Today, I received a pair of Nokia's flagship bluetooth stereo BH-604 headphones to play with. I've never used stereo bluetooth headphones before and don't really expect it to sound anywhere near conventional wired headphones. And I was right. Anyway, let's look at it first.
The BH-604's appearance is very typical of a good quality pair of headphones except that it does without wires. Its size is, well, large. The silver parts are actually plastic that is textured to feel like aluminium. The "leather" parts are nice and cushy and make it one of most comfortable pair of headphones I've used, and I've used plenty in my lifetime.
The left can has no functioning buttons on it.
Everything is located on the right can.
Here you can find the call answer button, play/pause button.
Rewind/forward buttons.
And also the volume slider, charger port, microphone and multi-function LED.
The cans' range of movement is pretty big and ensure they fit you nicely.
There is also plenty of extension to make sure they fit the largest of heads.
Here are a few side by side pics with my full sized AKG K271 Studio headphones.
Pairing up is a simple affair. Press the big answer call button until the LED flashes a blue light, scan for new devices with your phone, enter the "0000" passkey, and you're done.
Now, to the main event. How does this thing sound?
The first thing that strikes you is the big sound. It sounds pretty similar in character to my Sony MDR-Z900.
The bass is pretty hyped up, but not in an unpleasant way. The big drivers ensure there's plenty of bass extension, making music sound big instead of sounding like someone pushed up the 100hz band up by 12db.
The mids and highs are pretty natural sounding, requiring no EQ to smoothen out any frequencies that are sticking out.
However after about 30 seconds, it dawns upon you that what you're listening to is obviously not full resolution. It's no fault of the headphones but rather, the inadequacies of the transfer protocol.
Sound quality is pretty grainy. Hi hats and crash cymbals tend to crack. High and forceful horn lines sound distorted. The fingernail contact of intimate acoustic guitar playing is mostly lost or mis-translated. Reverb tail ends get lost and hence misrepresenting the intended ambience. Lower frequency inadequacies aren't as obvious as our ears are more sensitive to higher frequencies. But they're there. Again, the key work here is "grainy".
I'm sure if you connect a wire to this pair of headphones, it would sound very good, as presented by it's overall tonality. It's just too bad the weak link is the bluetooth transfer protocol.
As the amplifiers are integrated into the headphones are not in any way dependent on the phone itself, you can get pretty big volumes out of this thing. Great for drowning out the world while travelling on a train or something. The big bass helps this impression too.
Battery life as claimed by Nokia: "Get up to 18 hours of talk time from less than 1.5 hours of charging. Listen to music longer with up to 19 hours of music time and up to 2 weeks standby." I don't see a reason to doubt their claims. So this thing should give you plenty of juice to last through some serious listening time.
Conversations with it's built-in microphone is very good. The other party has no problems hearing you and you get a nice big sound of your caller's voice piped into your ears. Press the nice big button to answer calls. Can't get simpler than that.
Music automatically pauses while you talk and automatically resumes after you're done. All done smoothly with the appropriate fades. Classy.
So what's my conclusion? If you can get past its form factor, it's probably one of the best sounding stereo bluetooth headphones you can buy. Telephony is a treat through it too. It's so comfortable you can wear it for hours on end. It feels reasonably well made and will probably take some abuse. Battery life is great. No wires make it really convenient to use while carrying a bag.
Personally, the bluetooth transfer protocol is still far away from achieving an acceptable standard of audio fidelity. I'd use it at home for unfussy listening. But it's not worth looking like a club DJ out in public for the sound quality.
Monday, November 26, 2007
Not for the image conscious: BH-604 bluetooth headphones...
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11 comments:
nice review, I was just looking for a BT stereo headset... ty!
some questions: can u use the headset with wires? can u use the headset while charging it? it charges with the classic Nokia ac3e 2 mm charger?
thnx
Thanks Cos. No you can't use wires with it. Yes you can use the headset while it's being charged and yes, it uses the N/E series 2mm charger.
Great review. Got it myself. Can't seem to get it connected to my imac (intel) though. Any suggestions?
I can agree with the others, great review.
I've had these headphones since November, and I must say, they aren't recommendable as substitute for regular "wired" headphones. I listen to a lot of heavy-metal with high-pitch tones, and the crackling drives me nuts!
The normal reason for buying big stereo headphones, is to get big crisp stereo sound. with Nokia's BH-604, nothing could be farther from the truth.
But as said in the review, that's what can be expected from bluetooth; I just didn't expect the grainy, crackling to be so violent.
Don't buy these, if your looking for what Nokia proclaims you can do: "hear your music as it was meant to be heard – in clear Hi-Fi sound". The bass may be fine, but they grainy quality totally ruins the experience.
Actually, bluetooth 2 offers enough bandwidth for hi-fi sound quality, the problem is with the audio codec. If the audio stream would be compressed with a lossess algorithm the sound quality would be equivalent to wired headphones (at least in theory). Until then I'll stick with my good ol' wired headphone. Nice review btw!
I totally disagree with John... Go buy this one...
There may be setbacks as opposed to high end cord headphones. However, the freedom of beeing cordless is amazing.
Can I ask, what is your lifetime using highend earphones on a mobile player?
And what volume can you pull from it before distortion? As mentioned above, the 604 is self amplified and provides amps to keep going for something like 18-19 hours...!!!
Go buy this one!
A friend of mine bought a pair of these bluetooth headphones, but he had some problems of reception and right now have problems because of magnetism. Buy Viagra Viagra
The silver parts are actually plastic
that is textured to feel like aluminium.
I have been looking for sites like this for a long time. Thank you!
Not all devices have the same blue tooth. The one in question here is A2DP. This allows the blue tooth connection to send 2 channels to a device. Of course the device also needs to meet these specs. Standard ear pierces do not have A2DP because no one anticipated a person wanting to listen with one ear. To my knowledge these is no phone that can send music to a regular headset. The phone itself would have to process the A2DP into HSP ( headset profile ) and then send it.
http://www.latestone.com/headsets
12 years since their release and I have a pair that are still going strong. I bought them used on eBay for USD$27 in 2011 and recently replaced the old peeling faux leather cushions with gel cushions which greatly improved their already strong bass and reduced outside noise. Despite their age and now old Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR support, they still work with most of my devices, except my Google Hub and Google Mini (Amazon Echo device work fine). I am actually surprised the battery still lasts several hours. The next thing that will need to be replaced is the faux leather head pad that is starting to peel a bit. I'll definitely keep these headphones going as long as I can. I have not yet seen any new headphones for sale that are equivalent at a decent price.
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