I’ve needed to upgrade some audio equipment; my trusty old Sony MDR-CD380 headphones lasted for ages, but have been cutting out in the right ear and the cable’s connection feels a bit flimsy now. I also needed a proper microphone to replace the ancient old webcam that I’d still been using as a “mic” long after its video drivers had stopped working with modern OSes.
I normally anguish for ages over researching models, trying to find the perfect one, but I cut that research short this time. A lot of the “best” gear is out-of-stock pretty much everywhere, and I don’t want to rely on ordering from Amazon too much. Instead, I figured I’d look at what was in-stock in stores in town, and try and get something good and actually locally available. So, after a bit of stock-checking and some lighter research, I finally left my neighbourhood for the first time in this pandemic and headed to a Best Buy.
For the microphone, I picked up a Blue Yeti Nano. Not the best mic ever, but readily available and perfectly adequate for my needs. From some quick tests, it already sounds waaaay better than that old webcam I’d been using. Clearer and crisper, and almost no background hiss, which had been awful with the webcam. It doesn’t have any of the advanced pickup patterns, just cardioid and omnidirectional, but it’s highly unlikely that’ll ever matter to me. It’s not like I’m doing interviews in noisy settings, where you’d really want the “bidirectional” pattern, for example.
For the headphones, I wound up picking up the Sennheiser HD 450BT. I wasn’t really originally considering Bluetooth headphones, since I didn’t want to worry about pairing, battery lifetime, etc., but this model appealed to me as the best of both worlds, as we’ll see in a bit.
I am actually a bit disappointed with the Bluetooth aspect of it. It mostly works…except that there’s a tiny bit of lag on the audio. Not really noticeable most of the time, except when you’re watching someone on Youtube and you can definitely notice a bit of desync between their mouth and what you’re hearing. I suspect my particular really-old Mac hardware/OS combination doesn’t support the low-latency Bluetooth mode, but it’s hard to verify. That wasn’t all, though. If I paused audio for a while, it would spontaneously disconnect the headphones, requiring me to manually reconnect them in the Bluetooth menu before resuming playback, which is really annoying. Playback also becomes really choppy when the laptop gets memory and/or CPU-starved, which happens fairly easily with Chrome being a huge memory hog. None of these are really the fault of the headphones themselves, it’s more the environment I’m trying to use them in, so I don’t think any other model would have done any better.
But, fortunately, I’m not entirely reliant on Bluetooth. The other major feature of these headphones is that you can still attach an audio cable and use them in a wired mode, not needing Bluetooth at all. They still sound just as good, and don’t even consume any battery power in this mode, so I’ll probably just use them this way with the laptop and desktop. I’ll leave the Bluetooth mode for use with my phone and TV, which should work far more reliably.
Speaking of my phone though, the other disappointment is that some of the features of the headphones like equalizer settings can be managed via a mobile app…which requires a newer version of iOS than I have. I could upgrade, but I’ve been reluctant to because that would break all the 32-bit iOS games I have. Dangit. I’ll probably have to upgrade at some point, but I don’t think this will be the tipping point just yet; the headphones still work fine without the app.
These headphones also have active noise cancellation, but I haven’t really had a chance to test it yet. Just sitting around at home, it’s hard to tell whether it’s even turned on or not.
So, overall I’m pretty happy with them so far. The Bluetooth problems aren’t really their fault and aren’t fatal, they sound pretty good, and they’ve been comfortable enough (not quite as comfy as the old Sonys, but those were much bigger cups).