{"id":6708,"date":"2008-03-28T10:38:07","date_gmt":"2008-03-28T10:38:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/e-commerce\/plantronics-audio-480.html"},"modified":"2008-03-28T10:38:07","modified_gmt":"2008-03-28T10:38:07","slug":"plantronics-audio-480","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/apple\/plantronics-audio-480.html","title":{"rendered":"Plantronics .Audio 480"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"I just had a chance to test drive the Plantronics .Audio 480 USB Headset<\/a> also known as the Virtual Phone Booth. While I generally have problems with all in-the-ear headphones, these felt better in my ears than many others I have tried.<\/p>\n

For example the Shure E3c<\/a> Sound Isolating Earphones (currently discontinued) don’t fit in my ears well and subsequently I have to resort to the ear plug type adapter that you roll tightly and then let expand in your ear.<\/p>\n

The problem with the Shure ear buds is that if your fingers are not absolutely just-washed clean, the buds get dirty and don’t work as well — they then need replacement. This includes the carbon residue from newspapers that you don’t even realize is embedded in your fingers.<\/p>\n

Another problem is if you take one of these foam ear buds out to speak with someone on a flight you have to take time to roll it again before reinserting it back in your ear.<\/p>\n

I am somewhat impressed with the sound quality of the Plantronics headset. In tests of dance, pop and classical music, I thought the range of frequencies transmitted to be good. Don’t expect body shaking bass but for a headset of this size, the sound quality is above average.<\/p>\n

Where these headphones shine however is as a portable VoIP headset allowing you access to Skype or any other soft client. There is a wire thin and light microphone boom that comes down to your mouth from the left headphone. <\/p>\n

I have experienced this microphone slowly dragging the left headphone out of my ear and an easy fix was to just twist the mike up and over the ear bud.<\/p>\n

In addition, there is a  USB dongle the size of a small pack of gum which also has connectors for headphones and microphone. This device works with PC and MAC and could be used in situations where a USB connection is more handy or if there are no connectors for microphone and speaker.<\/p>\n

Thoughts on how to make the .Audio 480 better are a button to kill the sound (there is a mute button and volume control slider) and I would extend the length of the cord by about 18 inches. Update<\/strong>: I would also bump up the frequency response on the high end to 20 kHz from 10 kHz.<\/p>\n

Other than that, the .Audio 480 seems like a must have for the road warrior’s laptop case.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I just had a chance to test drive the Plantronics .Audio 480 USB Headset also known as the Virtual Phone Booth. While I generally have problems with all in-the-ear headphones, these felt better in my ears than many others I have tried. For example the Shure E3c Sound Isolating Earphones (currently discontinued) don’t fit in<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[158,172,163,189,203,191,205,1675],"tags":[],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6708"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6708"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6708\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6708"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6708"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6708"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}