Dave and David on Headsets

The Daves discuss the state of the headset world. Lots of types and considerations. Things you should know - from bluetooth to dect to over-the-ear to earbuds.  

Transcript

0:10

Hi, it's Dave Michaels from Talking Points. I'm with Dave Danto. Hello, David. Hello, Dave. How are you today? Good. I have a feeling this is going to be like a, 20 hour episode, but this is going to be a good one. We got a great show lined up here. We are going to talk about headsets. And when I say headset, you probably have no idea what I'm talking about because there's everything from giant, huge headphones to, little tiny earbuds and there's call center, whatever. So we're actually. There's an important thing to note about headsets is a lot of different types. So we're going to be talking about different types. We can talk about different connectivity. We're going to be talking about different, different eras. And so, David, I want to start you off here with a real interesting question that I can't wait to hear the answer because I got, I want to share mine. Before we get into the contemporary lineup, what is, as a, I think you're 95 or something. 95 years old. What is in your career, your favorite headset that you remember? What is it? What is the one that you. That stands, out? Well, I'm gonna, I'm gonna answer that question, but I'm gonna go sideways first. The interesting thing is we've now developed into an era of collaboration and communication where it's not enough to have one device. If I'm having a conversation with you on video, like I am now from my desk, I'm using a microphone on the table, I'm using an open speaker because there's nobody else in my office. But I have a different headset that I use when I'm in an airport, and I have a different headset that I use when I'm in somebody's office. And I have a different. So the modern executives, modern communicators, whatever level they are in an organization, know for sure that they need to have more than one headset based on their circumstances. Now you don't need like a bundle like I have, but yeah, a difference. I am actually still very fond of, the, the Poly Voyager 360s. These, I remember that came out. That's still, that's a current, still current model. You can still get those. It is still. It's still a current model. They made a smaller version. Now the, the interesting thing about these is these were the first control case where you could start and stop music. You could use the case as a Bluetooth transmitter and plug it into like an airplane, if you were flying. The. The case has multiple charges for the headsets. It's giving you data and details. You can change the type of noise cancellation. And, I'm a control freak. So even though I have some better earbuds than these, I actually really like them. I had also been using, and I know you're familiar with it, when I was working for Poly, I had been using the Poly 6002 hundreds, the one that was the neck band with the earpieces. And I would have, Yes, with the red. They had the red, yes. And I would have to pack the case when I traveled because you don't want to keep it loose. You want to have it available. And when it came changing packing a case this big to throwing that in my pocket, this became my go to headset for travel. And I think the quality is good. It's probably. If I were to do it on a scale of 0 to 100, these are probably like 85, 90 in terms of the quality that I'm looking for. It's funny you say that, because I'm pretty excited when those, UC3s came out, and I got one of the very first ones that came out, and I was so excited about it, and I liked them. They were okay, but mine kind of just disintegrated. And, I mean, they literally just kind of disintegrated. And I talked to the product manager at Plantronics about it. He said, yeah, the first batch, we made some changes. And so I think they got. They got them a lot better. But that first batch was, kind of like a disappearing, message or something, you know, or a snap message. But, So. But it was a great concept design. When it comes to my favorite. It's funny because so far we've talked a lot about Plantronics. I have to say I'll give a little. I'll give a little slew here of the Plantronics. They were very generous. They gave out. I. I've got. I worked with Plantronics for a long time, and so I've got a lot of different memories of different products that. But they were very generous. They often sent out an evaluation unit. And, So I've got a lot of memories associated with Plantronics. But the favorite headset that, from Plantronics, or even in general that I still cherish, is. I think, I think they were called the. Oh, no, I forgot the name now. But they were. They were. They were, rubberized. And they were, they were, it was a little, little wrapped around the they were like a sport, a plantronic sport or something like that. And they went into your ear but they didn't, they didn't block your ear. This was the important part of the design was they allowed traffic and car noise and whatever dogs barking. You can still hear that while you're not doing your walk and doing so. And they were weatherproof and they were, they were sharp looking, they were sweat proof in blue and pink and yeah, I still have a pair somewhere. The, the, the difficulty with, with, with a lot of the plant. First of all, the Plantronics headsets were great. And you know, we always, we. I always say a prayer and close my eyes when I think about what happened to Plantronics, then to Polycom, then to Poly, then I don't think there's any that would recognize a headset if they tripped over one. But, but what, what I, what I didn't like about those headsets is they're not repairable. You have built in batteries and when the goes, you toss them. And. Well, I'm, I'm glad you brought that up. And you're right because when those started disappearing, me and my son, my son loved them because he likes to work, to wear bikes. Started buying them up. You know, we're like, we'd find them on ebay or whatever, we'll buy them up. And they came, you know, and, and they often were dead. I mean they were, they were, they looked like they were still in a factory sealed package or something like that. They got, they were on the gray market but, but the those internal batteries died. And they're not the only ones that do that. A lot of these earbuds have non replaceable. They're basically disposable. You might, you might be paying four or five hundred dollars for them. And people don't realize they're disposable. They're banking that you're going to have a new pair by the time these things die. But they often have batteries in them that you can't replace. I see a coup at ces. A couple years ago I found a company that actually had created a prototype. They were in Eureka park of a headset with a replaceable battery. And I thought it was really exciting and I introduced them to a few companies. It never went anywhere. And I think we have to admit that it never went anywhere because the business model is the obsolescence of the product. They want you to keep buying new headsets there. The big brother, the man, whatever you want to call it. It's. The whole idea is that you can't replace an iPhone battery. You've got to get the next generation of the product. So, I think there's some. Some design factor in that. And, you know, in their defense, you know, Bluetooth keeps changing, the phones keep changing. So, you know, there's something, some degree that maybe there is some technology obsolescence. So why not put a disposable battery? But it's a little frustrating because we come from an era where, you know, if you took care of something, it would last a long, long time. So. So I know we. I know everyone's going to want to talk about earbuds. I'm going to hold off on earbuds for just a minute. Let's start off with some of the bigger units. Let me ask you your opinion on, On boom microphone or no microphone? Because a lot of headsets have no boom microphone. What are your. What are your thoughts on that? The. The. They all work. And I'll leave. I'm talking about bigger headsets. Maybe I have. You would be surprised. We'll see what we're going to talk about. What I'm going to pull out. It's a show and tell episode, folks. I have a pair over here, and they had a number of different brand names. Bose was the first one, and then Polly had some. And whatever they work. The problem that you ran into with a lot of these headsets is that you're dealing with a lot of programming to try and figure out what do I capture and what don't I capture. And when it works well, it's great. But when it doesn't work well, there's nothing you can really do. You know, in my best. Scotty. You cannot change the laws of physics, Captain. You know, you. The microphones that are closer to your mouth, that have additional microphones in the boom arm to reject wind noise and other things will always perform better than boomless headsets. You know, the boomless headsets are pretty good. You know, with some AI algorithms in there, it's not. So. So again, depends on what you're looking for. The sweaty feeling of having big cups over my ears. You know, when. When Bose Quiet Comfort first came out, that was the big deal. You saw every flyer carrying one because it was a status symbol, like a Rolex or first class. I remember that. Yeah, but. But I. I couldn't. In fact, American Airlines actually gave them away to their flyers. But, but I, I never liked, they didn't give them away to all fire. You got, you got, you got, you know, you had to be in the whatever club. But, right. I scored a pair after flying not the Mile High Club either. And I, and I, I love them. And then my wife needed some and I gave them to my wife. And that's just like a never ending shoot of garbage. Once it's given to my wife, I'll never see them again. She'll never. Well, the thing is because, because the technology changed and so my first pair of those quiet Bose, comfort whatever were of course corded. And there was a long, you know, corded was the way to go for, the only way to go for a long time. Bluetooth. When Bluetooth was new, it still was pretty bad. So Bluetooth has come a long way. I just had to buy a Bluetooth thing and it was very clear in the instructions, be sure you get Bluetooth 4. It's like most people don't even pay attention to this stuff. But most modern smartphones, most laptops now support Bluetooth 4 and it's a lot more capable than it used to be. And so we come a long way. Now. One thing about the boom that I want to say is that, because you're right, I've worn those headphones. I was walking through like a trade, trade show floor, very noisy environment. And the person I was talking to had no problem hearing me, which is amazing because I couldn't hear myself. But. And so on that sense, remarkable technology. However, you know, the nature of my work, you know, I'm in the, Mission Impossible Missions Force, I have a, I have a lot of very confidential information. And, and and the problem if you don't have a boom is you can't whisper. And so, and so, you know, someone's asking me my ATM code and I want to say Bosco. I want, I really want to whisper that. That's a standfill reference for anyone who didn't get that. But, but you want to be able to whisper and you could whisper with a boom. And so if you happen to be in the Impossible Missions Force or some sort of secret agent or something like that like myself, you may want to prioritize a boom microphone. Another thing on the, on the, Because contact center stuff. Contact center stuff, they tend to buy cheaper headsets. Yeah. But there's a couple things that are really important, you know, so Noise management is really important. The boom we already talked about. Another thing I want to talk about is Bluetooth, versus deck versus wired. What, what is your, what, is your take on, on that? Well, I'm a big believer that contact center agents that are working in a contact center, in a large, you know, bay of computer terminals and everything else really need to go wired, because there's too many other things that can interfere with what's going on. What you're going. This is the. One of the original, black wire headsets that Plantronics, used to make. You could tell it's one of the originals because the black wire actually has a black wire. The newer one, the newer black wires have a red wire. And don't ask me to explain that. I have no idea. But you notice they're, they almost look like the headsets that used to be able to get on airplanes. Very, you know, they're, they're more comfortable, you know, but, but there's not a lot to them. There's a boom, there's a wire and maybe a quick connector, and that's it. And when you're talking about buying headsets for a thousand people, where you're throwing out five a week because of damage or stepping or whatever, you know, it's, it's, it's getting. The cheaper one is something that the black wire is still pretty barred and headset, you're, you're holding it up there as a legacy item. Let me just ask you what kind of, what kind of wire connector is on that, that prop you just showed up? Well, the, the Plantronics in the day had a proprietary connector called quick connect connector that you can see. You can see. And then depending upon what you would need, like to connect that to, at one point a Cisco C60 that I had in the room, I had to get a connector that turns that into two analog jacks for microphones. Okay. All right, so that's, that's what I was going to try to get to. And so, and so we, and the wired headsets it used, telephones in particular are very proprietary, so there's a lot of different issues. Why are you, But even on the music side, there was the small jack, there was the big jack, there's the airplane thing with the two jacks. But now we've kind of moved. Now if you were going to go buy those black wires, there's a good chance I think they would be available in the Bluetooth, format. Is that a reasonable statement? You can get Bluetooth, but I don't again, I think wired in a large. Okay, okay, okay, okay. Let's go back to the USB format. And so we went from the proprietary wiring to a usb, which is a little more universal. We used to have a big black box to convert it to usb and I think now it's gotten a lot smaller or invisible. But, well, they now actually come with USB C and usb, the adapters on the wire. So. Oh, that's true. No more getting the adapter. And I think that was actually really a cool thing to do. But you know, the Bluetooth and whether Bluetooth works in your situation or whether you need to have something that's more secure and, and higher quality really depends on the density. You know, I wake up in the morning and I come down to my kitchen and I get a notice from one of my programs that Bluetooth is off. Bluetooth is not off. You're just in a in a forest of Bluetooth and you can't figure it out. So that's not a good application for Bluetooth. As opposed to dect, which is. DECT is frequency to frequency. It's higher distance, higher resolution, higher quality, goes longer distance and you can put more of them in a space. So. Yeah, yeah, very important. And that is why this is, this is an interesting part of the evolution. So, so Bluetooth was never really practical on something like an airplane, which frustrated people because they wanted Bluetooth on the airplanes, but they solved that. A lot of the newer planes now are putting Bluetooth on and they've solved it by putting the lowest power Bluetooth. I mean, it's literally got a range of about three feet on that, on that thing, which is actually a very clever way of solving it. They pretty much know where you're sitting. So, they've very clever. I thought that was pretty clever. But the other thing that's evolution that we should really talk about very briefly. You know, we were talking about the strategies with the microphone, but we also want to talk about the strategy with the ear, which you mentioned. You know, they're the aftershocks, which is now shocks, makes a bone conduction headset which if you've ever used it for uc, which I have at least their first generation. I haven't used the latest one. But you know, the sound is a little bit more muffled than you would like it to be. It's not very bright. It doesn't have a lot of. It's hard to distinguish voices in a crowded environment. They've actually, you know, often when we talk, when we talk, I think you're not very bright. I've tried to adjust the brightness on the tv, but the content doesn't get any smarter. So that's an old Gallagher joke. The, so, so that's one of the issues. But the other issue is how do I keep my ear clear? How do I make sure that I don't miss an important call at a trade show or at some other place where I'm walking around in front? So we used to use stuff like this. And you know, the, this again, I have the stock of the Plantronics here. But you know, Yealink makes one that looks exactly like this. It's not get into that. And and, and a few others do. But you notice it covers one ear and it keeps the other ear open for conversation. And this used to be the strategy for how I can have a conversation with you and yet still not, you know, have an issue. What, what, what's happened now is many of the manufacturers coming out of Asia and, and some here in the US have switched to a, a, a, a model that looks like this. These are, clear headsets that, that you and I have both tried. And I've got a demo of this on video. I'll try and put a link in for it. But this sits over your ear. It's not covering my ear in any way. And I did, a 45 minute phone call with somebody yesterday, when I was at an industry event. They heard me just fine. I didn't raise my voice. I heard them. You couldn't write back to earbuds here? I can't wait to talk about these player because I got, I got, I got, I got a pair right here. I didn't know they're called clear though. I thought they were called, I thought they were called talking points. Yeah, but load your own logo. We're going to dive into earbuds here real quickly, but real soon. But before we get into the earbuds, I think you, you made a really interesting point though about the bone conduction technology or, I don't know, conduct, I think of the word conduction. I, I, I, you know, obviously you don't hear through your bones and so, the same way you hear through your ears, I should say so. So your point there about it being not as bright, I think is important Now. Now there's been two interesting evolutions of that. And the first evolution was an over the ear and bone conduction My son has a pair of those. He raves about them. I have not tried them. But his bone conducting in the front and over the year like you described, on the back and he raised about it. And again, he's into bicycling, so he needs to be able to hear traffic and stuff like that. I have a friend of mine who's a swimmer and he bought a brand. It wasn't the same. What's the brand that makes the bunk shocks? I think it's called. It was a different brand. And the issue here was because, when you're swimming, the Bluetooth isn't very good. And so he had to get, he has like this little boombox he sits next to the pool, which is not a Bluetooth transmitter, it's more like a deck or something like that receiver. I don't know what it is. And then he goes in with the bone conducting. And I don't know if it has over the ear or not, but it might. But he, he, he swims with it. He says it's great and he really likes really enjoying swimming. It's amazing to me that you can now go swim with with good earphones or headphones. Well, audio propagation will work during, through the air, but it works very poorly through a medium of water. So that's a case where bone conduction would really work well. Yeah, it's the difference between a slightly muffled sound and no sound at all. And Shokz has also started to make companies for, for the disabled population. Make headsets for the disabled population. You know, helped improve hearing and do some other things. So, so you know, kudos to them finding that niche. It's, it's just one of many choices that you're able to make when you're doing, Yeah. Okay, so one more thing before we get into the earbuds. Hi fi, hi fi. Hi Fi. What if you want to listen to your favorite music at home in your living room, after other people have gone to sleep. What do you read for? Those are the cases where I'll use an over the ear, headset. And and actually the, the, the again, you know, I have a large stock of poly because I work there. But I, I, I have an old plantronics before it was UC capable before they, that was when they still had the consumer brand. I'm an old one of those which is both wired and Bluetooth. And that's, that's my go to unit. I keep it charged. I can pull it out and listen to music that as often as I used to. Most of the times when I'm listening to music it's when I'm on an airplane and I'm too tired to keep my eyes open. I I have an old pair of Plantronics like that I don't think they ever went to market. I think Plantronics sent to me before they like, like an early testing whatever kit and I forget what it's called. Plant products one like that, a really high end, very high quality headphone. I still have them but again they've disintegrated because they didn't really have the right materials for the So I've got now I' electrical tape all over it trying to cover up all the stuff. The material was. Let's pause there for a second because that's actually a really important point that we need to get to briefly, tangentially is companies have been trying to figure out form factor in addition to audio quality and propagation. The ones you were describing before were a loose band around the back of the neck and they also. There are companies that make one that was a hard band around the neck and put it in there and the hard band would vibrate if you were getting a call. You have over the head. You have you know, some of these things which, which you know that, that you know it's, it's smaller and over the head with, with a shorter boom. These are the Jabra evolves. But yeah, it's what is the form factor that people like. And you know you run into a very, even an earbuds, or over the ear. In the ear. On the ear. Yeah. Correct. Yeah. And, and, and the answer is there's no right answer because people have their favorites. And it varies. I know men tend to more like very big over the ear pieces than typically ladies do. Ladies tend to have earbuds more because they don't mess up their hair which is. Well, earbuds weren't a choice 30 years ago. Right. And so you had to have over the head and yeah. Mess up the hair, messed up the hats. You might want to wear all kinds, all kinds of issues. And so, so now there's all this choice and it's such a strong preference. It's very strong preference. So I just was going to say about the Oh, about the hi Fi stuff now I haven't done a lot of comparison shopping with over the hi Fi stuff. Those tend to be higher end headphones. But I tell you, I'm a sucker. I had. I'm a sucker. My first job in high school was working in a stereo store. And we were a normal stereo store, but right across the mall was the Bang and Olsen store. And I've always been a sucker for being an old. I, I just love that stuff. And I think one of the most interesting, brand things that came out with Cisco and Bang and Olsen getting together and, and they now got a whole line but when they first launched it was just one very high end over the year, living room type of headphone that was also a headset you could use for meetings. And I thought that was a really interesting brand stuff. So I have no idea whether they're the best headphones out there or not and compared them. But I take a lot of pride knowing that I've got a pair of B and O, high end headphones because I. Let me make, let me make two points about that. The first one is you have to understand the history of our industry a little bit. You know, Snorakaspu, who's in charge of. Oh God, he's in charge of everything. Collaboration, you know, the products, everything that's going on. He had retired a number of years ago, left Cisco, didn't want to go to a competitor because he felt a lot of loyalty for the brand and he went to work for Bang and Olsen for a couple of years and that he's bridged that relationship and he brought over a couple of people as well, from the design side. So that's one of the reasons that that relationship came up. I go back to the science when it comes to high end headsets. Now you can kind of see over my shoulder, hidden behind the talking, points, pickets, badges. You know, I've been a judge for the CES Innovation Awards on and off for the last 17 or so years. And a couple of years I do the high end audio and I, when I look at the high end audio devices to judge, There was one, one year there was a $5,000 pair of headphones. Yeah. And I go back to the science and I say human hearing at its best. And I'm miles past that is 20 hertz to 20,000 hertz. Yeah. Nobody's very younger humans than us, but yes, yes. Nobody's going to get you more than that. They can, they can maintain less, you know, noise, less static be true. People who are claiming that they hear better sound when they take a marker going around the edge of the CD or they, they take a $300 headset and a $3,000 headset and they can tell you that they hear the difference. There's very little difference other than what you're doing in terms of reference audio. The best, most expensive industry headsets are the ones that are not doing anything to the sound. Tell me what it feels like, naked. But the $5,000 headsets, one year. I mean my rating for that was. Are you effing kidding? That's a status symbol. That's not a, any kind of audio quality. So, so yeah, I've, I've experienced that. But the brand, like here's you and I both love the Cisco Bang and Olsen, earbuds. I know we're not on earbuds yet, but this is the co branded one that you were talking about. Do the headsets work really well? Yes. Are, they branded really nicely? Yes. Where in the case did they leave room for the damn dongle? I've got it taped on here with a piece of tape so you know that's, they're missing Gavin Ivestor. Gavin should have fixed this, but you know, he switched sides. He's now on the Cisco side. But, but the, the, the key here is it's not always just the sound. It's the accessory, it's the package, it's the brand, it's the battery life. It's a lot of other things into it. Well, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll counter that because I got, I got the same thing right here. And I'll counter that and I'll say I've never ever used that dongle. So the question is, do you do, do, do you. I don't, I don't have taped on. I've never used it. I don't care about it. And so the question is, like you said, we have different headsets for different things. And so I use these typically when I travel and I'm just using Bluetooth. And so the question is, and that's why we have some different headsets is how do you design it for who, who is the use case you're designing it for? So you made me think of two different thoughts there, David, One of them is, you know, you talked about how AI is changing all this stuff in these fancy headsets and what they're doing to the, and it's the same thing's happening in photography, right? Because these new smartphones are Getting so fancy, you can tell them manipulating the picture and, and sometimes just the beauty of art, going through light, going through a lens is just, it's just what you want. So it's that, you know, same thing. But the other thing I want to mention that you triggered on was reference, audio. Yes. 20,000 hertz on the high end is what the human ear is capable of. Most of us can't get that high and as you get older, we lose that stuff. Which is why, because one of the differences between FM and AM Radio is FM can go much higher frequency than AM can, which is why old people love AM radio. They're not missing anything on AM reading. It sounds the same to me because they've lost all those higher frequencies. But anyway, so let's, let's, let's get back to, headsets here. So, I think we need to talk about differentiators because that's really what we're buying right now. Whether you're buying portability, whether you're buying features, whether you're buying quality, whether you're buying brand. I mean, this is a, a, a headset that, that got sent to me by a company called Volume, V, A I It's called the rec dot. And if you look very carefully, there's the dot. Okay, so you put this on, you put them on, you listen to music, you listen to whatever you like. It works just fine. The case is key charging, so you can stick it on a key charger and it works just fine. But if you, if I'm having this conversation with you in the wild, we met at an airport or, or at a coffee shop and I want to record the conversation and transcribe it. You press the button, or you can press the button on the app or I think there's a way to do it on the earpiece as well. And all of a sudden it's recording both parts of the conversation and it's not recording it to teams and it's not recording it to zoom. And it's not recording it to any other walled garden. It's recording it to your phone and instantly transcribing it. And then you can. I'm just going to put on my, old man, my old man glasses here. And I'm going to say, is it also putting a recording tone On the line? I don't know if it's doing that. I haven't used it for that. I've used it for the. Because I'll still use the recording in zoom, when I'm doing zoom, and the recording in teams. The convenience of this, you're going to start to see more and more products coming to market is I can casually record the conversation. Most of them. I just want to point out the recording laws are actually really weird. Recording on telephone is what the laws are written for. So some states require that you had to notify and then they do the tone and stuff like that. But, those laws don't really apply to meetings necessarily. Right. And they, and they don't apply to conversations that were happening you might have in person. And, and so it's really interesting how and they also don't apply to transcripts. And so you could have an AI technology create a complete transcript without having to do a recording notification. So you didn't actually record the conversation. So it's really kind of talk. Talk about how the laws have become obsolete, from their intent. But all right, let's dive in here to earbuds, because you raise a really important issue here. And so, I travel with these that we just held up with Cisco. One of my favorite features on these is indeed noise reduction. And so traveling a lot, you want to block out that jet sound. Now that was the killer feature you mentioned earlier of the Bose quiet comforts and the big over the ear. That was what made them so popular. And people would even put them on even if they weren't listening to music or anything just because they did such a nice job. It's amazing technology. It's actually just absolutely amazing technology. What's going on to make that happen. I never would have thought it would be possible because the whole idea is it's covering your ear and so, and then it's canceling the noise. I would never thought that would be possible with an earbud that's not covering your ear. But the same technology works pretty well. And so when it comes to traveling, I don't do an over the ear type, of headphone because these are specifically designed to let that noise in. So I think you really have to think about what is your purpose. And these would be terrible for a bike ride. This would be terrible for things where you need to be able to hear a little bit of background noise. And interestingly this past Cesar, there was a company whose name escapes me right now that was doing a headset in that same form factor that Clear had over the ear, not, not in the ear that was including noise cancellation. And, I said, you're kidding. How can you do that if you're not blocking the ear? So we can do it. It's not great, but we can do it. And I put it on. And he's right. It took down about 5 or 6 decibels in the general area. So it's, it's, you know, active noise cancellation is simply picking up the noise around you and creating the inverse of it going into your ear. So they're able even to do that with open ear headsets, which I think is. Now, we've talked about noise. Let's talk about germaphobes, because these clear headsets, have a germaphobe feature. Why don't you, why don't you explain, explain that one. Yeah. If you take the headset out and, and, and you put it back in the case and close it, the case tells you that it is. There it is. Oh, there it is. Yeah. Yep. UVC sterilizing. Now, having lived through a pandemic, I don't think anybody ever proved that UVC actually sterilizes anything, but it might. So it definitely makes people feel better that it's on the, on the unit, amongst its many features. I have to say I would feel better if the battery went from full to empty when it did that. I feel better like it was putting, you know, thousands of voltage into this UVC stuff. But it has a battery in here and it does several charges. But, I have no idea whether it's a gimmick or not. But why not? Why not put that feature in there? They do that form factor, those clear. ARC 3 is the model that we're talking about. They make a version for gaming, which is the one that has the dongle. So if you want to use it with your computer, you need that one. It's also got a lower latency, which is important to gamers. They make a version for sports. The sports version will give you heart rate and do other readings that you can get through your ear. So that's very nice. And then they make one for general music. So, you know, again, we're starting to see these differentiators and you have to figure out which ones are important to you. An important point to make. We were talking about the recording ones and some of the other ones. Most of the UC platforms that we talk to, Microsoft, teams, Zoom. I don't know if Google's talked about it yet, but they've talked about how they're coming up with features where you can take your smart device, your, your mobile or your phone and put it on a table and record an impromptu meeting. And that's an added feature where instead of you're just transcribing the call, you're transcribing an impromptu conversation. The problem with that in my mind is I would need to give up my mobile device for the half hour conversation I'm having and I would start feeling, you know, like itching down my back. It's like, am I getting any emails and what's going on in the world? And I'm disconnected from my device and oh my God. Help. Help. So I've also seen some third party products that are like the size of a card that do exactly the same thing that you plug into your computer or those headphones or whatever where you don't have to give up your mobile device. So again, it's all, it's all. If we're, if we're deciding on headphones, if we've passed the quality barrier and we've passed the battery life barrier and now we're deciding on features, we're doing the right thing. Interesting. We've talked about number brands, we've talked a lot about Plantronics, we've talked a little bit about Cisco, we've talked a little bit about Logi. We talked about Clear. One, big player that hasn't come up yet is Jabra. And Jabra's, they're the first ones. I don't know if they're the first ones that actually did it, but the first ones that I came across that had the, we've talked a lot about the passive noise but they're the first ones that had an earbud that had a microphone on the outside and you could adjust, you could adjust on your app how much transparency you wanted, of the outside noise to come into the inside. I always thought that was a brilliant feature and again, I don't know if they were actually the first to deliver that, but they're the first ones that I had. I thought it was a brilliant feature because I loved, I love those plantronics I told you about the bright corded ones for that very feature. The problem I had with that is there was just a slight delay, and so you hear this noise would happen and you kind of hear it and then it comes in a little bit later on the headphones. But, but I thought that was actually a pretty clever. And Jabra is a pretty major headphone maker, especially now with Plantronics has dropped off. I mean, absolutely. Jabra is owned by GN Communications, which is their primary business is, hearing aids. And they've done some really good things with that. There's also an interesting product that came on the market from a company called Luxottica, which you may or may not have ever heard of, but they make 99% of the glasses in the world. Yeah, whatever. And you're talking about Ray Ban or anything else. They make everything. They came out with something they called Nuance a couple of years ago, which has just gotten FDA approved a few months ago. Where the microphones are here in the temples of a plastic pair of glasses and the speakers just over your ear. And it's for people, me that are starting to, you know, lose some of those high ends where I can look at somebody and I can hear them a little bit better. I think that's an interesting product. The glasses look horrible. They're dorky, they're black plastic, glasses. But that's an interesting feature. And you know you guys are starting to see some, some fringe companies starting to add features that, that would be really interesting. Yeah, so that's where we're going with Facebook because they've got the Ray Ban glasses and they've got the the speaker. And this is actually, you know, I have a really bad, I have really bad face blind. I can never remember anyone's names or faces, whatever. So I love the idea of having this AI remind me of who somebody is or something like that. I think that's just brilliant. And be able to record stuff. I think that's brilliant but not quite there yet. At least to, at least I'm not there yet, but maybe it's coming. And we did mention Logi. I should just point out Logi has made a very big deal over the last year and a half talking about how they've removed the dongle that they're now doing high bandwidth audio connections to PCs or whatever without needing to plug in a dongle. And I know that Plantronics had worked on that for a little while as well. I haven't tried them. But you know, again, feature differentiation is what's going to matter. Yeah, there's actually, you know, we're going to list all the brand, a lot of great brands have come, come, gone. You know, Sennheiser's always been a great name and in audio and I, I, I actually was really excited about my son. Another, another category aviation, headphones. And, And then. And Plantronics does a good job in aviation headphones on the big jets, but the little jets where you need a lot of noise protection. Plantronics doesn't do that. But Sennheiser, this beautiful set, and I remember getting them from my son and said, this is Sennheiser, a great brand, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, they discontinued those like a year later. So it's, It's a shame. But. But, that was a, that was a more of a. Of a business thing where Demont had owned. You know, you had Sennheiser and you had epos, and then they separated out and they. I think they've been trying to flip EPOs and they haven't had success with doing that yet. So it's kind of hard to keep track of the. The. The patent place going on over there. Yeah, a lot of, Lot of stuff going on there. So, earbuds. I think we've already covered everything without even talking about the earbuds yet. So. So what kind of earbud? What kind of earbuds? What are your go. What are your go to earbuds? Well, we already talked about the, the Poly Voyager 360. My next set are the Bose headsets that Hilton gave me because, I became a lifetime diamond. So, nice, without a doubt, are the best sounding, earbuds that I've ever had. When you put them in your ear, they send a blast of noise in your ear. Very, very low. It doesn't hurt you. And it actually specs out the ear canal and adjusts it for you. And when I put these on, on an airplane, I don't hear the airplane at all, which kind of scares me a little bit because I kind of like to hear for crashing or if there's an announcement coming on board. But these are probably the best sounding ones. But I still use these as secondary when I'm. Nothing you can do. If it's crashing, you may as well enjoy the music. So. So, but. But I have a pair of Bose earbuds and they don't look anything like that. I don't. I wish I would have grabbed them. Mine are like a little long, long thing. Yours is a deep one. Yeah, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll come up with the, with the, name. They're the, They're the. They're the Bose Quiet Comfort Ultra Earbuds. That's that. That's what my Phone knows them as. And those are your go to for travel. Those. Well, the, the, the Voyager 360s. And when those batteries need to be recharged, I switch to the Bose. And then I struggle putting the, the, the, the poly units back in because the Bose sounds so much better. I see, I see, I see. I, I, I, I have the Bose and I have the, the, the Cisco. I, I tend to use the Cisco more. I, I think I prefer the Cisco. But, my problem with these, with any of them actually, maybe it's my ears, but my, I always drop them and your, but always falls out and I, I kind of want them to go back to the string around them because if, if you're walking, you know, on an airplane or something like that, you want, you know, unloading and it's all traffic jam. I think you lose an earbud and you can't even figure out where it went. It's like really a bad thing to happen. And so I would prefer, I want to bring the cord back. That makes sense. I'll tell you why the bows aren't on the top of my list. It's nothing to do with the quality of the units because they're great. I have, when I travel, I have an iPad that I use and I have, a phone that I use and I need it to work with both of them. And the way the Bose app is designed, it can only connect to one at any one time. So with all of the other, earbuds that I use on airplanes, I'm able to make a setting on one and it carries over to the other. But with the Bose, I have to literally disconnect it from one and connect it to the other so that I can adjust the app on that one. And again, it could very easily be a quirk of me not understanding how to operate it, but that's something that will prevent me from. You know what I'd rather, I'm not going to screw that. I'd rather use what's working. You know, we haven't mentioned, and maybe we shouldn't, we haven't mentioned The Apple, AirPods. Are you an Apple user? Do you have those? I am an Apple user. I am not an AirPod user. I was an Apple Watch user and I've now given it up for this, $25 watch that does everything that I needed to do and doesn't ask me to give a blood sample and fingerprint and all the rest of the things that you need to do when you're switching the Apple Watch around. Apple lost the customer because they made it so hard to use their product. And you know what I found? Other than the one feature that I can't seem to get on any of these watches, which is dual time zone, I don't miss it for a second. I have everything that I need. I have all the step counters, I have all the time. I have the heart rate, I have everything else. It looks like an Apple watch to the untrained eye. And it cost me again under $30. So, Apple lost me and the same thing. I know these earbuds that I'm talking to you about, and they'll go anywhere from a hundred dollars to two hundred or three hundred dollars. Apple overpriced their buds like the Beats people did because they're trying to sell the brand and the label and I'm not, always going the other direction. Give me the non designer jeans, give me the cheap reject jeans. I don't want to ever support branding for the sake of branding out of my wallet. So, yeah, that's why I don't go with Apple. Well, I don't do the Apple just simply because I have an Android phone and they don't work so well on the Android phone. And I have a Garmin watch by the way, and I'm feeling, I very rarely take off my Garmin watch and I'm charging it right now. I figured it would be safe to sit here, do a video without my Garmin watch, but I'm missing it. And I love that garment watch. And so no, Apple in my life. I actually say that I use the MacBook. But, but I think we have to talk about, because the AirPods are pretty popular. People love them. I just, we just can't comment on them. I know, I know they're out there. You know, when I was working with a brand that was competing against the AirPods, I always made the point that if you're taking a business call on them and they're not encrypted and you only have one in your ear and the other one's back at your desk, how do you know somebody else didn't put the other earbud in and listening to your call? They weren't really set up for business communication. And I still think that, I still think they're a consumer device. There's where from our last video, there's where you can talk about a consumer device versus a business device. I'm not sure I'm following you on that. Are you saying that if you had something like the Cisco or something like that, that one ear wouldn't work if I looked on my desk? I'm saying that the Apple, AirPods are so ubiquitous, people leave them lying around all over the place. They don't think of the business application, as opposed to these, where you are actually thinking of the business application. Okay, but they're equally secure. They're. They're equally secure. I don't know. Let's. Let's put, let's put a, put a pin on that and come back to it. I've always felt that the security is a little bit stronger on some of the ones made for uc. Okay, have we covered everything with that? Like I said, I kept on trying to save earbuds to the end, but I think we've covered everything on these earbuds. Yeah, no, we've covered everything. The only thing we didn't talk about we're not going to spend time doing today is when you have this ability to not put in headphones. You know, whether you're talking about, you know, microphones that we're both using right now or, you know, a speaker microphone puck or something, or, you know, here's a, Here's a cool one that I like that I always like to show. That comes with a magnet. So, you know, I keep it in the thing above me, and it just kind of. You can stick it anywhere you want. It's like, it's like the, the scented thing where, you know, you ever want to have an extra thing, just shove it on the car and you've got audio. So there are a lot of those. Some are more geared for uc, some are more geared for, for. For audio. But they're, they're small and rechargeable and really cool. So when you have the opportunity to use them, it's great to use. All right. More props. You didn't show us everything you got. I think actually the only thing we didn't talk about that I guess we could talk about just a little bit is, you know, this goes way back. This is a Plantronics, Voyager. I think this is the Legend, or this is the case of Legend. And you can see it's in a glossy, shiny box. When you buy it, sometimes it opens up and it's got a clear thing where you can look at the product. And if you look at the latest products that are coming out, you know, they're. They're in plain cardboard Non painted. Definitely thinking more about sustainability. If you look at the Jabra, the Jabra actually spells it out for you. That's why we reduced the packaging, you know, and so, so that you're starting and Logic's got some sort of score on theirs, whatever. But, but, but it's not just, I mean, you know, kudos to them. And it's not just about sustainability. It's also because you're less likely to be buying these things in retail like you used to. And so it used, used to go to, you know, best. I'll say Circuit. You used to go to Circuit City and hold up that plantronics box, in an aisle and decide whether you wanted to buy it. And of course that, that kind of, retail shopping packaging is much more important. When you're clicking online and, and, and trying to, you know, looking at online pictures and whatnot, the box really doesn't matter. And so we're seeing that, even, you know, buy a toaster. I mean a toaster used to come in a big glossy box. And also if you have less air in the box, then you can get more boxes per case and more cases per pallet and it becomes less expensive to ship and it's good for everybody. And then, and then on the sustainability stuff, a lot of them are using, post recycled, materials, plastics, they're using less Styrofoam. I mean it is more than, than just the box. But it's great to see that. It's just, it's just so unnecessary, so wasteful. And so that, that's great to the whole, to the industry as a whole. So, I think we've covered most things here and I think it's a pretty informative conversation. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna go back to listening to my music. I'll let you close this out. Okay. All right, well, thank. Thanks folks for watching the episode of of Talking Points. And And we'll be back with something equally compelling in the, in the.