If this was a review my advice would be: don't buy. Sorry, JBL, but you screwed up. The headphone itself is nice, *mostly* well made, with unfortunately one essential flaw: it broke down, most likely due to a design or manufacturing mistake.
Thanks JBL... 100 euro down the drain.
The Problem
The headphone would spontaneously no longer start up. Or to be more precise, it would start up, give the BluTooth 'pairing' tone, then immediately give the BT disconnect tone and power down.
We've tried each and every combination of buttons we could find mentioned on the Internet, but to no avail.
Weird BT button
When inspecting the phone I noticed that the BluTooth button was strangely unresponsive and sat too deep in the casing. As the headphone wasn't working anyway I opened it and had a good look at the inside (click on any image to enlarge):
Well, look at that! The whole BT button has desintegrated. I found a few tiny bits of plastic and metal wandering around inside the casing.
So, a case of user error (pressing the button too hard and thus destroying the headphone)? Well... not exactly...
Design or Production Error?
Take a look at the next image. Inside the green circle are the working volume and stop buttons. There's a little piece of black plastic keeping the buttons in place.
When you look at the red that section is constructed differently. There's just one little bit of square foam glued (!) into that spot, and there is nothing stopping the buttons from going 'too deep' into the casing. That bit of plastic was either a fix to a design flaw, or someone dropped in a piece of foam with a bit of glue in exactly that space. Who can tell?
Without any mechanical stop it's all too easy for a button press to damage the switches behind. Even carrying it around in a bag might do the trick.
Perhaps the foam was intended to push the PCB a little up, so the buttons prongs would sit on the buttons properly, and that's all fine but the BT button was gone... And I know the user of this headphone fairly well: after the initial pairing she never paired her headphones again, and didn't even know how the noice cancelation feature worked...
Question: "Then why did you buy this one?"
Answer: "I liked the color."
I rest my case.
NOT impressed
Poor design and / or quality control, who can tell. But the net result is that this headphone is broken after eighteen months of use, and it can't be repaired. Which is a pity because the rest of the headphone seems to be of decent quality. Just those buttons are finnicky... and not up to the task.
Sorry JBL, but call me unimpressed.
No comments:
Post a Comment