Headphone Reviews

About a dozen years ago, I found myself sitting across from a disheveled gentleman in a near-empty lounge at LAX Airport as we both waited for a delayed flight. A well-loved leather suitcase stood at his feet. To my amazement, he wore a pair of Stax SR-L700s—full-on electrostatics he powered with an unwieldy amplifier he held on his lap, a power cord snaking to the outlet near his seat. It was absurd. And magnificent. He caught me smiling, smirked, lifted one earcup, and said, "If I'm going to spend another three hours in this godforsaken place, I might as well do it with Coltrane in my skull."

There, in his defiance of convenience, was a truth: Sound matters, enough to haul an electrostatic rig through Terminal 3, to trade portability for transcendence.

Most of us don't have the luxury—or the upper-body strength—to travel like that. We look for a balance between fidelity and practicality, between the pursuit of purity and the reality of overhead bin space.

Enter the high-end Bluetooth headphone. A human travel companion may sneakily take the middle armrest or jabber about Bitcoin at 30,000 feet. I frequently prefer the alternative: a silicon-based sidekick who shuts out the world when you need it to, providing relaxation or energy depending on the playlist you feed it (footnote 1).

Listening while you travel can make for deep experiences. The music becomes fused with the location. Your brain creates a more enduring memory, seeding even old tunes with new emotion. At home, I've listened dozens of times to Here Be Dragons by the Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble, but the noir soundscapes never cut as deep as when I played the album with a pair of earbuds, walking the foggy, glistening streets of Rotterdam at 2am.

Surreal coincidences and synchronicities sometimes happen this way. This past January, I was a passenger in a van traveling on the dark highway between Sri Lanka's Nuwara Eliya and Colombo, wearing the T+A Solitaire T headphones I'd brought along to review, listening to Robert Wyatt's song "Blues in Bob Minor." Just as Wyatt sang the line "meadow brown peacock, pupa-larva-caterpillar," I swear the van's headlights illuminated a big sign that warned "Danger: Peacocks Ahead."

Kicking the tires on the Model T
T+A has an address on the Planckstrasse in Herford, Germany, a street I assume is named after the great German physicist Max Planck. That seems fitting. The letters T+A stand for Theorie und Anwendung—Theory and Application. Teutonic and Ambitious would work, too. T+A has a reputation for designing inventive technology while scrupulously sticking to proven scientific principles. No woo.

In contrast to the company's Solitaire P and Solitaire P-SE headphones ($6900 and $3900 respectively), the T is built for travel. Its pricier siblings are large, open-backed, and wired, without active noise reduction (ANC)—four reasons why you probably won't want to take them on a trip. By contrast, the closed-backed Solitaire T is light, foldable, and Bluetooth- and ANC–enabled. It aims to combine audiophile-grade sonics with easy portability.

Focal's $699 Bathys takes a similar hybrid approach. There's also the $999 Mark Levinson No. 5909, which I've heard good things about but haven't tried (footnote 2).

In the din of an airplane cabin or on a bustling city street, distinguishing between Bluetooth and USB on either the T+A or the Focal proved a fool's errand. Even with noise cancellation engaged, the shushed ambient roar smoothed over any meaningful difference. But at home or in a quiet hotel room: different story. There, hi-rez rules. With a wired connection, the shimmer of cymbals and the plink of upper-octave piano keys sound more polished. Percussive transients are snappier and better delineated.

With the Solitaire T, there's an exciting middle ground, too: HQ (high-quality) mode, a better way of handling wireless playback. We'll get to that. First, a quick once-over of the T+A's exterior.

Although the Solitaire T's styling reminded me of my 10-year-old Oppo PM-3 planar magnetics, the T+A headphones win on looks. They certainly have a more premium feel. Each soft, synthetic-leather earpad is separated from the chamfered cup by a half-inch band of ribbed anodized aluminum that provides anchor points for the U-shaped yokes. The cups can be folded inward, toward the headband, for compact storage. They also swivel as much as 90° in either direction.

Build quality is outstanding. I occasionally derived a geeky pleasure from having the Solitaire T in my hands, admiring the solidity and precision of its hinges—not so different, perhaps, from appreciating the door of a luxury car when it closes with a muted thunk.

Despite my big head, I had no issues with the Solitaire T's fit, except when I wore a baseball cap or a beanie. Then the headband proved a few millimeters too tight. If you have large ears, you may find the earpads snug (their interior measures 2.8" vertically and 1.5" horizontally). They fit me fine but try before you buy.

At 11.5oz, the headphones are reasonably light, so listening for hours on end was no problem. Even when I wore glasses, the earcups made a solid seal around my pinnae. The Solitaire T's controls are well-placed and easy to use. The left earcup sports the power switch and a battery indicator with four green LEDs, each representing 25% of the charge. The right cup has a springy Bluetooth switch for pairing digital devices plus two small silver buttons. The bottom one summons the digital helper of your choice (Alexa, Siri, or Google Assistant); the one above it lets you cycle between ANC off, ANC on, and HQ mode.

The flat part of the right cup's exterior is a touchpad. Tap it once to pause the music, again to play. Swipe up and down to control volume, forward to advance to the next track, and backward to play the previous one. A small circle near the touchpad's bottom edge toggles transparency mode, so you can hear conversations or approaching traffic. This dime-sized area is slightly rough to the touch, so you can easily find it with a fingertip.

I would've preferred finer control over volume. At times, a single swipe dropped the sound from a bit too loud to not loud enough. In a future version, perhaps T+A could give us a way to select volume increments. I'd love a choice between 0.5, 1, and 2dB steps.

A few dozen times, mostly at the beginning of my eval, the Solitaire T registered a swipe as a tap. Operator error, probably. Either I got better at swiping, or T+A's firmware updates (mostly) took care of it. Also, when adjusting the 'phones on my head, I sometimes accidentally touched the right earcup, pausing the music. Still, the swipe-and-tap interface worked well—much better than on my circa 2017 FIIL Canviis headset, which has similar controls.

When a call comes in, one tap on the T+A's touchpad connects it; touch-and-hold sends the caller to voicemail. Simple. Calls typically sounded clear and strong on both sides of the conversation.

Under the hood
There's some smart engineering going on inside the Solitaire T. With active noise cancellation turned on, a Qualcomm QCC5127 microprocessor handles Bluetooth reception before passing the signal to a Sony CXD chip that takes care of DAC duties, amplification, ANC, and calls. Switch to HQ mode, and the Qualcomm reroutes its I2S output to the 32-bit ESS ES9218P Sabre DAC, bypassing the Sony processor. This means you get superior digital-to-analog conversion and amplification without a wire. The downside to using HQ mode is that it consumes extra power, reducing the T's battery life from 70 to 35 hours. That's still a lot of juice, and recharging from empty to full takes just two hours.

The Solitaire T falls slightly short of the superb noise cancellation that the Apple AirPod Pro IIs and AirPods Max offer. That's understandable: The Cupertino colossus can throw virtually unlimited funds at any technical challenge. With ANC on, the T almost erases the drone of a plane, most traffic noise, and the murmur of a busy café or office. Good. But sudden environmental sounds and nearby conversations can remain a distraction.

The T+A headphones are equipped with Bluetooth 5.1. Not even the latest Bluetooth version, 5.4, inherently supports lossless audio, although Qualcomm makes a Snapdragon microprocessor that can play files in full hi-rez within the Bluetooth 5.3 and 5.4 standards. Until Bluetooth incorporates a fully lossless codec, going wired remains the only lossless option.

T+A's founder and Managing Director Siegfried "Siggi" Amft doesn't think that having only lossy audio in Bluetooth is any great, um, loss—not with HQ mode engaged, anyway. "Lossless seems to be a good development and is something we think about for the next [product] generation," he emailed me. "It can improve the sound quality, no doubt, but only if the signal path through the involved processors is good enough. Our HQ mode is able to show the benefit."

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Footnote 1: This unsociable pursuit is perhaps reflected in the name of the product under review, and a minor reason why I like it. T+A confirms that the T in Solitaire T stands for travel.

Footnote 2: Sure, lots of Bluetooth headsets let you plug in a cable. But robbed of their chips' performance, they tend to sound dull and uninspiring. The wired option is just a "better than nothing" backup for when the battery dies. Headphones like the Bathys, No. 5909, and Solitaire T were created from the ground up with high-end sound as the main goal.