Gadgetory

wireless headphones it's a super subjective topic to discuss particularly because you know there are a variety of headphones in the market right now that offer everything from you know basic functionalities like just being able to give you the freedom of being Wireless to headphones that have uber high in features for example this my friends is the Sennheiser PXE 550's and they're really geared towards travel so if you're someone who's looking to you know not compromise on things like sound quality design build and for most party if you're looking for a headset with noise canceling characteristics this might be appealing to you the problem is the price because it costs three hundred and fifty dollars that's expensive so let's find out if it's any good right after this optimize your desk space with the surahs new gram spectrum TTL keyboard with a compact steel frame and low-profile key caps removable cable and sweet illumination plus your choice of the source agile blue or red switches to satisfy those fingers sieved gram spectrum TTL keywords for you links below so guys tech tober has been crazy and I know a lot of you guys know that well more than I do because I've been traveling a lot lately for launch events here and there and it's been quite a tiring process but I'm glad to be home safe and sound in my normal work space so I can get back to work but over the course of that time I've actually been using the PXA 550 s not just for listening to music and watching movies on the plane with the noise canceling feature on I'll get to that later but also I've used this to edit my videos on the go so this is gonna be more of a real-world users perspective on living with the PFC 550 s so why don't we get started first up design and build and these get a solid 10 out of 10 in my books it's robust very flexible and they've used a good combination of hard plastic materials and a solid metal frame not to mention I'm not experienced any creaks and that's to be expected considering the price the ear cuffs featured this matte silicon like finished has softer to the touch although I'm worried about how long it would stay that way over long-term use but I would gladly take this material surface over any glossy plastic finishes any time of the day I should also mention that the clamping force was a bit too strong for my taste but that's because I have a larger head the leather earpads provided Sealand a nice snug fit plus I never found myself sweating while wearing them so that's nice now you might find this to be a little bit gross but hear me out for a second if I'm wearing these or if I'm resting these around my neck and if I go out to grab a cup of coffee or something like that if I'm maneuvering my head around it actually picks up the ear cups actually grab onto my period hair and it kind of hurts a lot so you know if you're someone like me who was actually walking a beard and if you're thinking of picking the PXE 550's certainly keep that in mind because you're not gonna like those beard hairs just getting stuck here and they're now out of the box you do get this nice carrying case but I did wish if it included a loop so that I could tag it along with my backpack but rest aside you do get an airplane adapter a micro USB to USB cable to charge the headphones a 2.5 limiter to 3.5 mi cable and Inc quarter inch adapter the setup process is actually pretty straightforward all you have to do is just twist the ear cups and then it'll automatically turn on the headset now Sennheiser has built a voice assistant into the headset so it actually prompts you on certain things like you know powering on powering off and if you have multiple devices connected to the headset it'll say things like phone one connected phone two connected phone three connected again it's pretty nice it's I think it's a good guide when it comes to giving you an idea on what's happening but sometimes it gets really annoying especially when you get to like a 20% battery level it says battery down recharge me and it keeps continuing it'll it'll start continuing to say that after like 10 or 15 minutes and it's constant now you do have the option to turn off voice prompts through sanitizers cap to an app which is a dedicated app for both the Android or the iOS store the problem is that if you just have this headset pair to a laptop you actually won't have the ability to turn on the voice prompt feature because it's not directly feeding into the settings of the headset it's more of a software pairing methodology I'm not sure why that's the case but again it's something to be noted my biggest annoyance with the PXE 550 s is the lack of a physical on-off switch this whole twist to you know turn on the headset is a complete it's a complete failure in my opinion because for instance you know if I'm listening to music on on the go and if I'm if I take them off and if I rest him beside my notebook or something and if I go out for a coffee or drive ever come back I probably lost like 5% or 10% of the battery with this headset and that's that's pretty odd because it doesn't have a you know smart feature where it puts the headphone to sleep because right now if I hold it this way which is probably the most obvious way to store your headset it's still on guys this is still on it's still draining battery so you have to physically fold a headset or twist it to turn off again that's an extra step and then folder that way store it in your case and you can conserve battery that way because this is off this is the off position now pairing on your hand is by far the fastest experience with the PSE 550's so if your smartphone features NFC you just have to tap your phone on the left side of the ear cup and a little complete that painting process immediately and automatically it's very fast and convenient or you could use a standard Bluetooth printer pairing procedure if your phone doesn't have NFC and now let's discuss the touch pad located on the right side of the ear cup so as usual you get the normal just like swiping up and down to adjust the volume swiping back and forth to skip between tracks you also have the option to tap to answer phone call or tap again to hang up there are a lot of gestures with this touchpad and it's something that you sort of have to memorize and it's something that you really feel like you have to take advantage of because as far as I'm concerned you know I've only used things like volume up and down and skip track scan for and probably hang up or answer phone calls and that's about it I haven't used the other gazillion features that Sennheiser has built inside this time finishing touch functionality but again my biggest concern though was how sensitive it was because for example if I'm handling this headphone right now and if I accidentally just tap it it'll start playing music right away check it out like I have to physically be very careful with this touch pad because it's super sensitive I really wish if they give us the option to disable the sensitivity or at least took this tune the sensitivity within the app but that's not the case it's there you have to live with it now when it comes to physical buttons there is the noise guard switch then switches between adaptive and full noise guard mode that actually completely silent isolates the background noise you also have an effect mode button that cycles between different effects or cues that have custom built or pre-built inside this or within this headset one of my favorite features of the PXA 550 s is the smart pause feature that essentially pauses and music when you automatically take the headphones off of you and then it resumes the music when you put them back on it's worked pretty much consistently all the time across the board it hasn't failed on me so far so that's pretty awesome but if you don't want to do that especially want to have a conversation with someone or if if someone's approaching you to have a conversation with you Sennheiser is actually implemented something called talk through which is a pretty cool feature that essentially takes advantage of the two microphones that are on the outside of the headphones so when you quickly double tap on the touch pad it actually activates that microphone and it starts picking up the ambient noise and of course it'll start emphasizing on the acoustic performance or the acoustic levels of that person who's trying to have that conversation with you so you don't have to physically remove the headset you can just double tap and start having that conversation which is pretty cool so how many express my concerns with a PXE 550's how do they actually sound in person well in one word phenomenal I left the effect mode to its default setting as I mentioned earlier and there's fantastic definition in the higher frequencies the bass is rich and deep when you need it it's also really tight most importantly if your phone supports aptX playback it sounds even better especially because you know I really enjoyed my time listening to my collection of flack files in my pixel 3 and this one supports aptX so listening to that on the PMC 550's was just phenomenal it's really immersive again the bass it's it's again super nice its crisp the frequencies in the high range of the mid-range are still very clear and well-defined great sound stage you really won't be disappointed with the sound quality on the PXE 550 s because they're really that good now is the noise cancelling feature any good well the short answer is yes and I'll get to that a little bit but I just want to give you a quick synopsis on how this technology works so there are four microphones in total on this headset so there are two on the outside and two on the inside the two on the outside actually filters out the high frequencies and the two only inside filters out the lower frequencies so when you combine them together it actually gives you good isolation of the surrounding environment and it works really well especially when you're in an airplane it does a good job sort of isolating and filtering out the jet noise so you can actually focus a lot on the content that you're listening to or watching and for the most part it's it's less minimal or I guess it's less beneficial if you're in a quiet space for example you know in my office space I don't really have to turn on noise canceling because it's pretty quiet and you're really not going to be gaining anything out of it in noisy environments it certainly does a really good job but I do want to point out that if you don't have any music or any content playing in the background it feels like you're in a vacuum space and it's very hard to describe that because after using them for quite some time especially when you're on a flight and when you're ascending and descending it feels like one of your ears need to pop after that trip because it again it's just that extra feeling that you get and it goes away after a few hours but again I just wanted to bring that up but overall as someone who's tried noise cancelling headphones for the first time this is certainly life changing I certainly cannot leave my house without these because you know if I'm traveling these are certainly going to come with me now another factor to discuss is battery life and I'm happy to report that it has been excellent on the PXA 550 s I was easily able to get well over 20 hours of use with this guy and of course I've taken it to long trips with me to Beijing and I didn't run into any instances where I had to constantly plug in my headphones and one last thing that I want to quickly talk about is the microphone quality so in quieter environments it's very well done it actually picks up the voice pretty clearly but if you're in a chaotic environment of example if you're you know walking through the streets where it's really noisy there's absolutely zero noise cancellation so the person on the other end will definitely have a difficult time hearing you for our Canadian audience memory express is a place to go for home business and gaming electronics you can try before you buy especially great for peripherals by visiting one of their stores in Winnipeg Calgary or Greater Vancouver and more they do custom PCs and will beat any Canadian price guarantee so in conclusion the PXE 550 s from Sennheiser are by far the smartest headphones that have ever encountered in my life trust me I've encountered gaming headsets I've encountered wireless gaming headsets as well but this my friends is taking things to a whole new level and it has its own downsides so it sounds great it's got a great design and build quality I actually like the way how it looks and Sennheiser has nailed all the basic departments are the basic bullet points efficient looking for in a headset in the first place it's the other features that come along with this headset that's just a little bit overwhelming so the touchpad is way too sensitive it's got the Gazoo leaders that you still have to get used to and you have to sort of learn at a doctor words the other thing is of course the lack of a physical on-off switch because the fact that you have to turn them on right now it's on and you factor you have to twist to hear cuts to turn it off is just absolutely it's not practical so from a usability standpoint I just I just can't use the PXE 550's because they've got its own quirks now if you feel like you're gonna be taking advantage of everything all the features like gesture controls and you don't actually mind the on/off switch the $350 price tag might be justifiable to you but if you're someone who's just looking for a basic good pair of headphones that sound great with good noise cancelling characteristics and you don't really care about gestures and all that kind of stuff I'm running out of words now I can't really recommend the pxp 550 s because there could be better options out there before I wrap things up I just do want to quickly bring up something for our Canadian followers here on YouTube Santa has actually opened up a main headquarters here in Montreal Quebec and essentially you know they were kind enough to invite us over there to just take a quick tour of what they have and what's cool is that if you have a Sennheiser product and if it has issues the RMA process is actually going to be a lot more simpler and easier especially if you live in Canada so you can just ship it directly to Montreal if you live locally you can bring it to the office and they'll actually inspect it and find out what's wrong it was really cool just checking out the facility in the testing center to see what tools they used to troubleshoot and figure things out it was really quite an exhausting experience so it's good news for Canadians who are who owned Sennheiser products but that's about it guys I meet with Harbor Canucks thank you so much for watching make sure to check out some relevant content over here subscribe to our new boot sequence channel for the latest tech news and rumors I'm signing off and I'll see you guys in the next one you