Plantronics BackBeat Go

The featherweight BackBeat Go ($99.99) is a stereo Bluetooth headset equally adept at voice calls, listening to music or podcasts, and watching movies without disturbing anyone nearby. In fact, it's the best stereo Bluetooth headset we've ever used for phone calls, period. A few sound quality-related pitfalls with music hold it back from a perfect rating. But the BackBeat Go is still easily good enough to secure our Editors' Choice award for wireless headphones, and is well worth a close look?particularly if the Samsung Modus HM6450's ($99.99, 4 stars) convertible mono and stereo design doesn't appeal to you.

Design, Inline Controls, and Cable
The BackBeat Go weighs just 0.46 ounces. The plastic earbud housings have a curved shape, with a rubber cover over the micro USB charging port on the right earbud. The rubber tips are of a very soft material (more on that later). Plantronics includes three sets in the package, each of a different size, plus a set of optional looped stabilizers to further anchor each one in place when fitted to your ear.

The inline control is close to the right earbud, and impossible to see with the earbud in place. It's simple enough to learn quickly, though. Three rubberized buttons on one side handle volume and multifunction call button duties, with the two volume buttons larger than the one in the center, and the + volume closer to your ear. Holding either + or ? down for two seconds will push the current music track ahead or back, and you can toggle mute by tapping both at once. On the other side, you'll find a rubber power button that's tough to find by feel alone, and a little difficult to press with your finger (but easier with a fingernail).

The tiny cable connecting the two earbuds is of a tangle-free design, and is designed to sit behind your neck. It's made of a rubberized soft touch material that's comfortable, and in practice it disappears from view and doesn't interfere with modest neck movements. Larger ones?such as swinging your head to the left or right to look at someone?will rub the cable against your shirt collar, and eventually unseat one of the earbuds after a few times. On the plus side, Plantronics includes the same charger with the BackBeat Go that they've included on every product we've tested of theirs for the past several years. Consistency is good.

Pairing and Audio Quality
The first time you power it up, the BackBeat Go enters pairing mode automatically. I had no problem pairing the headset with an LG Lucid and an Apple iPhone 4. Subsequent pairings require you to hold down the power button for two seconds. You can also check battery status by tapping the power button while the headset is on.

The BackBeat Go features a pair of 6mm neodymium drivers. Audio quality is good, but not great, when listening to music. The BackBeat Go is highly sensitive to getting exactly the right seal in your ear in order to deliver sufficiently weighty bass response. That's true of all in-ear earphones, but what makes the BackBeat Go more difficult is that you can insert them in your ears 10 times, and end up with 10 slightly different frequency response curves. There's no point at which they "lock in" the way, say, the Samsung Modus HM6450 ?do, or any number of wired earphones we've reviewed. If you bump a BackBeat Go with your finger, you'll change the sound quality almost every time, and almost all positions don't deliver enough bass response. The culprit seems to be the earbuds themselves, which are just too soft; they change shape too easily and too often. Even when properly seated?which takes practice?these aren't earphones for bass fiends. You may want to enable whatever bass-enhancing EQ your phone or MP3 player offers.

The high-end is another story. I've yet to hear as smooth a treble range over stereo Bluetooth as I do here. The BackBeat Go is unusually delicate, with little of the obvious harshness and warbling you get with other Bluetooth headsets. There's a trace of it, as you can't fully escape the limitations of the Bluetooth codec, but it's not at all bad. I heard some slight cable thump when walking, even with the wire situated properly behind my neck, although it was more of an awareness of some distant low-frequency "boom" in the earbuds, rather than the outright thumping sounds you hear with poorly designed wired earphones.

In addition to music, the BackBeat Go makes an excellent Bluetooth headset for voice calls. The company's wide-ranging experience with mono Bluetooth devices like the Plantronics Voyager Pro HD ($99, 4.5 stars) shows in the BackBeat Go. When directly compared with the Samsung Modus HM6450?both in stereo, and in its convertible mono headset mode?the BackBeat Go sounded more natural, with much less wind noise transmitted from a loud outdoor street in Manhattan. The HM6450 was virtually unintelligible through the headset body mic and the in-line wired mic on the same windy test.

Other Features and Conclusions
Plantronics offers MyHeadset, an Android app that adds a battery headset meter when connected to Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) tablets or Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich)-powered phones. The BackBeat Go also added one automatically to the iPhone 4 I tested it with. Range is excellent; I was able to walk roughly 20 feet away from my test handset before the signal began to break up. The BackBeat Go charges in a fast two and a half hours. We're still testing battery life, and will update this review with a result as soon as we have one.

Overall, the BackBeat Go is a solid effort and an easy buy, as long as you're not a demanding audiophile when it comes to stereo sound quality. The BackBeat Go is lighter and more convenient than the Samsung Modus HM6450, although the HM6450 offers its nifty convertible mono mode and stronger bass response when listening to music. The Novero Tour ($79, 3.5 stars) is also pretty lightweight and sounds about as good with music as the BackBeat Go, but since it's a hard plastic design with a metal band in between, it only folds up about halfway, and therefore takes up much more pocket space than the BackBeat Go. Finally, the LG HBS-700 ($69.99, 3.5 stars) is a bit of a middle ground, with earbuds dangling from little wires that fold into a hard plastic headband; it's another good choice, if not quite as unobtrusive as the BackBeat Go.

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