Back to school with BuddyPhones Cosmos+
Due to my other blogging endeavors I’ve played with some of the highest end consumer electronic headphones that are out there and wondered when these advances were going to make it into the children’s market. The answer is evidently now with BuddyPhones, high end audio features in a kid-targeted product.
The advances I’ve been waiting on specifically were noise cancelling, ability to be plugged into a school laptop or play from a tablet (3.5mm, Bluetooth,) and of course princesses and unicorns. All have been realized.
The ability to plug in a 3.5mm cable means your child can keep on working when the battery eventually dies because they forgot to recharge it, for a week. It also means less time spent when the school laptop loses the Bluetooth connection because Dave in IT pushed a new profile. The case will hopefully keep them safe from kids who think it’s ok to drop a backpack containing a laptop from two feet and then walk across it.
Damn, kids.
My kids used the BuddyPhones Cosmos+ headsets for a while, and could not tell me if the frequency response was on par with higher end equipment, nor tell me whether the highs and lows were good, nor could the 8yo contrast and compare the style of active noise cancelling to some older styles of headsets I have. Yeah, great helpers I’ve got there.
Anyhow I stepped in and listened, armed with the unicorn headset which did not fit me. It’s for a slightly smaller headed person. I cannot accurately comment on the noise cancelling features because I didn’t get a decent ear seal. They’re there, but my tests on those and how the noise cancelling worked were mostly me rubbing my hands together and asking the kids if they could hear that noise and it seemed to do extremely well at actively cancelling low level noises. The ads claim it’s aimed at travel noises, which man, let me tell you the difference good ANC makes on a plane sometime.
Of course there’s your standard volume limiters for kids. They can be bypassed, but not accidentally. It’s defaulted at 85dB but can be overridden to 94dB which is about half the volume of a 4yo trying to express why they’re actually being quiet and not yelling. Headsets can be chained together to share audio (think two kids watching an iPad in a car.) I have not played with this feature, looks cool.
One of the things that impressed me about these is they feel really really well built. We’ve gone through some headsets over this past year. I think three have damage of some sort. Don’t get me wrong on this however, we’ve not beat-tested them yet. School starts next week and so far it’s been just the usual accidentally dropping them, stepping on them, and spilling an unspillable drink on them.
The hard case is probably going to be the savior of these, and some pencils I’m assuming. There’s more than enough room for both in this case. I’ll follow up if any pencil related disasters come through. Maybe I will leave them a note in the case that says “don’t close this without all the parts because you’re not getting replacements” I don’t know…
There’s a microphone attachment as well, we… don’t do good with microphones yet. I’ve got two kids who don’t seem to understand they don’t have to use ALL the air in their lungs every 3-4 words.
Overall, if they fit me, I’d use them. What I’ve heard sounds good, the ANC that I can vaguely test doesn’t sound like the tinny type of yesteryear, and they would be comfortable if they fit.
The BuddyPhones Cosmos+ are available on the manufacturer’s website, most of their other line of headsets are available on Amazon as well.
