If there is one thing I remember from my first Telecommunications course in 2013 is that an engineer must be able to deal with trade-offs. In that case, we were often talking about the trade-off between wired and wireless communications and all their properties in terms of noise, interference, mobility, range and so on. At the end of that course, my idea was: avoid wireless, if you can. That’s why I’ve always been listening to music with wired products.

Recently though, I became a commuter (walk, train, walk, repeat) and some of my priorities and habits changed. That’s why I decided to buy something new.

I was looking for a specific device:

  • wireless connection with Android and iOS,
  • good audio quality,
  • as small as possible,
  • reliable.

As usual before buying a particular product, I spent few hours searching on the web, reading reviews and watching videos, trying to understand all the the pros and cons. Then I spent few days thinking about it and on October the 27th I bought the Dash Pro a pair of expensive earbuds from Bragi, a Munich-based company. After ten days, the product was shipped from Düsseldorf and in three days I had it in my ears.

The Dash Pro

It’s been almost a week I’ve been using it and I want to share all the good and bad things I discovered while using them with a Nexus 6P and an iPad Mini 2. Let’s start with a positive mood.

Good

  1. The audio quality is acceptable. No difference with my previous in-ear headphones (Sennheiser, €49).
  2. The volume can be quite loud, even though you won’t be able to enjoy VERY loud music.
  3. Freedom of movement: you can easily put on or take off a T-shirt while keeping listening to music; you can also be 5-6 meters away from your device with walls in between.
  4. You can change song, increase the volume, stop and play music with touch controls directly on the earbuds.
  5. You can store a bit less than 4GB of music and forget about your phone.
  6. Good customer support. They always replied to me in one working day.

Bad

  1. If you have a Nexus 6P, you don’t want to buy the Dash Pro as the Bluetooth connection drops every few seconds whether you move your body or you put your phone in a pocket—trousers, jacket, left-side, right-side doesn’t matter. I know this happened to some other users as I read complaints on the Bragi’s Facebook page, but unfortunately I don’t know their phone model. (My negative feedback on the Bragi’s Facebook page was deleted after few days.)
  2. The touch controls are not easy. When you want to turn on the Transparency Mode you may end up starting a running session. When you want to lock the touch controls you may have to try multiple times to get the gesture right.
  3. The small piece of rubber going inside your ear canal is very dangerous. After I lost it in my ear three times, I understood it was better to use the FitSleeves.
  4. The left earbud had problems twice. The first time, it had no sound while the right earbud was normally playing. The second time, I heard a strange noise and I had to take it off.
  5. If you wash your face or if you move your facial muscles, they might fall off. (Maybe this is related to my ears).
  6. You must install and update the Bragi OS, but you can do this only with MacOS or Windows. Excuse me, what about Linux users?
  7. You can store music in the Dash Pro—also using Linux this time—but to transfer few megabytes it takes ages.
  8. The price was €349.

Neutral

  1. The battery is quite good (~2 hours), but then they need to be recharged and you have to wait. Definitely bad for a long journey.
  2. They’re relatively light and small, but in the long run you feel them and you may want to take them off for a bit.
  3. The Transparency Mode allows you to hear the world around, whether you are listening to your music or you stopped it. The sound you get from the outside though is not natural, you can tell the difference and it’s probably better to remove the right earbud instead—faster and easier. You definitely don’t want to use this feature to improve the quality of a classical music concert. (Yes, I tried it.)

Still To Test

  1. Running
  2. iTranslate

My Personal Opinion

As Apple is showing with the AirPods, I think this kind of technology and products will replace a lot of headphones. Despite the problems I had so far, I’m quite satisfied as I think they can be solved, either by me or by Bragi.

In the end, I think the trade-off here is between money and quality.