(Not) Tangled Up In Blue(tooth)*

Now that I'm a member of the iPod Army, I finally had the chance earlier today to test-drive a set of Bluetooth-based Wireless Headphones for iPod that Logitech shipped me for review a while back. I was specifically prompted into action by an RSS feed I received this morning, indicating that they were now selling for as low as $29.95 (after rebate, a significant discount from their original $150 MSRP). So I charged them up, paired them up, stuck them on my head and, after using them around my home office for a while, took them with me for the daily lunchtime walk-the-dogs routine.

I was pleasantly surprised with the results. They're not length-adjustable, so the strap that is supposed to go around the back of your head stuck an inch or so beyond mine (rumours to the contrary, I'm actually not very big-headed). And I tend to prefer either 'traditional' headphones that wrap around the top of your head (admittedly precluding the simultaneously wearing of a baseball cap or other hat) or those that stick inside your ear. But they were lightweight, pretty comfortable, and not near as bulbous as the wireless headphones I usually have on my head during working hours.

Fashion and comfort, however, weren't my primary motivations for evaluating the Wireless Headphones for iPod. I wanted to test out the dual-channel audio enabled by the v1.2 Bluetooth specification-supportive silicon inside the headphones and matching iPod-mounted transmitter. Pairing the two was as simple as pressing a button on each and waiting for their LEDs to turn from red to blue. And, in spite of my spectrum-crowded home office environment, the adaptive frequency hopping did its job well; neither the microwave oven or any of the four 802.11g access points, nor for that matter any 2.4 GHz-corrupting device in my neighborhood, caused the sound to glitch even once.

The Bluetooth circuitry seems to auto-detect and respond to the presence or absence of an incoming signal, because the transmitter turned off a short time after my iPod mini went to sleep, followed shortly thereafter by the headphones themselves. Logitech's 30 foot broadcast claims seem a bit overenthusiastic from my particular testing perspective, but a spectrum-friendlier environment might be more amenable to long-distance transmission. The most common listening environment, of course, combines an iPod on your hip and the headset atop your noggin, with only a few feet separating them, and Logitech's unit worked great in that configuration. I can't vouch for the validity of Logitech's 8-hour battery life claim; for feedback on that and other specifications I'd suggest you peruse the reviews by CNET and others.

A short TSR (tip, side and ring) extension cable included with the unit lets you tether the transmitter to any device with a 1/8" headphone jack (such as my iRiver H10, or an iPod nano or fifth-generation iPod 'video'), not just to an older iPod with the secondary connector atop it (first-through-fourth generation iPods, iPod minis, and iPod photos). Logitech also sells a more generic Bluetooth headset if you'd prefer to dispense with the TSR adapter. Conversely, if your iPod has that secondary connector, you can use controls build into the headset to start, pause, and skip forwards and backwards through a playlist.

The headset's built-in volume controls, however, don't actually control the iPod's volume; instead they adjust the headphones' input gain setting. And speaking of volume, how did the Wireless Headphones for iPod sound? They certainly weren't reference-quality; the bass was a bit boomy, and the treble a bit subdued. And they didn't have the ambient noise immunity of, say, my in-ear Etymotics. But when you're listening to lossy-compressed audio in a high ambient noise setting, as is the case for many of us, much of the time, headphone transducer quality is only one of several factors that attenuates and otherwise distorts (or if you prefer, transforms) the original audio characteristics. And let's face it, Jerry's voice never had much high end, anyway.

Bottom line; the quality was acceptable, as was the battery life from my limited thus-far testing, and the absence of an iPod-to-headphones tether was emancipating. Good job, Logitech, along with whoever your silicon supplier is (no, I didn't tear them apart); your product exceeded my expectations, and as a result you've boosted my bigger-picture opinion of Bluetooth.

*Anyone out there a fellow Bob Dylan fan?