Neck speakers are absolutely not the next big fashion statement and headphones will always have advantages over them in public spaces. But at home? I might be a convert to how much better surround sound is when it comes from around your neck, especially compared to headphones. It’s not going to beat a real multi-speaker home theater setup, but if you want to largely keep things to yourself but still experience true surround, these are the way to go.
Sony SRS-NS7 – Design and Build Quality
The Sony SRS-NS7 neck speaker feels similar to a pair of headphones in hand. They are made of mostly plastic, but the exposed areas have a sort of silicon, rubberized feel to them, and that’s what you’ll touch the most when setting them on your shoulders or adjusting the volume. They certainly feel high quality.
The entire top of the left and right of the device is covered in speakers that face upwards when the NS7 rests on your shoulders. These are covered with a cloth mesh, typical of what you would find on a set of desktop or bookshelf speakers. The result is that they actually look like you’re wearing a pair of speakers on your shoulders.
The space between the left and right – the part that goes behind your head when wearing them – feels like a flexible silicon, but it clearly has some kind of rigid core because while they do flex lightly, it still feels firm.
While wearing the NS7, volume is controlled on the interior of the left side along with a button that can be used to pause and skip music. On the opposite interior is the power button and mute button if you are using the NS7 as a microphone.
Sound is generated from a pair of full-range speakers which point upward towards your ears while two down-facing slitted openings fire into your shoulders, which helps improve the low-end and makes it so you can actually feel the rumble of the bass at times. Sony is able to read sound from whatever the NS7 is connected to and actually generate surround sound through this simple arrangement and its position relative to your ear.
More on that shortly.
Sony SRS-NS7 – Setup and Usability
The NS7 is pretty easy to use right out of the box. After charging it through a USB-C port on the right hand side with the included USB-A to USB-C cable (though annoyingly no charging brick was included), it’s as simple as connecting the included dongle to your television via USB-A and hooking the included optical cable into your optical port.
While yes, the NS7 can connect to devices using solely bluetooth, not everything supports that and honestly it’s pretty quick and easy to use this admittedly fiddly setup. You also don’t need to worry about syncing a device with the headphones if you use the included dongle: it connects immediately.
If you want to use Bluetooth and forgo the dongle, you can do so by holding down the power button for a few seconds to activate discovery mode. One note: if you connect it to your smartphone by Bluetooth, you gain access to Sony’s Headphones app that will let you fine tune the audio. This feature does not seem to translate to when it’s wired to a television, unfortunately.
Volume can be controlled from the neck speaker itself and I found that it got much, much louder than I needed it to. I am using it somewhere near the lower end of its possible range and found that to be perfectly suitable. If anything, these speakers don’t get quiet enough, in my opinion.
The most annoying part about this headset is that the only way it can be hard-wired to a device is through an optical cable linked to its wireless dongle. So really, it’s not hard wired at all. I’m sure there is a good reason, but you can’t use it with your Playstation 5, for example, without having the console connected to a television through the optical port. I personally like to game on a monitor, and monitors don’t typically come with an optical input and the Playstation 5 doesn’t support audio from a Bluetooth source. I would have liked some way to connect the headset to my Playstation directly; even a headphone jack and cable would have solved this problem.
Sony SRS-NS7 – Wearing Experience
If you are the kind of person who finds over-ear headphones to be uncomfortable, the SRS-NS7 is a really fantastic alternative. The speakers aren’t quite as private as over-ears or earbuds, obviously, but they do a remarkable job keeping sound isolated to the wearer if you keep the volume at the mid and lower levels.
I was able to watch movies and play video games next to my wife in our living room and she was able to easily ignore the sounds coming out of the NS7. It’s not that the sound wasn’t noticeable, but it wasn’t too loud and she was able to do her own thing and easily ignore it. I think this will be particularly helpful for people with young children who still want to enjoy the full surround sound experience of a theater at night after they’ve gone to bed without running the risk of waking them up.
Personally, wearing the NS7 for long periods of time was comfortable enough, but my body just isn’t used to something resting on my collarbones. I think with time, this could change, but I wanted to take these off after a couple of hours because of that light pressure where there is usually none.
The NS7 will also get just a tad bit warm as you use it, so that is also worth bearing in mind.
Sony SRS-NS7 – Audio Quality
I am honestly blown away by how good the audio experience is on the NS7. I watched a few different movies and at times I could not honestly tell I was hearing the audio through the device and not through my home theater system. When sound is supposed to be coming from directly in front of you, it sounds like it is. If it’s supposed to be left, right, or even behind, that happens too.
Surround sound specifically is incredibly accurate, and scenes in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and Shang-Chi had me seriously believing there were speakers behind, to the side, and in front of me. Watching sports was a trip, as when the crowd cheered, it actually sounded like I was in the stands myself.
In video games, especially those that rely on spatial awareness, the NS7 sings. Wearing these while playing a competitive first person shooter or a game that requires you to know what is happening around all the time is definitely possible, which is usually not the case outside of headphones unless you have a very expensive home theater setup and even then isn’t always a guarantee. I actually think the detail of the surround sound was better than many headphones. It is at least slightly better than Sony’s own PlayStation 5 Pulse headset, which I have been daily driving for the better part of a year.
I have no problem recommending these for gaming, especially for those who don’t like headphones for whatever reason and speakers aren’t in the cards either.
Music sounds great on the NS7, and while it’s not going to beat out a dedicated set of headphones, it’s quite pleasant and most will be perfectly happy with the quality of the sound.
I tested the NS7s on two different televisions (both of them made by Sony), with one running Google TV and the other using a Roku Ultra. Everything was pretty perfect on the television with the Roku, but the other television had some strange tuning in the vocals. While music and effects sounded spot-on, voices sounded hollow, tinny, and empty. I’m not sure what caused this discrepancy, but I’m willing to chalk it up to something on my end and not blame the headphones since they worked perfectly on a second television.
I touched on this earlier, but unfortunately changing the sound profile in the Sony Headphones app had no effect on how audio through the dongle sounded. I tested the same YouTube video through my phone and through my TV with the dongle and the NS7 sent me two different audio experiences. If your TV has particularly robust sound options, that is likely to be your best bet to tuning the audio experience.
What I think is a really nice advantage of these is that you do not need any kind of ambient mode or passthrough like you would with headphones: your ears are always open and free, and you can hear both your content and whatever is happening around you. Depending on how loud you run the NS7 will have diminishing returns on how well you can hear your surroundings, but if you keep the volume at a mid to medium low level, you’ll have no problem watching TV and keeping an ear open to make sure you don’t miss your doorbell ringing or your children in the next room over.
One other thing to keep in mind is that the NS7 is specifically designed to work with your head in a very tight position. If you tilt your head left or right, audio immediately sounds worse and unbalanced. I suppose this has the advantage of helping you with your posture (don’t you dare slouch!), but it’s otherwise a downside of a close-field audio system that isn’t attached to your ears.
Sony SRS-NS7 – Microphone
If you’re going to use the NS7 for video games, it better have a good microphone, right? Luckily, it does. Voices come through balanced and clear and your voice is projected to the other end very well. To compare it to a regular phone conversation, with the NS7 your voice is clearer because more of the tonal ranges that make up your voice are transmitted.
Sony SRS-NS7 – The Competition
Neck speakers are not a new segment. Panasonic, for example, has a gaming-specific neck speaker that it launched in 2020. In addition to those, I think the NS7 will also be up against traditional headphones. There are a lot of options there, obviously, and all of those will have their pros and cons. The $250 asking price of the NS7s is up there with some of the more expensive headphones, so you’ll have to decide if what they offer is worth that premium price.
from IGN Reviews https://ift.tt/O61ezQrRT
This could be a real lead forward for personal gaming... Revolutionise gaming
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