Fixing the Edifier Exclaim E10BT BlueTooth issues

About 9 months ago, I bought a new set of speakers for my PC called Exclaim E10BT from Edifier. They sound superb and they have a very small footprint. Both of those features were equally important to me when I was searching for a set of speakers.

However, it has a feature that I didn't really want or use, but it has started causing me a lot of inconvenience. That is BlueTooth connectivity. You can connect to it from your phone and play back music via BlueTooth. It sounds like a handy feature to have. But it doesn't ask for a key to input when you connect to the speakers. Anyone with a BlueTooth device can connect to it.

This would not be a problem if you were living in a big house. But I am currently living in an apartment and there are other people living near me. Someone has paired their TV or device to my speakers. Every now and then, they would connect to my speakers and I would start hearing nonsense through the speakers.

There is no way I can disable BlueTooth on these speakers. The manual doesn't have any information relevant to my issue.

However, I figured that I might be able to do something about it.

When the speakers are connected to a device via BlueTooth, another device cannot automatically override it. You have to terminate the existing connection by pressing the power button on the speakers, and then try to connect. So, if something from my end can connect to the speakers before that other pesky TV does, at least I have the control. Luckily, my desktop PC which the speakers are connected to, has support for BlueTooth. So, that device on my end can be the desktop PC.

I connected the desktop PC to the speakers via BlueTooth and observed its behaviour.

Luckily, the SoundPEATS QY7 was not a Humpty Dumpty

On last Friday, when I was about to leave the house for work, a tragic accident occurred. I had my SoundPEATS QY7 earbuds in one hand and they got entangled with my right shoe when I bent down to tie my shoes, and the right earbud got snapped. It broke into several pieces. I picked up what I could see and put them in my backpack and left the house because it was getting too late. (Gah, I forgot to take photos again!!!)

In the bus, I got a seat and I assessed the situation. Luckily the wire connections were intact; however, there were some pieces missing. And I wasn't sure if I would be able to put it back together. To make things even worse, a woman in her middle age demanded my seat and since I know how ugly their mouths can get, I gave it away reluctantly. I had to stand the whole way for 90 minutes.

It was a horrible day. I had nothing to do while commuting. That's about 4 hrs total without nothing to do, thanks to our super road system. I could have surfed the Internet on my phone, but looking at the screen makes me nauseous, this time due to the ride being so rough: braking and switching tracks frequently.

I actually found out that I could play Real Racing 3, which I installed to check how good the work of devs of Fire Monkeys Studios was, but it didn't go well again due to the rough ride - I cannot how a steady line on the track, not to mention sticking to the racing line. So I just looked outside the shutters thinking about various things.

SoundPEATS QY7 Bluetooth Earbuds - Initial thoughts

Thanks to Amazon Prime, I received my new Bluetooth earphones the next day after placing the order. I will be replacing the Plantronics BackBeat Go 2 which is having an issue as discussed in this post. 

It came in a nice pouch with lots of other spare ear tips and a charging micro USB cable. The default eartips worked fine for me so I didn't change them.

At first I paired it with my iPhone 6 which is my day to day phone at the moment. I could easily pair it with the iPhone. It shows the battery level of the earbuds when it is connected just like the Backbeats. The quality is very good too, much better than the Backbeats. The quality of the Backbeats were quite poor. I didn't feel this initially, but even compared to the Apple EarPods, they were very clumsy. Remember though that I'm not an audiophile and this is a subjective claim.

The other thing I love about the QY7 is its battery life. It would work way longer than the Backbeats. I haven't measured the battery life properly, but according to my experience it would go for more than 8 hours without a charge. I listen to podcasts while commuting to work and that is about 1hr in total. I would 90% battery left according to the battery status shown on the iPhone for the earbuds a day after fully charging the battery of it. If this is accurate, it could be as high as 10hrs. It could be that these earbuds carry a larger battery than the Backbeats because they are a bit larger. Also it appears that the earbuds turn themselves off after a while if it is not connected to a device. Not the most amazing design but I'm up for longer battery life.

The Plantronics Backbeat GO2 headset died...?

Few of days ago on the way back home from work, I called my wife asking if I had to bring home any grocery from the supermarket. While I was in the middle of the call, suddenly the call dropped. I thought the call got disconnected (happens very often with iPhones), but it seemed that the Bluetooth headset had been unpaired from the phone. 

I kept holding the power button of the headset, but it didn’t turn on. I thought it was weird because usually the girl's voice in the headset would have told me that the battery was about die. But I couldn't remember she telling me that the battery level even went down to medium. About 2hrs of listening time remains even after reaching medium battery levels. It seemed as if the battery just had a fatal heart attack.

As soon as I went back home, I plugged the headset to the charger. To my surprise, the charging indicator didn't light up. The LED indicator lights up in orange when the headset is being charged and changes to blue once it becomes fully charged. But it showed nothing! Seemed like the headset was dead!!

Man, that was a bad start to the Sinhala New Year. I couldn't live without the headset so I quickly emailed Dospara (the shop that I bought the headset from) about this and demanded a replacement.

[Unboxing] My Plantronics BackBeat GO 2 wireless earbuds finally arrived

Few days ago, I ordered the Plantronics BackBeat GO 2 wireless earbuds from Dospara. It was a great deal. The earbuds carry a MSRP of $79.99 (as of 2014-01-26), but I only had to pay JPY4,687 (or about $45) from my pocket. The caveat was that it took a while to get delivered. That’s no biggie. I could wait.

Finally the wait was over. The earbuds arrived at home early in the morning.

I took some photos when I unboxed the earbuds.

		Plantronics BackBeat GO2 earbuds VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

The first thing I did was to plug the earbuds to the USB charger. I didn’t check the manual at first, so I didn’t know what the LED indicator meant. I later found out that the earbuds carried a full charge out of the box. You can also check the current battery level by pressing the volume buttons when your are not listening to any source. The earbuds will speak it out to you.

They came with the medium sized “eartips” installed, but they felt too loose in my ears. As a result, there bass was very poor (because of sound leaking to the outside). I changed them to the large sized ones, but they felt a bit too large in my ears. Bass was much better however. Perhaps I only need some getting used to. I remember same thing happening with my old Sennheiser CX500’s a long time ago.

The pairing seems pretty quick. It can remember up to 8 paired devices. I have only paired it with my iPhone 5S so far but it should work with the tablet as well as the MBA.

Actually there are a lot of things you can do with the earbuds. I need to check the manual and learn about all of them slowly. This is my first Bluetooth earbuds, so there are weird things happening at times. When I want to play podcasts from the built in speakers in the iPhone, it doesn’t play, because the earbuds are paired. The audio plays back from them. When I make a call, the default speakers are the earbuds. I get the option to choose which one to use, but the call goes through via the default speakers – the Bluetooth earbuds – even though I had not chosen which one to use.

Tomorrow I will put it to full use. I will be listening to podcasts using them while I commute to and from work. I will get a good idea about the battery consumption as well. Even though the specifications say that the battery will hold for 4hrs, people were saying that was not the case. In reality, it was about 3-3.5Hrs. Still, that’s ample time for my commute. But let’s see how things go.

I’ll be sure to update the post or write a new one about my experiences once I play with it for long enough.

[Rant] I've had enough with the Apple EarPods

Some time back, my Zagg Smart Buds broke. I didn't buy a new set of ear buds because I was going to get the iPhone 5S a couple of months after, and they should come with Apple's redesigned EarPods which were first announced with the iPhone 5. Until then, I used the old ear buds that came with my iPhone 4S.

When the iPhone 5S came out, I upgraded as early as possible. I've had the iPhone 5S for about 2 months now. That means, I've been using the Apple EarPods for about 2 months. And they suck!

There were two big issues with the old ear buds. They don't stay fit and the audio quality is bad.

The new ones are better in terms of the audio quality (but worse than a proper set of ear buds). However, although they are designed to fit in the ears better than the old one, for me, that hasn’t been the case. They fall so easily when I walk and ride the bike. I cannot turn the head without them coming off. Sucks!

Which means, I need a new set of ear buds!

There are two options for me.

One, get a new pair of Zagg Smart buds. I should wait for the Black Friday deals though. That’s only one more week to go, if I am not mistaken. Zagg is known to come up with nice Black Friday deals. The only issue is that I will still have to pay for shipping. And I would have a hard time claiming warranty in case they broke because I will have to send them back which costs money! Sadness. Too bad they don't sell Zagg products in Japan There was a Japanese store a while back, but not anymore. Amazon is selling a handful of products, but they don't have the SmartBuds.