Cables are annoying. Especially when you want to recline on your sofa and watch a movie at night with headphones on. Or when you are rolling backwards on your office chair, crushing the cable of your headphones, and pulling them off your head. Once you had wireless headphones you will never want to miss them.
Selection criteria
My first set of wireless headphones, the Sennheiser RS140, are now more than 5 years old. The cable is slightly broken, the left side only delivers 50% volume (no matter, it has a balance dial), and the padding is disintegrating. They are analog all the way, that means a 3.5mm input jack for your device's headphone output and analog transmission from the base station to the headset. You get the usual hissing noises when you move your head in the wrong direction and at best average overall sound quality. It's certainly OK for watching movies but not great for music.
About three years ago I bought another set, the Panasonic RP-WF6000. This product is apparently no longer on sale in Europe, I believe it only was available for a short period. On paper it had great features: Optical digital input, digital transmission to the headset, optical digital output (passthrough), switchable analog input, and more. Unfortunately, it had severe issues: The base station pollutes the 2.4 Ghz band so nearby WiFi wouldn't work anymore when you use the headphones. Every time you switch it on, it enables its "Cinema Enhanced Fantastic Surround" audio effect processing. You don't want that, believe me, so you walk to the base station and press the Select button thrice. Everytime. This gets old fast. They are now in storage and I doubt I'll ever use them again.
Given that history, I now know what criteria matter for wireless headphones: Full digitial input, digital transmission with no extraneous noises, good no-nosense usability, and no interference with WiFi.
The new Sony headphones
My newest purchase are the just released Sony MDR-DS6500. At first I couldn't find anyone selling it, then I realized how idiotic the product name is. Replace the dash with a space when you search! They are not cheap, I paid ~220 USD.
The first thing I noticed is how comfortable they are. You can adjust the left and right side "length" individually. The padding on the ear muffs rotates 360 degrees, you can adjust the ear-shaped hole to fit snug over your ears. They are certainly much more comfortable than my old Sennheiser and Panasonic. I think they actually look quite good, even the base station is as simple and clean as it can be.
On the base station you have a range of switches, none of them are very interesting. You can of course switch between analog and digital input if you have two sources connected. The sound effects however are awful, as usual, and they seriously distort the original audio. It's best to leave this off. My goal is to get an unaltered and undisturbed transmission from the audio source to my ears.
The headset has two LEDs: The red one means it is charging sitting on the base station. The green one indicates that the headset is switched on. And that is actually a minor problem: You have to press and hold the Power button on the headset for about two seconds to switch it on. This has to be done whenever you pick it up from the base station, the headset only turns Off when you put it back, not On when you pick it up. Why two seconds?
The only other button on the headset is the volume wheel. This is a real dial with a scale from 0 to x, so you can set a fixed volume. I'm used to Volume Up and Volume Down buttons, or an Up/Down jog-wheel. I guess this is a matter of taste, I'll probably get used to the dial. The wheel itself is somewhat difficult to find blindly, some deeper grooves in the plastic would make this much easier. Still, if these are the only issues I can probably live with them.
You can send DTS or other common (multi-channel) digital encodings to the base station. However, after I saw the DTS LED enabled once, even going back to the same source and movie, I couldn't get it to light up again. It sounded the same though! Personally, I don't care at all about anything but 2.0 stereo audio, and I find it pointless to even speculate how well it can render 5.1 into microscopic left and right speakers.
What I can say is that the audio quality is good, much better than the Sennheiser and a little better than the Panasonic. Movies are great and I wouldn't even mind listening to music on these headphones. There is no hissing or other analog artifacts, it's clean. To give you a reference: The best headphones I've ever had (actually, still have) are Etymotic. The Sony headphones are not in that league, overall I'd rate the sound as "acceptable, above average".
My livingroom has bad WiFi reception, as I've explained before. When I try to connect to the WiFi with my cellphone I get a weak signal and a slow but stable connection. There was no change to the WiFi signal when I used the Sony headphones, so pending further tests, it's probably safe to assume they won't interfere with WiFi. Very good.
That's really all I'm asking for and I'm happy with the product so far. If you want to know more or you want me to test something else, post a comment here.
