3000 miles with BEOne headphones

There are two things I seem to have a continuous struggle to get right when it comes to motorcycling (three if you count getting my elbow down, but we don’t need to talk about that). Gloves that offer the perfect fit for my tiny hands, and headphones that actually work.

Over the last ten years I must have tried twenty different pairs of headphones. Everything from the cheapo ones you can buy in motorway service stations to custom made numbers that fit in molds of my ears. They all get treated the same and some last longer than others. The sound quality on the expensive ones was very good, sometimes amazing. The strength of the wires on the other hand, not so. Cheaper ones had wires that I could swing off, but they usually cut out at motorway speed and become useless.

The BEOne noise cancelling headphones from Boom Earwear arrived from out of space, I think. I didn’t order them, but they turned up a week after I’d Tweeted about another pair of headphones getting launched up the road for letting me down. I like companies that monitor social media, and these guys seem to do just that. Minimal packaging, a handy little carry case and a range of rubbers to fit any lughole, things started well and got better once I tried them out.

There’s probably loads of science and stuff going on inside these, but the bottom line is that they work well up to about 100mph in a full-face helmet and about 60mph in an open face helmet. Just bassy enough and with no distortion, the quality of the sound they produce is fantastic when you consider the asking price. I like to flick from Ludovico Einaudi to early ‘90’s jungle on a ride and found these phones have no problem at all coping with different kinds of music.

The cables are thin, but not flimsy like others. They don’t immediately tie themselves in the kind of knot that’d have a scout sweating if I jam them in a pocket, and I’ve yet to lose either of the rubber covers that sit in your ear. I did fit a bigger one to one side as it kept slipping out of my ear initially, but that may well be down to me having mismatched ears. It’s easy to tell which side is which as the backs of each bud are different. The right side is (r)aised and the left side is (l)owered. It’s simple, but clever nonetheless. The headphone buds are magnetised, so they clip together when you’re not using them. It makes them easy to store and gives you something to play with if you’re bored. After a couple of months, the magnets had some kind of disagreement with each other and stopped lining up, but in no way was the performance of the headphones affected.

I recently clocked three thousand miles with these headphones. In mileage terms, that puts them on par with the best of the other sets I’ve used, some of which have cost over £100.