though, but that's nice because noise cancellation still works. I doubt they were intended to be used as passive phones, as powering them off and using the cord is really bad.
Battery life is not as stated, I got about 4 hours initially, but that's with a lot of playing around with the DSP. Supposedly the battery life is better with all the active processing off, and using only the amp and touch control. You should use their charger as the battery takes a bit of current to charge, and some little USB adapters won't do it.
Pairing was less than stellar, and if I walked out of range from the iPhone and dropped the connection, returning to the iPhone didn't re-pair them, it took manual action. The initial pairing was low-quality bluetooth, like phone quality, then they renegotiated and paired up in full quality stereo, and have been since.
Overall I really did like them. They're fun to use, sound actually pretty good when you feed them good sources, and when I think of the sound quality I'm getting and they're bluetooth, it's just plain amazing. They're kind of addictive! I'd be using them almost every day...if I could get them off my son's head!
Not sure about us selling them to clients, though. Might be a bit too high of a support issue, not because of failures, but because of hand-holding during customer initiation. I have a call in to Parrot for a heart-to-heart about some of the issues. I'll post the results if any.