Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

A few years ago, I set out on the quest to find the perfect wireless listening device. My quest came to a swift end when I realized that a truly great wireless device that is a marriage of insanely great functionality, comfort, and tear-inducingly beautiful and obsessive design doesn’t exist. I’m sure many of you reading this have sadly come to the same conclusion and are aching for such a device to be born. I was excited and hopeful that the Bang & Olufsen H9 would move a step closer to this ideal. Let me save the suspense and spoil it for you right away: What you’re looking for in the wireless headphone/earbud world doesn’t exist (yet). B&O H9, does in fact move a step closer to this ideal (in some areas), but unfortunately, the steps are minuscule and marginal at best. Headphones and earbuds are a very very difficult problem to solve. Comfort and fit are orders of magnitude more challenging to get right than a smartphone, because unlike a smartphone, these are devices that you actually wear, and becoming a perfect fit for every person, considering the breadth of variety in human anatomy shapes and sizes is a Herculean challenge for any designer. My review here merely reflects what I sensed based on my body compatibility with the H9. I’m not a professional audiophile, but have a great deal of professional experience in the world of visual/audio design and multimedia. Form to me is just as important as function. For a product to be truly great, form & function need to exist intimately fused together. These are the current wireless Headphones/Earbuds that I own: Beats Studio Wireless, Bose QC35, B&O H9, Bragi Dash wireless earbuds, Apple AirPods, Powerbeats 3 Sound Quality: B&O H9 is without a doubt in my mind, the best sounding _wireless_ headphone I’ve ever listened to. The Beats Studio wireless is embarrassingly muffled and lacks detail compared to the H9. The QC35 sounds good and is balanced in quality, but the detail that you can experience with the H9 is unquestionably more noticeable and enjoyable when listening to instruments and vocals. Design: The B&O H9 as an object, is a beautiful device. The materials feel great to the touch, quality oozes from the colors, textures, and the precision craftsmanship. The device looks beautiful when hanging around your neck. The cans stick out farther than the Beats, and the connecting arc is thick and heavy. Compared to the Beats Studio wireless, they look somewhat bulky on the head. But because the materials are beautiful you could pass it as a fashion statement. When you look closely at the materials of the QC35 and compare the build to the H9, the difference is so evident that it blew me away. I expect the H9 leather to last many many times longer and age more gracefully than the thin & cheap looking material used in the QC35. Comfort: Between Bose QC35, H9, and Beats Studio wireless, I would rate the Bose as the most comfortable. The oval shaped cans of QC35 not only fit my ears better, but the lighter weight of the QC35 and minimal pressure on the ears make it a more comfortable experience for all day listening. The Beats and the H9 come in second in somewhat of a tie. The feel of the lambskin material of the H9 is great, but I just notice too much pressure after a few hours of wearing the headphones, and they’re noticeably heavier than the Bose. The H9 are the most comfortable of the 3 to wear around the neck however, if that matters to you, due to the generous size of the arc around the neck and the ability to turn the cans flat toward your chest. Active Noise Cancelation: In a world filled with sound pollution from busy city life, to the crazy loud train and plane noises while traveling, active noise cancelation has become an indispensable feature. The first time you experience it, it’s a truly ear-opening experience. The ANC of the Beats Studio wireless is a joke. Enough said. The ANC of the H9 is quite effective and decent. It feels well balanced. The ANC of the Bose QC35 is truly jaw dropping. It is so effective that it gives you a spine shivering world-isolating sensation. Perhaps the type of isolation you would experience in a sensory deprivation chamber… The verdict here is that if shutting out the world is truly important to you, Bose is the king. There is something strange and unnerving about too much isolation such as the ANC you get from the Bose. It's almost disorienting. I bought the Bose for flying and while in ridiculously noisy situations. It truly has no equal there, though the Bose ANC cannot be turned off, where as the H9 ANC is deactivated with a simple downward gesture on the right can. For everyday normal life sound levels, I actually prefer the H9. The Ugly: You may have wondered, why did I give the H9 a 2-star rating considering the above performance. You’ll find those reasons here. I’ll have to admit, that although I’ve given the headphones a 2-star rating, I’ve decided (just barely) to keep them and not return them purely for a few areas of strength that I mentioned above. Sadly, where the H9 shines, there are no other wireless headphones on the market to compete. H9 Controls: They are terrible. Simple as that. The volume control is awkward. There’s no clear feedback whether you’re successfully changing it and by what increment. Drawing a circular touch motion on the right ear can _seems_ intuitive (and looks cool in a promo video), but in practice it’s awkward and extremely finicky and imprecise. Bose QC35 and Beats Studio wireless's physical controls beat (no pun) the H9 in this area. The pause/play controls are the most infuriating. Every pause/play action involves me making several attempts, to hit the center of the touch sensitive area and wait to check if I successfully triggered a pause/play event. Most of the time, it makes me look like an idiot, trying to perfectly aim and repeatedly tap my headphones. Some of the control choices are just baffling. For example, if you double tap the right can, it’ll redial the most recent phone number that called you (or you called). This feature CANNOT be turned off. With such finicky controls, it’s very easy to accidentally call someone when you don’t intend to (and there is no _obvious_ feedback that you’re calling someone!!!…). Even more baffling is that this feature was included at all. No one that I personally know would find this useful enough to be available and turned on by default. Maybe if you work at a call-center? Seriously. For a company like B&O that takes pride in designing with care, their user interface designers are an embarrassment to the caliber of the brand. With the H9 on your head, be worried and be prepared to accidentally call people more often than you have ever done so in your life. Why is there no control to activate Siri? Surely siri could dial phone numbers and more… The track-skipping gesture is ok, but it’s hard to draw a horizontal line sometimes. I would almost say that if there is one control feature of the H9 that is better than the other headphones, it's the skip-track gesture (when it works). It's a smooth straight swipe and very intuitive. But I’ve accidentally turned the ANC on/off when I meant to skip a track or go to the previous one. Think about it. Your head can be straight, or looking down/up. If you swipe just slightly at the wrong angle, it can turn an ANC toggle into a track-skip gesture or vice versa. Connectivity: My old and worn Beats Studio wireless do a much better job with a steady reliable audio connection than the brand new H9. Specially when outdoors, walking around the city with an H9, I get an experience that reminds me of the finicky Bragi Dash earbuds with strange garbled audio during phone calls or strange artifacts when you're going up and down stairs and there is a lot of movement. These issues are usually quick and not show-stoppers but they’re embarrassing for a $499 headphone when the competition clearly doesn’t exhibit this problem. Please note that with ANC headphones, if you rub the surface of the headphones the built in Mic will pickup some additional sounds. What I'm talking about is not this. It's really noticeable garbled sounds and it becomes clear when you happen to be listening to human speech such as on the phone or listening to a podcast. Battery: I didn't run a very scientific test on this, but I wore them on an 8 hour workday constantly streaming music. When I left for home, the battery was at 60%. That's more than adequate for my needs. Summary: Pros: +Sound Quality +Materials and build precision & quality +Beautiful design (though this is subjective due to the size) Cons: -Awful controls -Awful interaction feedback from the controls -Poor comfort during really long use -Strange rare connection artifacts (mostly noticeable outdoors) -Somewhat heavy -No hard-shell travel case (The BOSE QC35 has a beautifully compact case in comparison) I’m hopeful that the controls and connectivity issues can be improved through software updates in the future. As it stands, I’ll keep the H9 for those times when I need to the best wireless sound at home, or I’m trying to make a fashion statement. For traveling and extra long use the Bose QC35 is my pick. I'm a bit concerned however about the durability of the Bose based on the more flimsy materials and construction. And the Beats Studio wireless… I just have them as a last resort emergency backup these days. Final notes: I own other B&O speakers and truly admire their visual design language, material choices, and their commitment to beautiful and honest sound. I do believe that as a company their user interface and usability competency is lacking. For the life of me I still have issues with a simple pause/play on their A9 speaker. These kinds of controls should be stupid simple. Easily operated even if you're intoxicated. The outdoor sound artifacts that I experienced (with my iPhone 7)… I have no explanation or excuse for that. They should be holding themselves to a higher standard of excellence in user experience, considering the price tier of the products they sell.