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Fancy a mile-high earjob? We've had five!
Our correspondent gives five noise-cancelling headphones a flight test
Beats Studio Wireless
Apple's finest come in a lovely little ovoid capsule that, at 12x18x9cm is too deep to sit inside seat-back storage unless you're at the nice end of a plane. The cans ship with two cables, one for audio and one for USB charging. The former's colour matches the headphones, which come in different hues. There's no airline adapter in the package.
The capsule doesn't offer a place to store the cables, so things quickly get a bit messy and the audio cable didn't like the treatment, requiring some tweaking to deliver reliable signal to the right earphone. I also found myself worrying that the headphones' hinges may set with a satisfying click but don't look robust enough to survive many months of hard use.
Uniquely among the five models I tested, the Beats produced aural artefacts. When my head nestled deep into a folded-in economy class headrest, the headphones started to produce pulses of sound as they tried to cope with the echoes and bounces in that odd little cleft. When I pulled my head out again, the pulses stopped.
I'm not an inflight-neck-collar-wearer, so the chance that I might droop while sleeping and find myself woken by artefacts was perturbing.
The Beats were also the last product I tested, so I was unable to replicate the exact circumstances that caused the artefacts. I did, however, cup my hand around all of the other models tested in the hope of reproducing the sounds I heard. I could not do so, even with the Beats.
Battery life, provided by a USB-rechargeable, built-in battery, was fine. The makers claim 12-hours and I got through very lengthy flights without any battery hassles. But the Beats share the same problem as every other USB-powered model, namely that carrying an extra cable around is inconvenient. More so than hunting batteries? I'll get to that later.
Noise-cancellation is an afterthought for Beats, so turning it on wasn't easy as it required a long press of a small button.
Comfort was good: the oval earpieces and supple material are pleasantly soft, didn't sweat and the headphones didn't pinch my head.
Sound was pleasant, with warm lower frequencies on the ground and instant cut-out of domestic humming. In the air, the headphones didn't require cranking up to high volumes.
Beats' effort are the second most expensive set I reviewed, but don't obviously out-perform its rivals. It's hard to say if they should as Beats' documentation doesn't include claimed db reductions.
Apple, hey. You get what you pay for. Which in this case is very pretty headphones that will turn heads and do well on the ground, but aren't at home in the air.
More info Beats
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