1. What Bluetooth Offers Headphones

Headphone cables tangle in clothes and bag straps and you can’t wear them at the same time as a cell phone headset. If your phone rings while you’re listening to music, you might not even hear it while wearing noise-canceling headphones. If you do, you have to pull out your headphones and put your music on pause before answering the phone. Combining a Bluetooth headset with music headphones is a solution — plus you can control your music player without pulling it out of your pocket. But can you get the same audio quality that headphones offer and Bluetooth phone capabilities in one device?

There are several different approaches to wireless headphones, ranging from Etymotic’s oddly square twin ETY8 headsets to classic over-the-ear cams from Creative. Some only stream music, while most serve as a mobile phone headset as well. We tried out nine different models, comparing them to our top-rated in-ear headphones like the Shure E500s and to the Aliph Jawbone noise-canceling headset. We wanted to see if you can get comfort, control and high quality in the same package — and how much you have to spend.

What You Can Listen To

There are a handful of personal media players with Bluetooth built-in, including several Samsung models, and very many mobile phones have music players and support the A2DP profile for streaming stereo audio over Bluetooth. If you want to control the music on your media player or your phone from your headphones, it needs to support the AVRCP protocol as well. If you want to listen to music and answer phone calls on the same headphones without playing music on your phone, look for a pair of Bluetooth headphones with multipoint capability like the Jabra BT8010 or Nokia BH-501 models.

Only a few portable media players like the Samsung YP-T9 have Bluetooth built in. Many media players don’t have Bluetooth built in – like the iPod – so you’ll need an adapter. The ETY8 headphones come with an iPod dock adapter and the Plantronics Plusar and Creative headphones include a universal adapter that fits into a headphone socket. There are numerous A2DP adapters of both types available separately. Adapters like the one supplied with the ET8s or the Motorola DC650 and Jabra A125s that fit into the iPod dock will draw power from the iPod so it will drain the battery faster (which also happens when using the built-in Bluetooth on a music player). Adapters like the Creative, Pulsar or Jabra A120s that connect to the headphone socket may not give you the same audio quality and they will need charging separately, but they won’t run down your music player any faster.

We tested these headphones with the Samsung YP-T9 media player, the Motorola MOTORIZR phone, the iPod Nano and several HTC Windows Mobile devices to see how easy they are to pair, how good they are at making phone calls, how easy the controls are to use and how good your music will sound.