Bluetooth, noise cancelling and plenty of battery life
"Plantronics has packed an amazing feature set into the BackBeat Pro.
If you like your headphones wireless and noise cancelling, these are
hard to beat."
For
Pair with two devices
Fantastic 24 hour battery life
impressive sound and noise cancellation
Against
Pairing mode could be easier to initiate
No identification between paired devices
Slightly pricey
Plantronics may have started off as a mono headset company,
but over the past few years the company has been making some pretty good
moves into the stereo category, leveraging their expertise in Bluetooth
to deliver some solid wireless earphones, like the BackBeat Fit. The
company has now turned to the premium headphone market. The BackBeat
Pro combines Plantronics' Bluetooth stereo smarts with noise
cancellation, twin device pairing and a fairly massive battery life to
create a compelling headphone offering. Weighing in at
340 grams, the headphones are heavy on the scales, but feel
significantly lighter on the head. And given the feature set, the extra
weight feels worth it.
Design
The
BackBeat Pro is available in any colour you like, so long as you like
black. The simple colour scheme sort of matches its target market though
– this is a pair of headphones for the type of people who would
normally buy a pair of Bose QuietComfort 25. That
said there is a subtle purple lining to the inside of the over-ear
headphones, so you get a touch of Joker in with your Batman. Like
all over the skull headphones, the strap expands and contracts to fit
your head. But one nice design decision is that when you take the
headphones off and wear them around your neck, the headphone cups fold
down so the padding rests on your collarbones, rather than straight up,
like many other designs. This means that the headphones are just as comfortable to wear around your neck when you can't have them on. Each
headphone has controls integrated into its design for easy access. The
left cup has a large, circular button on top that will start and pause
your music, with a rotary dial that will fast forward or rewind tracks.
The noise cancelling switch also rests on the back of the left cup. The
right headphone, meanwhile, has your call/answer button on the cup,
with a volume dial around the outside, with the power switch at the
back. At the bottom of the right headphone is a pass
through button as well, which activates the inbuilt microphone so you
can hear people talk to you without stopping your music. The
end result of this design is that everything is ridiculously easy and
intuitive to control. Where some other Bluetooth headphones have smaller
buttons scattered across the design, the BackBeat Pro are simple to
control and navigate. There's
also a standard 3.5mm headphone jack at the bottom of the left
headphone, so you can listen to music with a wired connection, getting
around all those pesky wireless transmission restrictions on aircraft. It
also helps work around the emergency situation of running out of
battery, although that wasn't a situation we encountered during our
tests. If there was a single design element we didn't
like, it's the fact that the headphones don't fold up for portability.
Seriously, chucking these in your carry on is going to take up a lot of
precious space, where alternatives like the Bose are a lot more compact.
Performance and Verdict
Performance
The good news for music fans is that the
Backbeat Pro has some very nice audio quality. What's more, they sound
great both with and without the noise cancelling features activated. Overall,
the audio is quite well balanced. Bass is solid but not overwhelming,
the mids shine through, while the high frequencies get plenty of
coverage. The noise cancellation is also good, especially
when partnered with the passive cancellation you get from having the
headphones encase your ears. It
can't compete with the active noise cancellation on a pair of Bose
headphones, but it's almost a case of the BackBeat Pros having great
sound with really good noise cancellation, as opposed to Bose's tendency
to have amazing noise cancellation with really good sound. As
you might expect, the Bluetooth integration here is top shelf. Not only
do you get a Class 1 radio on the inside, which allows you to listen to
music up to a distance of 100 metres from your device, but the BackBeat
Pro also allows you to pair two devices simultaneously. The
streaming quality was solid - the connection only really dropped out
when we walked a good distance from the source, and even then there were
a few walls between the headphones and the device playing music. Using
the headphones for making and receiving phone calls was great, with one
of the best quality connections we've found on a Bluetooth pair of
headphones. The
dual pairing is incredibly useful too. Pair the BackBeat Pro to your
phone and your tablet, and it will seamlessly switch between the two. You don't even need to do anything to make it work, other than stop what was playing on one device before playing another. It's
not perfect though. For a start, every device you pair with the
headphones is referred to as a phone, be it an actual phone, a tablet or
a games console. The little voice that tells you what's
going on will announce "phone one connected" or "phone two connected",
but that doesn't help you if you're not sure which device is phone one
or phone two. The
next challenge is pairing itself. To pop the headphones in pairing
mode, you need to hold the answer/call button for two seconds. But
there's no audible feedback, and if you press too long, you'll just
activate Siri or Google Now. For Android users, you can get around it with the embedded NFC chip, but iPhone 6 or PS Vita users don't have the luxury. Still, the convenience still outweighs the challenge in a big way. Also
convenient is the battery life. Plantronics say that it will give you
24 hours of Bluetooth playback with noise cancelling activated. In real world use, that means that you might – just might – need to recharge the headphones once a week. Plantronics
managed this extraordinary feat by including a couple of sensors that
automatically stop music playback when you take the headphones off,
saving battery life. These sensors do occasionally get
it wrong – run for the bus and you might find your music stops and
starts on every second step, for example – but the music does
automatically start playing again when you put them back on. Bluetooth 4.0 also helps conserve juice, while a deep sleep mode can keep the battery going for up to six months. If
you do run out of battery life, it's a simple matter of plugging in a
standard headphone jack, and you can keep listening (albeit without
noise cancellation). And when you go to charge, the Backbeat Pros will go from 0 to 100 per cent battery life in about three hours.
We Liked
There
is so, so much to like about these headphones. Audio quality is great,
noise cancellation is really good and the controls are super intuitive. The
dual-pairing Bluetooth, 100m range and passthrough button that lets you
hear the outside world and your music at the same time all warrant a
mention too. But it's the battery life that makes
everything come together. At a time when it's getting harder and harder
to go too far from a power point thanks to average battery life, being
able to go at least a week between charges is a huge relief.
We disliked
As much as we loved these headphones though, there's still plenty of room for improvement. For
a start, the lack of identification between paired devices is
frustrating. Whether it's a voice-to-text upgrade that will identify
your device's name or something simpler, it would be nice to have more
detail about what's connected. It would also be nice if
there was a bit more feedback when the headphones are put into pairing
mode, so it can be easily done without taking them off. The
Backbeat Pros are also a tad heavy. You don't really notice it while
wearing them, and it does allow for the integrated battery, but as with
most gadgets – lighter is always better.
Final Verdict
At
AU$349 / £250 / US$250, these are not a cheap pair of headphones. But
they are an investment in both comfort and convenience, and if Bose has
taught us anything, it's that those are features people are willing to
pay for. Sure, they're not perfect, but having the
ability to pair to multiple devices simultaneously, without having to
panic about battery life constantly is an amazingly enticing
proposition. But when it comes down to it, these are some
of the most versatile, best performing headphones we've encountered.
Given that they are also Plantronics' first foray into the high-end
Bluetooth headphone space, it kind of makes us excited to see what the
company will do next.
