Over my life, with audio, I’ve gone through a lot of things. I have learned so much, and I have had to unlearn others. But the thing that I believe has affected me lately is the understanding that gimmicks don’t mean anything. Look, I get it when apple of other come out and show you some cool feature, like shaking your head to answer; everyone goes crazy and thinks to themselves that they have to have this feature. I’ve gone through it over and over. Things like reading my text message that I’ve quoted about for years have led the way for some of my reviews. Apple can read your heart rate in workouts and translate speech. Cool right? I mean, who wouldn’t want an earphone that does all this?
And yet, when something like the Sennheiser MTW5 hits the shelves, I question everything. Their sole extra feature isn’t some gimmick. No! Their sole feature is giving users the ability to change out their own battery, find my earphones, and a battery protection mode, all there to make sure that you, the user, have a long life with the earphones, so that you don’t have to buy another pair of earphones for years and years to come. Not the ability to have voice controls or lights on the earphones. No, Sennheiser’s direction is one of usefulness and things that actually matter for the life of the unit. And this was something I had to slowly understand and come to terms with during my time with the unit. I started to see that the things I truly need are what the MTW 5 actually did. When I’m listening to my earphones and I’m in that holographic world the MTW 5s create, I don’t want my text message to come over my sound and be read to me …throwing me off and out of my zone. I most definitely don’t need it to read my heart rate or translate anything. I’ve had these features available on other earphones for years, and do you know how many times I’ve used that feature in a real-life scenario? ZERO!
When hype and the gimmicks are finally understood …I found myself needing only the core things. FIT, SOUND, BATTERY LIFE, ANC, HEAR-THRU, PHONE CALL ABILITY, PORTABILITY, AND RELIABILITY(CONTROLS, ABILITY TO PLAY WITHOUT SKIPPING AND DROPPING OUT, and how long they will last). This is truly what it always comes down to. This is what it is for me. I also don’t even use Multi-Point, even though my MTW% has it. So honestly, I can’t tell you why I let the world and the companies that push these other issues as the be all to all things. It has taken a while for me to understand that I don’t use all the gimmick stuff, hence why they are called gimmicks.
So when you look at this like this, it makes a lot of different earphones eligible for consideration for greatness, and that is a great thing. Things like the AirPods Pro 3 on Android are considered for greatness now because they only cover the core things. Things like the Boss are considered for greatness, and others. But for me, the Sound and Fit of the Sennheiser place it firmly in the top spot for the core things listed for me. Yours may be something else, and that’s fine. All I’m saying is that I’ve personally wasted a lot of time counting gimmicks and features I never use as a bar for measuring greatness, and now I see the core things are what I should focus on, especially things like the ability to change out the batteries to keep the use of the earphones in play for years.
Tech-N-Things 