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Audio: (Wireless) Headphones and a review of the Koss "The Plug" earbuds
Thu, 02 Jun 2005

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I've been into podcasts of late (in my case, mostly RetroGamingRadio and 1SRC's Jeff Kirvin though iPodder and other search services list an enormous volume of available podcasts. The trick is how to get the audio signal to the brain, and that means headphones, so I've done some research and tried a few products out and thought I'd share my experience and hopefully insight.

Like most people I travel between two main locations - home ('home office') and the daytime office and sometimes even get some sleep in between. I've got a pretty good Creative Nomad device with lots of storage and the worlds worst user interface that I keep at work with most of my audio collection within it. (Work at home for awhile and you'll manage to rip your entire CD collection to mp3 files. I'm just debating ripping my 1980s tape collection for old times sake...) I've gotten into mobile audio not via the Zen, but through my PDA's, oddly enough. As Bill Gates famously said May 13th, "I don't think the success of the iPod can continue in the long term, however good Apple may be." -- the iPod boosted to grand proportion the portable mp3 phenomena, but I'm not so sure it'll stay as large as it is with cellphones becoming more and more popular. If PDA companies have been side-swiped, Apple better keep its eyes open!

Wireless headphones?

Anyway, being a technology nerd I looked for bluetooth ("BT") solutions half a year or more back -- surely wireless headphones must exist, and they do ... almost. A number of (but not many) products existed but after studying consumer reports and joe-blow opinion postings (the most reliable information around IMHO) I saw a lot of flack for bad audio reproduction and hissing, bad battery life, and bulky ergonomics with silly over-large radio antennas and all sorts of nastiness. With heavy heart I passed over these earlier devides. Most of us have cubicles or small offices so bluetooth headsets would be great but they just didn't materialize.... alas with the podcast fetish came rushing back the need for headphones.

A few new products have come out which seem very good; noted in a few magazines and online reviews are the HP iPaq bluetooth headphones, which are apparently very good. Eureka! says I, thinking I could find similar products for Palm OS devices .. but no.

I will secretly admit that I live on the Treo 650, but also usually carry my Dell Axim X50v as a media device .. for playing audio, and as a Potential Game Device. (I do not have time to play games at all ... maybe a few minutes once every 6 months! I do like the option being available if I'm suddenly stranded somewhere by international spies.) I thought perhaps the iPaq headset could be adapted to the Axim (bluetooth is bluetooth, right?) and it seems some folks have done so by copying a custom driver from the iPaq to their Axim and mucking with its protection a bit. Not too hard apparently, but I'm not really interested in pirating a driver, nor interested in laying down $99USD for a device not supported for my platform.

So while there are few stereo headphones for PDAs and cellphones, there does appear to be a small market in mono BT headsets for listening to calls. They tend to include a mic for doing the whole phone chatter circuit of course, and I didn't want mono for listening to music anyway.

By now I'm sure you're either bored or like me and curious as to why so few stereo BT headphones are available for any platform, and none for Palm OS. After a little research I suspect I've found the reason. Without detailing how bluetooth works, let me say that each BT device offers a number of BT "profiles" where each profile identifies a usage pattern the device offers. A cellphone might offer a wireless-modem profile so that other BT devices can use the phone as a modem for dialup networking, for instance. The BT specification long ago had a "mono headset" profile and thus those devices do exist (such as the common Jabra BT headset that makes you look like Britney Spears), but it would appear that only BT specification 1.2 and later include the stereo headset profile definition, and thus only BT 1.2 and later devices may include support for that profile.

Well well well, if you look at the latest Palm OS devices bluetooth specification, you'll find they're BT 1.1 devices, and further still you'll find out that so far, BT 1.2 or 2.0 isn't licensed except for Palm OS 6 (Cobalt) which is currently vapourware. Doh! Pocket PC has BT 1.2 spec in the more recent devices, but I think the average consumer is still BT 1.1 there as well, so I believe this explains why theres so few products available -- theres no market to sustain them yet.

Learning this, I decided my search for bluetooth headphones was over. And they're too pricey anyway.

Wired headphones

I keep a good pair of Sennheiser phones at work. Not the highest price by any reach, but very very good in my opinion -- the sound reproduction is very good to my untrained ear, and the audio stays in the phones and doesn't leak into the environment. A foot away you can barely hear any audio at all, which I'm sure my cubemates appreciate. Anyway, these don't go on the road.. they stay at my desk, and I'd feel weird walking around outside with a pair of over-the-head-phones on anyway... it'd be like the archtypal 80's silver-gettoblaster guy.

So back to earbuds. I rifled through my gadget collection packaging and tried out the earbuds that came with the Tapwave Zodiac, and the pair that came with the Treo 650, and the pair that came with the Nomad, and the pair that came with a tiny tiny radio from 5 or 8 years ago (a radio the size of a lighter!) They varied in reproduction quality, but were all surprisingly good (minus bass response of course, like most earbuds)... but after 20mins or so I'd always get an earache - a really annoying one both in the ear canal and the little pointy bit that covers the canal on the outside of the ear. So earbuds seemed out .. perhaps my ears would become accustomed to that and the pain would depart, but one of my stubborn attributes is that I dislike acquiring a taste for something my body rejects outright (which is why I dislike coffee -- if it tastes so bad the first cup then theres just no need to acquire the taste, when it doesn't do you any good anyway. And no, I'm not immature, thank you very much ;) So I said no to earbuds.

I am a picky person, but this was getting silly .. no wireless options, and wired options were either big headphones, or silly silver shiny ones made for small humans, or earbuds that made my ear hurt when plugged into the ear itself. Great.

Koss -- The Plug

I saw some good (and some really bad!) reviews of The Plug and got a little curious. Apparently a few years ago a company came up with the intrusive idea of not only plugging the earbud into your ear hole, but actually sliding it a little up inside the hole into the canal itself. This has to be uncomfortable says I, and they do look nasty when you see pictures of these guys .. like a small thimble or ear-torpedo. Yike! Years ago when looking for earphones, I passed on these due to those assumptions, and the very high price as they were more targetting audiophiles or those ripe with cash to be parted with. I'm a little more conservative until you get to PDA's or retro..

Enter The Plug which are all over town and pretty inexpensive at $25CDN.. but they still look a little weird to be plugging directly into my eardrum. I did some reading about the technology, and that didn't ease my concerns. These are like traditional earbuds, except with a small tube sticking out of the body of the device instead of a flat little speaker. Then theres a soft rubber cone with a hole in it, so that it fits over the tube. The cone is soft so that it should conform to the shape of the ear, and protect you from being scratched and avoid vibration annoyance etc. Well and good, but the idea of putting a tube (even if only a centimeter long) into my ear canal seemed to beg early deafness :)

They do seem a little intrusive, but by the same token they don't pop out as much as I'd think; normal earbuds fall out of my ears all the time, perhaps because they don't sit so well in my ear. Maybe this is what causes my ear pain, or perhaps they're just slightly too large ... who knows? I've asked and a lot of people suffer a similar fate..

I had no such discomfort with these guys. I am very much surprised, though its only been a couple of days since I picked these up. The sound reproduction isn't really good (too tinny, and not a lot of bass, despite what reviewers are saying. My Sennheisers sound excellent, truly, while these guys pale by comparison. Course, the Senn's aren't mobile so thats that!)

I did consider returning these as I've got the option for another few weeks, but so far they've proven alright. There are many other in-canal options, but I'm not one to go and return something and try another and cycle through everything at the shop, so I'll give these another week or two before making my final choice, but I think they're keepers despite the poor audio quality.

They do not include a case, either. I'm using a tin candy container, which works perfectly.

Summary:

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