Review: Sony bluetooth headphones – MDR 1RBT

We went wireless, and now we can't go back

The day has finally come where we got to test a pair of wireless headphones, and have decided that we can now never go back to the constraints of being plugged in. Firstly, for a lot of people one of the fiddliest and flimsiest parts of our audio device, be it smartphone or mp3, is the headphone jack. Eventually, you get to the point where walking around gives you a strange, Millhouse-fiddling-with-the-radio-style effect that leaves sound coming and going from left to right, and sometimes not at all. With the wireless option, that is eliminated, and we get all the glorious sound as we were supposed to. Did we mention the wireless thing? This makes it easier to pop them in your gym bag or to bring them into work for the commute, without also having to deal with the dreaded wire tangle that comes with other headphones. The MDR series started life as the only pair of headphones most DJs would use, with the MDR v6, and while they might have gone through various incarnations in the past, they've always presented some great sound quality. With these, that tradition has continued, and while at very low levels of volume you can hear a slight hum in the background, in the usual day to day of walking around the place, but you may notice it at night, in your room alone while listening to some quiet and sad music. If that's the case, then you should change up your routine and flick off the music for a bit. There are also a series of controls on the side of the headphones which make life that little bit easier too, so you don't have to reach in and out of your pocket all the time to get at your phone or mp3. In terms of comfort, these were fantastic, and we noted the difference between these and our regular headphones straight away. Also, when wearing our glasses (hipster ones of course, there are no lenses in them, just for the stylish look) they didn't push in our ears on top of them, which is a problem with a lot of over ear headphones. Mainly, this was because they sit all the way over the ear, and not on top of it, which makes a lot of headphones uncomfortable to wear for long periods of time. That's not an issue here, as they were like two soft marshmallow clouds on our head. The battery life was also brilliant on these, and we ended up charging them only once in a three week period, and we would have used them most days. You could also go a decent distance away from the device you were using to play the music and still get an uninterrupted signal. The only slight drawback is the fact that these cost a decent bit, coming in at just over €300 on Amazon, which we'll admit ain't cheap. That said, if you invest in these, that's most certainly the end of your headphone buying days, and between comfort, sound quality and the fact that you can live without wires if you get them, we think they're pretty great. There's also no contest between these and something like a pair of Beats either.