what are the best wireless headphones u know?

[earworm]

heh,
sure, would be nice, no wires in a studio, mhhh, i'm addicted to wires and cables, but musicians arent...
so i wonder, does anyone give wireless headphones to their musicians?
i once had a pair on my head and they were heavy, didn't fit well,
and i'm not even talking about the SOUND...

the only thing i care about is that they are closed-back,
the more ambient-attenuation the better,
soundquality isn't REALLY an issue...its for tracking,
the more isolated they are, the less loud i have to put them...

any suggestions?

cheers

[dgatwood]

Wow. The timing is perfect. I just bought two pair. Well, I bought one pair, returned it, and bought another. Here's a quick review of the two models, in my (really blunt) opinion....

Sony MDR-RF960RK:

These things work up to 150 feet in distance. What they don't tell you is that the 150 feet is only line of sight, perfectly stationary, with absolutely nothing around the transmitter or receiver other than air for at least twenty feet.

I got really severe noise bursts as close as three feet from the base station. There were two large dead spots within line of sight just walking across my living room. (Note that this is wood construction, not concrete or brick, so that's just sad.) Even when I tuned it (it had a button to cause it to seek for the signal), it always had a high frequency whine that suggests that it never really found the center frequency.

For its power switch, the headphones turned themtselves on and off using a switch in the headband. Cute design, but can you say failure waiting to happen?

And then there was the flimsy power contacts. They pretty much felt like I was going to break something the very first time I put the headphones into the cradle. Really, really cheap construction.

Finally, I had to turn my headphone output WAY down to keep from oversaturating the crappy electronics in their transmitter. This, of course, meant that the headphones had to be turned fairly hot, and thus every one of those noise bursts was literally painful.

To make a long story short, I have never in my entire life seen wireless hardware that sucked this hard. Even the old 49 MHz realistic wireless mic worked better than these things. I don't know why I expected anything better from Sony, given my past history with their gear, but for some reason, I ignored my gut and bought this piece of garbage anyway....

For $100, I expect something at least halfway decent. Now I'm not saying I could design one that worked better. No, I'm saying I could have designed one that worked better when I was 10.

JVC HA-W300RF

This was the replacement. It was $20 less than the Sony. JVC claims 328 feet, and I think I believe it.

This has two minor disadvantages over the Sony, which I'll mention first. First, the JVC uses a (possibly custom) NiCd battery, which will eventually die and might be hard to replace... but not that hard, I don't think.

Second, this unit might have a slight disadvantage because of its manual tuning wheels. According to one review I read, it suffers frequency drift as the battery voltage decreases. I haven't used it long enough to know, since they shipped it with the battery basically drained, but that still gave me about five minutes of testing---more than enough to do a good comparison with the Sony (which I began boxing back up after less than a minute of actual use...).

Now, the positives. It has a real, mechanical, push-on/push-off power switch on the headphones. Major improvement.

The charge contacts seem really solid. I had a little trouble getting them to make contact initially, but at no point did I feel like I was going to irreparably stretch some flimsy spring-brass contacts like I did with the Sony....

From what I've heard so far, the sound quality is orders of magnitude better than the Sony. There's no constant 'slightly-off-frequency' whine, it doesn't lose its frequency lock whenever you turn your head or walk more than 3 feet from the base station, and even works reliably when the transmitter is on one side of my flat panel monitors and the headphones are on the other. Oh, and they sound better, too, even ignoring the artifacts. (The Sony had higher maximum frequency response @22kHz, but from the way they sounded, I think they pretty much lacked anything else.)

With the exception of when the battery bottomed out and the thing went into static hell (this is normal), I didn't notice any significant noise problems at all while walking all around my living room.

Relatively speaking, it's heaven.

I think that pretty much sums it up from my perspective....

[earworm]

interesting,
i never buy sony, i had NOTHING BUT TERRIBLE expieriences with it,
every single piece of sony equipment i (and my two brothers) used in my (our) lifes broke down

i worked as a sales representative (big word for lauzy job) and sold lots of sony things....received enough complaints from costumers,and i think its expensive "wanna look futuristic" crap

even our sony tv annoys the shit out of me,

maybe i got this evil aura around me or something...OR SONY IS JUNK
.. you deceide for yourself

've seen several wireless sennheiser headphones on internet,
i like that brand,

but in overal, seems like wireless is far from what we want in a studio..

too bad

[Clit Torres]

Wow, that's strange. I've had the total opposite experience, everything Sony I've ever owned from tape decks, to tv's and boom boxes have never died on me.

As for the wireless thing, I've never tested out a pair that I thought I would be satisfied with in the end, so I've just stayed wired. But it would be interesting to find a solid pair.

[fldrummer]

I would get a shure psm and a pair of sony 7506's if I was going to use wireless. I would feel alot better this way then buying wireless headphones. If you watch shows like howard stern on tv this is the kinda system they use for guests. You could even use in-ears if the artist wanted to. It's just a little bit more then those basic wireless headphones....

[earworm]

oh,
i got one pair of 'nice' sony in-ear headphones, were pretty expensive for such tiny things, i like them, great isolation, OK sound and they can go loud without distorting,
i offered the drummer to wear these, with new and clean rubber "ear thingies" but he laughed at me, ok, then i gave him some junky cheap sennheisers, he felt cooler with big cans on his head, whatever he wants...

and i think i might get the same reaction from other people, its not impressive to offer tiny headphones...
its not necesarry to go wireless, people aren't allowed to jump around in here anyway, but with 6 people in one room wearing HP's....then you automaticly start talking about this subject...

still no one with a great wireless expierience?

[fldrummer]

Originally Posted by earworm

i offered the drummer to wear these, with new and clean rubber "ear thingies" but he laughed at me, ok, then i gave him some junky cheap sennheisers, he felt cooler with big cans on his head, whatever he wants...

I guess this guy has never used in-ear-monitors(iem) then. IEM's are standard in todays live acts for many reasons. Great isolation...great sound...

Custom molds are really were the good stuff is at. If you think 100-200 is alot for iem's some custom molds can cost over 1,000. Worth it? Ask the artist using them and I'm sure they will say it is. But I think not many studio guys use them because they are just too much $$. If I was to do alot of studio work I think I would get a good pair to bring along with me rather then using the cans the studio has.

http://www.ultimateears.com/custom/
http://www.futuresonics.com/

[konabuzz]

Originally Posted by dgatwood

Sony MDR-RF960RK:

These things work up to 150 feet in distance. What they don't tell you is that the 150 feet is only line of sight, perfectly stationary, with absolutely nothing around the transmitter or receiver other than air for at least twenty feet.

I got really severe noise bursts as close as three feet from the base station. There were two large dead spots within line of sight just walking across my living room. (Note that this is wood construction, not concrete or brick, so that's just sad.) Even when I tuned it (it had a button to cause it to seek for the signal), it always had a high frequency whine that suggests that it never really found the center frequency.

For its power switch, the headphones turned themtselves on and off using a switch in the headband. Cute design, but can you say failure waiting to happen?

And then there was the flimsy power contacts. They pretty much felt like I was going to break something the very first time I put the headphones into the cradle. Really, really cheap construction.

Finally, I had to turn my headphone output WAY down to keep from oversaturating the crappy electronics in their transmitter. This, of course, meant that the headphones had to be turned fairly hot, and thus every one of those noise bursts was literally painful.

To make a long story short, I have never in my entire life seen wireless hardware that sucked this hard. Even the old 49 MHz realistic wireless mic worked better than these things. I don't know why I expected anything better from Sony, given my past history with their gear, but for some reason, I ignored my gut and bought this piece of garbage anyway....

For $100, I expect something at least halfway decent. Now I'm not saying I could design one that worked better. No, I'm saying I could have designed one that worked better when I was 10.

....

Wow.....

Exactly.....a spot-on description of these pieces of sh*t headphones.....ha.

I bought these cans at Radio Shack 2 weeks ago thinking the same thing -- that these would be great for tracking.....no more rolling my chair over the headphone cables lying on the floor, right? I thought.....range? no problem....they'll be within 10 feet of the transmitter at all times. If they work beyond that, it's a bonus.

My god.....these are terrible!! Self noise is like at -35db on the recording meter with NO signal, and that's HIGH! If you move (as in when you're getting into the groove and bobbing your head) forget it....woosh, woosh. Man, what utter crap.

The weird thing is, I'd also bought at the same time a simple armband Am/Fm Sports Radio thingy, also by Sony, for like $50.00 and it, too, would woosh in and out as you moved.....For Chr*ssakes it's supposed to be designed to work when you move!!! Ugh!!!!! Crap!

Sorry.....rant over now. Thank you.

[erichenryus]

i'm surprised no one has mentioned these.
http://www.amphony.com/

anyone tried them yet?

[Soulgolem]

I'm looking to buy wireless for tracking and can't decide what to go for, reviews are kind of contradicting in this field. Any new experiences for this application ?

What about those Amphony 2500 like mentionned, anyone tried those ?

[vintagetobes]

I can rule out the sennheiser ones for you. I have them and they sound just like dgatwood describes his sony ones. sorry i cant be bothered to check the model number. look on www.argos.co.uk for the cheapest ones! hehe.

[Dot]

I've got some in-progress notes on the 2.4GHz Amphony 1000's at
http://studioforums.com/groupee/foru...9/m/3251028731

The 5.8GHz Amphony 2500's aren't available yet. But I should have some in for review in a month or two.