Bragi The Headphone - Review 2022

The Bragi Dash was the first truly cable-gratis wireless earphone pair we tested. Since then, at that place accept been multiple entries in the nascent category—most notably, the Apple AirPods. While we liked the Nuance, Bragi's latest cable-gratis offering, The Headphone, is a bit more intriguing. Whereas the Dash is overstuffed with features and gesture-based controls, The Headphone is a little less involved—there'due south no fitness tracker or internal music actor. It's too, at $149, significantly more affordable. But while The Headphone offers decent audio performance for the price, yous'll get more sonic bang for your buck with a traditional (wired together) Bluetooth pair.

Design

Before we go farther, allow'due south briefly detail the chief differences between the Dash and The Headphone. Both are cable-free Bluetooth earphones that come with charging cases. The Nuance is h2o resistant, has internal storage and a built-in music role player, an accelerometer for fitness tracking, and works with the Bragi app. The Headphone offers none of those features, but it's a lot easier to operate.

Available in blackness and grayness, The Headphone ships with a charging instance that connects to a USB port via the included micro USB charging cablevision. A slide encompass protects the earpieces when they are docked, and a loop allows you to wear the example around your cervix or hang information technology from a hook. But the case itself is far different from all of the other models nosotros've tested in that it doesn't have a congenital-in bombardment.

You tin only charge The Headphone when the case is continued to a powered USB port. The Nuance, like the AirPods and the Sasmung Gear IconX, come up with a battery-powered instance that carries multiple full charges. This is a large deal, as cablevision-free earphones don't get very much battery life. In fact, The Headphone only gets slightly better battery life than the Nuance, at up to six hours compared with four. These numbers will vary with your book levels, but when The Headphone runs out of ability, in that location's no easy way to charge it on the become.

Bragi The Headphone inline The Headphone ships with only two pairs of silicone eartips—pocket-sized and medium—and a single pair of Comply foam ear tips. We've always been a big fan of Comply tips, which offer earplug-like passive noise reduction and tend to provide a better seal. Furthermore, the silicone eartips hither don't make a strong enough seal—they felt totally secure in testing, but there was nigh no bass response. Switching to the Comply eartips was like night and 24-hour interval—with the Comply tips, The Headphone provides a more powerful bass punch.

Where the Dash has a capacitive touch surface, The Headphone'southward right earpiece has 3 tiny buttons. Nosotros are bigger fans of the buttons, equally they allow for easier operation. That said, the buttons here are a scrap difficult to printing, and yous may feel the earpiece digging into your ear while pressing downward.

Press the multifunction push one time to control playback and phone call management; press multiple times to navigate tracks (something you can't do on the AirPods). The plus and minus buttons control volume (when pressed in one case) and an audio transparency role (when held down) that uses the built-in mics to permit in the ambience sound around you—a nice characteristic that means you don't have to remove them when someone is talking to you. The book levels piece of work in conjunction with your mobile device's master volume levels. The mic offers relatively potent intelligibility. Using the Voice Memos app on an iPhone 6s, we were able to easily understand all words we recorded, and the audio artifacts produced by the mic were relatively minimal.

The Headphone will mute (just not pause) playback whenever you lot remove the right earpiece. Information technology's a useful, somewhat standard, feature, though a pause button would be more welcome.

Operation

On tracks with intense sub-bass content, like The Knife's "Silent Shout," The Headphone delivers a strong bass thump, yet information technology's non over the acme despite some obvious depression frequency boosting. (And again, without the Comply foam tips in, this track sounds devoid of bass.)

Ane surprising attribute of the sound performance is how loud the pair gets—or doesn't. At maximum volume using an iPhone 6s as the audio source, The Headphone delivered loud audio, only certainly not what many earphones nosotros test can muster at top volumes. I'm not fifty-fifty certain I'd say that maximum volume is an dangerous listening level, and at about 75 percent, it's more than like 50 percent on nearly competitors. One reason for this could exist bombardment life preservation—don't forget the case carries no accuse, unlike many of the competing models.

Bill Callahan'south "Drover," a track with far less deep bass in the mix, gives us a better thought of The Headphone's overall audio signature. The drums on this track can audio unnaturally heavy on seriously additional systems, simply The Headphone delivers a modest bass boost, and thus the drums audio full, just not nigh as thunderous equally they might elsewhere. The high-mid presence also feels less sculpted than we oftentimes hear, and the issue is a very mids-focused, nigh flat response sound. There's not a lack of bass nor a lack of treble, but things sound both less bass-forward and less bright than many models nosotros test.

On Jay-Z and Kanye West'southward "No Church in the Wild," the kicking drum loop receives a decent high-mid frequency presence, but once again, the highs feel dialed back just slightly, and so that the attack is a fleck less sharp and punchy than it oftentimes sounds. The sub-bass synth hits that punctuate the beat out also lack the subwoofer thrust we often hear in bass-forward earphones—they don't audio weak, but information technology's the midrange frequencies ruling the show. There'south enough of clarity, but bass fiends, besides as listeners who favor very crisp, brilliant audio, might non honey The Headphone's sound signature.

Orchestral tracks, similar the opening scene in John Adams' The Gospel According to the Other Mary, interestingly sound a piddling more than bass-forward than typical. This tells us that The Headphone does a little more than boosting in the low-mids and some of the lows than it does in the very deepest, sub-bass realms. But even this boosting is subtle, and serves to add together a trivial bit of body and vibrance to the mix—zip sounds unnatural, and the college annals brass, strings, and vocals are nevertheless crisp plenty to remain in the forefront.

Conclusions

Bragi's The Headphone is essentially a simplified version of the Nuance for half the price. We similar the easier physical controls, but nosotros're less enthused well-nigh the included silicone eartips and the charging case'south lack of a battery. There's also audio quality to consider. If yous tin can handle a neckband or collarband-style pair of earphones, you can spend similar or less coin and go meliorate audio performance. The Beats BeatsX and JBL Reverberate Mini BT, for case, are both Editors' Choice winners with far superior sound quality. Entirely cable-free earphones are undoubtedly a growing tendency, merely and so far it's one we're non quite sold on.