Sony MDR AS600BT Review – The Best Bluetooth Headphones?

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Sony MDR AS600BT Review – The Best Bluetooth Headphones?

I’ve often wondered, what are the Best Bluetooth Headphones for working out? Could the Sony MDR AS600BT headphones be the best bluetooth headphones on the market? I decided to do this review to find out.

What’s in the box?

1x Headphones

3 pairs of ear buds 1x Large 1x Medium 1x Small

2 pairs of ear fins 2 small 2 large

USB Cable

Instruction book/Paperwork

Overview

Some people hate the idea of Bluetooth headphones some love them. I’ve always gone for corded headphones because they’re easier to get hold of, but I’ve been seeing a lot of Bluetooth headphones on the market so maybe now is the time to try them out. I’ve recently started to use a follow-along app for my workouts on a smartphone, these enable me to basically follow the on-screen instructions to complete preset routines for whatever workout I wanna do that day.

Now if you’re in a gym with techno music blaring through the building it’s hard to follow the sound on your app without headphones, and if you’re using corded headphones you can’t, for example, jump around or do any exercises which require both hands with your smartphone or tablet in your hand – so this is where Bluetooth headphones could come in handy for me…  Yes I know there are arm pouches for smartphones which I have tried but I hate them, they just feel really uncomfortable for me….sorry 🙁

So back to this – the Sony MDR AS600BT review. My first impression was that they look very big, they are definitely bigger than your average in-ear corded headphones. I suppose the Bluetooth components need to be housed somewhere, but still, my main concern upon first seeing them is the size of them…

Pairing them up was VERY easy, not complicated at all. You simply hold the button down, turn on your Bluetooth and pair it. No annoyances here. They also have NFC functionality which can make it easier to pair them up with your Bluetooth device but the normal method was fine for me.

Sound Quality

The sound quality I’d say is better than I expected. The only Bluetooth earphones I’ve ever used are those handsfree earpieces you can wear while driving. When I first took up this Sony MDR AS600BT review, upon first glance of these headphones I expected them to have quite a tinny sound and sound as though I was listening to a bad quality radio signal, but the sound was very punchy, a good amount of bass and I could appreciate the genre of music I was listening to while I was working out.

I won’t go into a full breakdown of the sound quality because sound over Bluetooth is compressed, so the quality cannot be fairly judged against the quality of a corded headphone of the same price bracket but these were surprisingly better than I expected, when I turned up the bass and the treble in my phone settings, the headphones responded well. I’ll put it this way, at no point did I feel my music sounded awful. There was a bit of sound leakage but that wasn’t a problem at all.

The sound isolation was great. The headphones drowned out the sound of people grunting and crashing weights down around me.  Thumbs up!

I used them 4 times in the week for roughly an hour long workout at a time. The batteries didn’t run out on me which was really good. They are advertised as having 8.5 hours of battery life so I didn’t come anywhere near to draining them, but if the batteries do run out they’re really easily recharged. You just unpeel the little flap and plug in the micro USB cable supplied into your computer’s USB port.

Problems?

While doing this Sony MDR AS600BT review, I did note some bad things. Disappointingly these don’t come with any sort of carry case. So bear that in mind. 

One of the problems I have with in-ear style headphones when I work out is that when I’m moving around they fall out of my ears. This is annoying for me and probably the main reason why I use over ear headphones as opposed to in-ear buds – in the past I have changed the size of the actual inner ear pads that fit on the end of the earphone in the hope that it would give a more snug fit, but this has never sorted the problem for me. I like them to stay on my head and I don’t want them to fall off halfway through an exercise. So I devised a little experiment see how good or bad these are at staying in my ears… I used a jump rope for 1 minute with them in my ears and counted how many times they fell out or almost fell out. Watch the video review to see how this went.

Overall

Overall I’d say they are a good buy. If you don’t want to spend a large amount on headphones for working out and you prefer in in-ear form factor as opposed to the over ear headphone these will do the job really well. Just keep an eye on how secure they are in your ear so they don’t fall out.

£55, amazon | sony.com