We were certainly keen on extreme noise cancellation as LP has the perfect convertible car to create the most extreme conditions.

Perhaps throwing the Lordpercy.com team the challenge of breaking this new noise cancellation system was a bit daft but hey we are nothing if not determined. The nXzen headset is a fairly small device weighing just 16 grams and styled in a restrained grey plastic. It has a few more buttons than the average headset with both a side button and pinch button which is close to the microphone on the tip of the boom.

After pairing the headset it was time to give it that all important 1st charge, the nXzen ships with two methods of charging a traditional AC power adaptor or a USB lead which although very short does connect direct to the headset. The initial charge from flat took just under 2 hours and gave us around 6 hours use during our tests and should be good for around 100 hours on standby.

The Gennum 5500 comes with a range of attachments to help you get a comfortable fit, this is key as the headset uses an in ear type fit which can be awkward unless you get it right. It takes a bit of getting used to at first as the headset almost seems to go inside your ear canal. The design is an over ear one and it fits tightly and there seems little risk of it falling out, however this tight fir is essential for audio quality and volume as our tests started to show.

So onto the road test, first up a few calls with the roof firmly in place. Audio quality seemed passable if a little lifeless compared to cabled headsets, callers reported us sounding a little distant but very clear and with a minimum of background noise. We should hope so too as the nXZEN uses frontwave technology which to you and me is twin microphones and a clever algorithm that uses phase differences between them to decide what is voice and what is background rumble and wind noise.

This noise suppression seemed to work well in the relative calm of the roof up car, so next time to go topless in a cold and rather damp London. We initiated a call and set off at around 30 miles per hour, at this speed our caller noticed little difference and as the speed increased the biggest problem was not wind noise but our voice getting more and more distant. At around 50mph we lost the ability to communicate although we could still hear the caller they just heard a hiss. Not bad overall as we then re tried this with an old HBH-35 and found that it was useless at 30mph, so the noise cancellation is clearly working.

While we were impressed with the sonic qualities of the nXZEN 5500 we did unearth an issue, making calls worked fine with the headset auto connecting, but answering calls with the side or pinch button seemed a very frustrating affair. 8 time out of 10 the call would be answered and we'd say hello many times before maybe 6 - 7 seconds later the caller would finally appear in the headset, normally saying are you there?  As they had been able to hear us from the moment we pressed the button, this delay led to a few missed calls and a bit of red faced embarrassment with one PR company.

Another nice touch is the ability to play your MP3 player via the headset using the supplied cable, it connect to your iPod at one end and even has a second headphone to make a full stereo system, but somehow it fells wrong to cable up a hands free headset.

Priced at £100 you may question the value of noise cancellation but from our tests the nXZEN is about as good as a consumer headset gets at keeping background noise at bay. The real shame is that it isn't always well behaved enough to get our full recommendation.

Published - 27/03/2006

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