A few months ago at the Samsung Galaxy S 3 announcement event, I noticed another mobile editor wearing a pair of Bluetooth earbuds that were unlike any other I had previously seen. For a while now, if you wanted to use Bluetooth A2DP to listen to music, you really needed to do one of two things. Either buy an A2DP adapter that exposes a 3.5mm stereo plug, and then bring your own pair of headsets or in ear monitors, or buy a relatively expensive pair of purpose-built Bluetooth headsets and live with them. The problem has been that the overwhelming majority are bulky, on ears or awkwardly shaped over the ears models that don’t really emulate earbuds or in-ear form factor headphones. Since getting to play with the BackBeat Gos, I’ve become aware of a few other similar Bluetooth wireless earbuds, but this is a relatively new form factor I feel like a lot of people have been waiting for to come to fruition.

So when I saw the Plantronics BackBeat Go model in the wild, I knew I had to give it a shot. Reviewing headsets or earbuds isn’t my normal coverage area, but I couldn’t resist playing with a mobile accessory of some kind, and after all, anything Bluetooth is tangentially related to smartphones.

The form factor is pretty basic – two earbuds at both ends of a short cable, with an in-line controller and microphone. The earbuds are a bit oversized compared to normal ones, but this is where the BackBeat Go places the battery and microUSB charging port. On the right side, the top rubber peels off revealing that microUSB charging port underneath. Charging works either with the supplied AC adapter or any normal microUSB charger. It’s also on the right side earbud that Plantronics has located the charge and status LED, which glows orange while charging and blue when fully charged.

The BackBeat Gos are clearly designed for right-handed users, as the inline controller box is closer to the right side of the cable than the left. There’s volume up, down, an action button, and power. Also on this box is a small notch which serves as the microphone window.

The cable is rubberized and flat, not circular, and not much longer than shoulder length. The idea is to let the earbuds drape over your shoulders, with the cable going around the back of your neck. That said I’ve also worn them going forwards, with the cable hanging down in front of my face.

Inside the package there are three sets of rubber earbud sleeves, and a set of stabilizers which can fit on the side and press against the ear to hold the earbuds in place. In practice, I had a difficult time finding a size that fit and made a good seal in my ear canal. When it comes to earbuds that go into the ear, I’m more of a fan of the in ear monitor approach which involves foam that you squeeze down, insert, then allow to expand, rather than simple rubber seals. Getting a good seal is important because it both is going to impact the attenuation of ambient noise, and defines the resonant cavity inside your ear canal. Without a good seal, things will sound fundamentally different. Unfortunately the silicone tips are the BackBeat Go's biggest shortcoming, as I find myself constantly hunting through the three available sizes to no avail – supplying something foam based which expands would go a long way to fixing this problem.

Each earbud is definitely heavier than an otherwise passive one, but this is because there’s both a Bluetooth receiver SoC, battery, and other components inside the modules. The result is that the two are definitely larger than normal, but not so heavy they fall out of the ear.

The BackBeat Go has an internal lithium ion battery which charges over microUSB, and draws around 170 mA at 5V to do so. Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR is supported, with profiles A2DP 1.2, AVRCP, HFP v1.5, and HSP v1.1. Unfortunately the BackBeat Gos don’t support the apt-X Bluetooth audio codec, instead I saw subband codec (SBC) used on the platform I could get this information on.

Thanks to the FCC, we have some idea what’s inside the BackBeat Go headsets. It’s impressive that things have been miniaturized enough that it’s possible to cram everything required for Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR A2DP, battery, and the speaker drivers themselves into two small packages.

The two earbuds contain vastly different components. Inside the left module is the speaker driver, and a circular Li-Ion battery that takes up the rest of the volume.

The right module contains all the other circuitry required for the headsets, a small Bluetooth SoC, and a few other packages on a few boards, which in turn wrap around a center module. Unfortunately I can’t make out what controller or solution is at the center of this all.

The controller board is relatively basic as well, containing four switches and microphone.

It looks as though the BackBeat go antenna is in that right earbud module, and it’s a very small –1.8 dBi internal PCB antenna.

The BackBeat Go doesn’t support pairing to multiple devices. I’ve used the earbuds with my 2011 MacBook Pro, Windows 7 Desktop, iPhone 4S and countless Android devices (One X, One S, SGS3, Huawei Ascend P1) successfully, but you’ll have to forget and pair again to each new host device when you want to change.

The controller reports battery level, and on the iPhone you get the standard indicator with state of charge. There’s nothing really out of the ordinary about how the BackBeat Go pairs and works with Bluetooth host devices, other than that the usual split between A2DP and HFP/HSP remains, and you can’t use both functions at the same time (eg hands free operation alongside A2DP stereo audio). This means you can’t really use the BackBeat Go as a gaming headset and get stereo audio alongside the microphone, unless you fall all the way back to mono audio. At least, I wasn’t able to make this work on Windows 7 with CS:GO and my generic miniature Bluetooth dongle.

SBC Codec used

I spent a lot of time playing with the Bluetooth Explorer developer tool which is a part of Xcode on OS X. This exposes some conflicting information from the Plantronics datasheet, specifically that the core version is Bluetooth 3.0 + HS. In addition we can see the controller vendor is Cambridge Silicon Radio (CSR) which isn’t a surprise at all considering their huge presence in the Bluetooth audio peripheral space. Unfortunately I can’t identify exactly what controller is inside beyond that.

That tool also allows one to enumerate all the different Bluetooth profiles that are available. Headset isn’t available despite the datasheet including HSP in the list, though HFP is essentially the replacement for that profile. Secure simple pairing also is present, which I’d wager basically everyone is familiar with. Again you can only pair the headsets to one device at a time, multiple host pairing is not supported.

While I heard good audio quality on Windows, iPhone, and Android devices, OS X left a lot to be desired, with frequent hitching and stuttering for some reason. A trip into the special options pane in Bluetooth Explorer allows one to increase the A2DP bitpool minimum, which resolved the problem.

Oddly enough it seems as though the defaults in Mountain Lion don’t include apt-X enabled out of the box, but checking this didn’t do anything for me, again, because the BackBeat Go doesn’t support it. I find it very curious that OS X has such strange defaults considering Apple’s continual push on device makers to support the maximum bitpool for iOS Bluetooth devices.

Plantronics rates the BackBeat Go as having up to 4.5 hours of talk time when used for Bluetooth calling, and 4 hours of play time when used as an A2DP device. That’s not a whole lot of battery life, but that’s the tradeoff that gets made when you’re talking about a Bluetooth device with very little volume that can be dedicated to battery.

Of course, I’m not satisfied with just citing manufacturer specs for battery life, and went ahead and measured the BackBeat Go audio playback time. To do this, I paired the earphones with an HTC One S and played an album on repeat, with the volume on the earphones set to 70%. I then placed the earbuds next to the One S (so there was good Bluetooth signal) with one of the earbuds inside a bag with a microphone.

In this manner it was possible to easily measure how long until the BackBeat Go battery died. I ran the test twice, and wound up with an average run time of 3.4 hours, which is just short of the cited 4 hours for A2DP, but relatively close. It’s possible they’re citing that number based on the earbuds being driven at a lower volume level, though 70% is where I often listened on the BackBeat Gos partially because of the lack of great isolation.

Performance

It’s hard to be overly critical about the audio performance of the BackBeat Gos since they’re so volume constrained. Inside each earbud is a ton of volume dedicated to battery and the Bluetooth controller, and relatively little volume dedicated to the actual 6mm neodymium drivers.

On the whole, sound quality is nothing to be terribly excited about, but is good enough for casual listening. I’ve never been dissatisfied with A2DP at the maximum bitpool on any device, though at the same time there is a perceptible difference between A2DP and a good analog output. I would say that sound quality on the BackBeat Go is more gated by its earphone performance and construction than the use of SBC codec.

Most of my complaints about the BackBeat Go sound quality boil down to the lack of a good seal between the earbud’s small rubber sleeve and the ear canal. With a good seal, I found the listening experience surprisingly enjoyable. Mids and bass are decent, though somewhat lacking compared to either of my usual go-to IEMs (Shure SE115 or SE 535). That said, I’d characterize the experience as more than adequate for casual listening. Given the small size of the drivers, I’d say the BackBeat Go audio quality is actually surprisingly decent.

Without a good seal, I found suppression less than ideal and bass and mids very underdriven. This is really the overarching problem I experienced with the BackBeat Go – the earbuds either slowly slide out of my ear canals, or movement of my head perturbs them, and I lose the seal and soundstage entirely. That obviously makes use while exercising challening. Thankfully there isn’t much sound communication between the cable and the earbud either; there's no noise transmitted through the cable when moving around with the cable rubbing on clothing.

Input latency is the other big concern, and on the two devices I tested, there wasn’t enough to distract from watching Netflix or YouTube videos. Some of this is a function of what the encode implementation is like on the host device, but on iOS and the HTC One X I was able to watch Netflix without perceptible audio lag.

You can also of course use the BackBeat Gos to talk on the phone as there’s a microphone in the controller midsection. I called a few people and asked how I sounded, and audio quality wasn’t super great. I was told that I sound like most car audio Bluetooth solutions, so I suspect some of this is just a reflection of the handsfree protocol quality. The BackBeat Go does include some DSP noise reduction and echo rejection, though this isn’t a two microphone solution. Again, how good at rejecting noise the system ends up being for the other party depends on whether your handset also will do further processing. For example the Audience sound processors have a port for Bluetooth audio in which will get used in conjunction with the other onboard microphones to cancel noise.

Five years ago I bought a pair of A2DP headsets, oddly enough alongside the purchase of a Dell XPS M1730. They were Dell BH200 stereo headests, essentially a rebrand of some Logitech models that were modern at the time. I used that in conjunction with a Dell Axim Pocket PC and later an HTC Apache to listen to streaming music while studying. Times have changed considerably since then, and both Moore’s law and further component miniaturization has made it possible to cram what used to require a bulky on-ear form factor into a pair of earbuds, and A2DP is likewise commonplace in any smartphone or PMP. I've long fantasized about a pair of earbuds with as little cable as possible, and right now the form factor of the BackBeat Go is basically as close as you can get to that reality.

The Plantronics BackBeat Go earbuds are good enough for casual listening, though discerning ears used to listening to higher end IEMs will detect a notably smaller sound stage and compressed dynamic range thanks to A2DP. On the whole however, the combo really is good enough to be passable when you have a good ear canal seal. The BackBeat Gos run around $76 at Amazon, which honestly isn’t bad for what you get. Since playing with this pair, I’ve become aware of a number of other players with the same form factor, for example Novero’s Rockaway or the Jaybird Freedom, all of which sit between $75 and $99.

My issue with the Dell BH200 headsets a long time ago was that wearing them was fatiguing and uncomfortable after a few hours. The BackBeat Go form factor is all around better, but unfortunately isn’t perfect, with the earbuds sometimes sliding out of my ear canals due to their large size and the lack of stiffer rubber. In addition, lack of multi-host pairing makes hopping between the notebook and smartphone as an A2DP source somewhat annoying.

The BackBeat Gos are tantalizingly close to being the sort of ideal Bluetooth earbud stereo platform that I’ve been dreaming of all these years, but aren’t quite there yet. That doesn’t mean they’re not enjoyable, but could benefit from maybe one more iteration.