So latest review on best buy is poor interesting points were: he thought it may have amplified noise like a hearing aid which I believe it has never claimed to do but worth taking note of also noise cancellation useless
I have just returned my IQbuds to Best Buy after 10 days of use (wearing them for ~2 hours a day in various situations). I bought them specifically to help me in the following 4 situations:
1. Hearing people speak in loud bars and restaurants – I often have difficulty hearing over the noise.
2. While watching television – I often struggle to hear dialog at the volume that the rest of family normally watches. If I turn the volume up so I can hear, they complain it is too loud. I have been wearing IR headphones, but this means I am unable to hear the conversation in the room so find I am constantly taking them on and off. I thought the IQBuds would give me the best of both worlds – augmented hearing while still able to hear the family.
3. As noise canceling headphones while flying.
4. To listen to music (and make phone calls) while working out.
Here is how I would rate the IQBuds ability to handle each of these four situations using a 1-5 scale with 5 being fantastic.
1. Conversation in Bars = 3. It worked, but did not dampen the background noise as much as I expected.
2. Hearing the TV = 1. Completely useless. What is not clear in the marketing material is that these headphones do NOT amplify or increase the volume of any external noise. All they do is reduce any background noise. This means that if you cannot hear someone speaking in a silent room without the IQBuds, you still will not be able to hear them while wearing them – as they will be at exactly the same volume. The app’s volume controls only allow you to reduce the sound, not increase it above its actual real world volume. This was a major disappointment.
3. Noise Cancelling ability = 1. Completely useless. I fiddled this for about 2 hours trying all the settings as well as the various ear bud tips while playing recorded tracks from inside a plane as well as a train. In both cases there was no discernable reduction in the noise (there is a place in the app where you can supposedly override the noise cancelling – switching back and forth – I could not tell any difference between the two settings. In contrast, I also tried a pair of Bose QuietComfort 20 earbuds using the same sounds. As soon as I put them on, both the plane and train noise almost completely disappeared.
4. Listening to Music: = 4. This was overall pretty good and was the only reason I thought about keeping them. The buds were very comfortable and snug in my ears and I never thought they would fall out while on a tread mill. It was great not having wires to get tangled up and I did not experience any blue tooth connection issues (the phone was on the console in front of me). All in all the sound quality was very good including making phone calls. The people on the other end had no issues hearing me and said the voice quality was good.
A couple of other annoyances:
1. The buds have touch controls that are very sensitive. I found that I would touch the buds to realign them from time to time which would cause some action to start – such as switching from music to plane mode or, most annoyingly, starting google search. I wish there was a means to tell the buds when you mean to use the controls – such as saying “OK buds!” or having to touch the buds with 2 fingers instead of one.
2. The app is a bit buggy. You can set up to 4 favorite modes (train, restaurant, place, office, music, etc) and then cycle through them directly by touching the buds. I found that no matter how many favorites you defined, the buds would only cycle through 2 modes – and these appeared to be random.
So in the end I decided to return them as it was hard justifying the price for what it turned out to be are just nice wireless headphones. I will keep on any eye on this company – as this is only release one – so they may still get closer to what I was hoping for.
No, I would not recommend this to a friend.
(20min delay)