4. Nokia BH-501

Unusually, Nokia combines a back-of- -the-neck design with over-the-ear ear-pieces and a folding headband for portability. Despite the larger ear-pieces, the BH-501s are light and very comfortable, because soft plastic ear-hooks take the weight and there’s no central lump to catch on the back of your neck.

The Nokia BH-501s have minimal controls, because you can’t actually control the music you listen to. There are no controls on the left ear-piece at all. There are three unlabelled buttons on the right ear-piece, along with the usual proprietary Nokia power connector; the Nokia charger is certainly small, but it is one more thing to carry. Two of the buttons are the volume controls and they have dotted markings to help you tell them apart by feel. The third is what Nokia calls the multifunction button, which does almost everything, including turning the headphones on. Press for voice dialing or to answer or end a call; press twice to redial and use the volume keys to reject calls or switch them back to the phone.

The reason there are no other controls is that although you can listen to music from a Bluetooth-connected media player, or your phone, or both, you can’t control a player from the headphones. They support the A2DP profile for streaming stereo audio, but not the AVRCP remote control profile. Pair the BH-501s with a phone and a music player at the same time and the music you’re playing will be muted when a call comes, but you’ll have to pause the music yourself if you don’t want to miss the rest of the track. Pairing is straightforward, although you have to press and hold the multifunction button for several seconds rather than just turning it on.

Reception is good; the BH-501s don’t have the longest range of the headphones we tested but you can listen through a brick wall and when you lose the signal it cuts out cleanly rather than breaking up. Sound quality is also good although bass drops off significantly at lower volumes. Turn the volume up for rich bass, good stereo separation and reasonable treble. Audio quality on voice calls isn’t quite as good but the noise cancellation is reasonable. The Nokia BH-501s are light, comfortable multipoint headphones, with good sound and long battery life – but you get no music controls at all