It’s usually around the point where you are choosing a password and entering your year of birth that you feel nostalgic for the days when headphones were something you just plugged in and switched on.
These days, the average wireless cans come with six or seven buttons, an app, mysterious multi-coloured blinking lights and the sort of soothing robot voice that in sci-fi films is usually a dead giveaway that a computer is about to turn evil and start killing people.
But at least we got rid of those annoying wires, right?
Audeara A-01. They offer fairly decent noise-cancelling, but £300 puts you into the fancy, boy-racer bracket in headphones
Audeara’s headphones have more of an excuse than most: designed by Australian doctors, the Bluetooth over-ears actually give you a hearing test before you start, and fine-tune the music to what you can (and can’t) hear.
They’re not messing about: you have to slog through between five and 30 minutes of listening to bleeps, marking when they become ‘barely audible’, before you can turn on the built-in sound processing (which works with everything from radio apps to Spotify). For us at least, the difference was quite subtle: music sounds a bit tauter, and treble a shade sharper. It wasn’t, to be honest, a eureka moment, but we found that we could keep the volume a bit lower. These could be worth investigating if you find normal headphones don’t deliver.
Like most high-tech headphones, they’re pricey, though. They offer fairly decent noise-cancelling, but £300 puts you into the fancy, boy-racer bracket in headphones, and these feel cheap next to the Boses of this world.
If you are looking for a more affordable one, consider these under $200 picks.