Top critical review
1.0 out of 5 starsTwo days outside of Amazon's return policy and parts are falling off the headset
Reviewed in Australia on 10 October 2020
Amended Review - the quality of the product in question:-
Actually, on the 17th Oct., my last day to return the unit fell apart. I am very careful with all of my equipment. Coming from a recording and music background, I treat all of my gear with respect no matter the price I paid.
So I took my Taotronic headset out as I visited my compassionate ground bubble buddy on the weekend. Wore it on the way there and on the way back in the car. By the time I returned home I have noticed that the cushion pad on the opposite side of the headset speaker was missing. I have no idea where it fell off, as the headset went straight from the car to the house and back with no usage during this time. The part is not broken, it just literally fell off. Please refer to photos as there is no crack at the connection point, design of the joint was not designed well.
Beware of this part if you should purchase this. I will be contacting ACCC in Australia to get advise what I can do in this instance as Amazon's return policy is now expired. Products should not have a 30 days policy, I believe this is against the Australian Consumer Law.
Original Review below
I purchased this headset about a month ago after doing a fair bit of research. In the end, I chose Taotronic because I had previously purchased a $25USD pair of BT mobile in-ear headset around five years ago from the same manufacturer and they are still working brilliantly. No sound quality issue complain when using my mobile phone.
So with this unit, there are a few issues I have experienced through using it with PC and mobile phone.
Firstly I will talk about the mobile phone usage.
Comfort:
I found the earpad a bit warm when I have it on. The speaker and microphone section is also quite bulky. Sound quality-wise I have had only one complaint. So, it seems to work much better with the mobile phone. I have had no complaint of sound and voice quality whilst I am driving and using the headset. I found it quite good with the mono ear speaker because I can keep the other one listening for traffic conditions around me. Only once did I received a complain when I was using the headset at home talking to a friend via WhatsApp. The sound was hyper-compressed and the volume was going up and down, to losing signals totally. It could be due to interference but I was outside sitting in my porch (running 2x enterprise-level Aruba APs), or it could have been at my caller's end. However, as soon as I changed my headset back to the wired earbuds, problem totally is gone.
Secondly, my main reason for purchasing this BT headset is for working from home as most of us are in this Covid crisis. The feature of being able to connect to two devices was exactly what I wanted. As then I can use it with the PC and with the mobile phone at the same time. They connected flawlessly. To qualify my next part, I had also purchased a brand name Gigabyte WiFi / USB 5.0 BT PCI-e card with an external antenna which I place on my desk. There should be next to no interference or obstructions for the BT connection.
However, when I ran some test with my housemate, connecting via the PC, the first thing I noticed is that there is a massive delay for when I speak to when my audio will actually get to its destination. This is especially a problem when I am using it for video conferencing. Next, I proceed to test the audio quality from playing a clip on Youtube. Same issue with out of sync audio to the video. Also, this is a headset for communication only, the sound quality from music, video is very poor. I believe it has something to do with the bi-direction nature of the headset. If I disable the mic then the sound gets better (still not great for video) but when I activate the mic, the above issue recurred very compressed audio.
I then did some research and found out that not all BT are equal, even BT5.0. You might need to get a high-end transmitter/receiver to have a good connection to a PC. I really don't know, as I have spent way too much to get this solution happening already. I was after something easy and didn't break the bank.
The headset was fully charged for all of the scenarios mentioned above.
For what it is, it is a good value. I only use mine for when I am driving now as my in-ears block out too much traffic sound and volume is not high enough when only using one. For that single job, it excels. I don't really understand it but that's the drop.
