Product review: Sony bluetooth headphones and transmitter

By Aaron Burkhart

While headphones are mostly used for mobile devices, I’ve sometimes found that I want to watch a movie on the big screen but don’t want to bother the wife napping nearby on the couch. Really nice headphones don’t come with a long enough cord to sit far enough away from the screen, so I decided to pick up Sony’s bluetooth transmitter (TMR-BT10) and stereo headphones (DR-BT22) to see if they would fit my needs.

The transmitter is about the size of a thumb, with an alligator clip and a good length of cord to plug into any standard headphone jack. For my purposes, it plugs right into the stereo system, but would just as easily turn an iPod or even an old boom-box into a wireless audio source.

The headphones are collapsable for easy stowage, but as a result feel less than sturdy at times. They also can twist when putting them on, making it a little awkward if you’re not used headphones doing that, but once on they were snug and lightweight. Pairing the transmitter and headphones was easy (just hold the power button on both until the lights turn blue and they find each other), and the sound quality was pretty good, but not great. A tiny bit of background hum was always present, but not distracting.

When paired with my iPhone, there wasn’t the same hum. An odd note about pairing with an iPhone is it asks for a pin number, which of course it doesn’t do when paired with the transmitter. Turns out the pin is just 0000, which I had to look online for since I didn’t hang on to the manual. Otherwise the headphones work great as a hands-free option, as it picked up my voice easily and was still clear for both parties when I was almost 20 feet away from my actual phone. For whatever reason, though, when I switched the iPhone to iPod mode for music sound would only come out of the iPhone’s speakers and not the headphones. I couldn’t find any option to route the music through bluetooth, but when making a call it switched automatically as long as it was still paired. It just wouldn’t work with music or videos.

When using it with my home theater system and the transmitter, it worked with a similarlly long range of at least 20 feet, even through several walls. However, while my using it with a home theater may not be a standard use, I did find a syncronization problem when using it with a recorded DVR program. On DVDs it synced perfectly and there isn’t a problem with live TV. But when trying to watch a recorded program off the DVR the sound would be lagging behind the picture by as much as two seconds. Pausing and then unpausing would put the sync closer together, but it takes doing that a bunch of times before it gets close enough to sycn as to not be distracting.

Other than the iPhone music and DVR oddities, the headphones work great and have a surprizingly long battery life; I haven’t plugged them in for weeks and have watched around 5 hours of TV with them throughout that time.

Combined with the transmitter (which can be used to bypass the iPhone music gap), this bluetooth headphone set has a lot of possible uses and has been a satisfying purchase, if not flawless.