Two year old headphones, still good though

25 Nov 2022

Hear me out, I’m not crazy.

So, I’ve recently started to exercise again, after becoming super slack during the covid years and putting back on a tonne of weight. My primary form of exercise right now is walking in the pool, as this takes a lot of strain off my poor knees - another reason I stopped regularly exercising.

I’m actually fairly inured to being bored walking back and forth across 25-25 meters of a pool, but it would be nice to be able to listen to something while I’m doing so. This is where the Tozo T6’s come in.

These are rated for IPX8 water resistant for up to 1m under water, so while they’re not for swimming (Bluetooth signals typically don’t mix well with water), they should be fine for walking in the pool, giving that if your head is underwater while walking in the pool you’re either doing something very wrong, or you’re somehow super dense.

I managed to get these from Amazon (I know, I know, but it’s like the only place to get them) for fairly cheap for just under 40 Australian dollarydoos on sale, which is why I pulled the trigger.

This model is around two years old, but there’s nothing newer I could find that also supported this level of water resistance.

I took them out of the box, which is compact and mostly cardboard, aside from a plastic wrapper, and a few plastic tags covering the charge contacts and the touch surface on the earphones themselves. There’s six sizes of silicon tips provided, the mediums are installed on the buds, and there’s two sizes in either direction, and a short USB mini cable in the box. There’s also a few slips of instruction paper.

There’s no app for these dinguses, it’s just pull out both buds initially and they enter pairing mode and you use the standard Bluetooth pairing screen to connect to them. They pair to each other fairly quickly, within a second or two of pulling them out of the case, and they even work fine if you take one out, put it in your ear, and take the other out, which I’ve had problems with with other “true wireless” earphones.

I’ve had a lot of issues with Bluetooth headphones in my area. For whatever reason - overhead powerlines, proximity to mobile towers, straight up bad juju - walking around my area I’ve found that at least three sets of headphones I’ve used from cheap to a $200 pair will just constantly get interference and dropouts just walking around with my phone in my pocket. These, however, worked flawlessly - walking in the exact same areas I never experienced a dropout once. They started to cut out when I put my phone down and walked around 15-20 meters away from my phone, which is about what you’d expect for Bluetooth.

Fitting them in your ears is fairly straightforward too - following the instructions in the booklet gave me a good fit and I haven’t felt like they were going to fall out at any point. I’m not the kind of person who would be running and jumping around, but walking around at least it felt fine for me, but as always with ears, your mileage may vary. I changed the eartips to the large size, and taking the installed ones off was a bit of a fight so they’re held on very securely.

The case is fine. The buds don’t fall out if you open it upside down and shake it, they’re held in securely with magnets. The lid hinge isn’t a satisfying fidget toy, but it does also close with a magnet so it does hold shut pretty well. It’s not that large so it is pretty pocketable and it’s nice and rounded so it doesn’t feel awkward. It has a usb-mini port on the bottom to charge with four white leds on the front to tell you the charge level. The port has a rubber gasket as the case itself is also supposed to be waterproof. It also supports Qi charging so you never have to use that if you want to, which is nice.

The buds themselves are supposed to have around 5 hours of battery life, and the case can recharge them for up to 24-ish hours. The manual reports the buds charge from flat in a bit over one and a half hours, so they’re probably not the best things to be taking on an airplane for continuous use, but they’re perfectly fine for exercise sessions. The case itself should charge from flat in around the same time too.

As for sound - they’re fine. I’m no audiological analyser, so I’m never going to be able to tell you “oh the low end is heavy and there’s no top end” or any of that shit. It was acceptable to me walking around the streets here. I’ve heard better, but I’ve also heard a lot worse too. The noise isolation is fine, I didn’t get bothered by outside noise leaking in although there’s no noise cancelling or anything - it’s just the silicon eartips doing all the work. Pausing the music allows you to hear people talking nearby so it’s obviously not great but I find it acceptable in my case.

They have microphones for making voice calls and… they exist. It’s fine, it’s a Bluetooth, microphone what do you expect?

As for pausing - the controls. Each earbud has a single touch sensitive surface and it’s the usual tap to pause, double tap the left earbud to go back, right to go forward, etc. It’s fairly intuitive and it does support holding to change volume and triple tap to invoke the voice assistant of choice. However, since these are jammed in your ears you’ve got to a) work out where in your ears to tap and b) tap on a thing jammed in your ears. I find this to be kind of awkward and often miss the first tap on a double tap to skip a song and end up pausing the music instead. And when you do tap, you’re uncomfortably jamming the thing in your ear, so I found myself pulling out my phone to make the adjustments more often than not.

All in all I think these are pretty good “true wireless” earbuds for the price.