If you work in IT, you will be familiar with what a standard business server room sounds like. For those that aren’t so familiar, let me give you some insight.
A server room is often a medium-sized room that contains rack-mounted computer equipment. This equipment is expensive and works around the clock 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. You’ll find networking switches, cores, and firewalls as well as storage racks and virtual machine hosts.
As this equipment is meant to run non-stop, it gets hot. To keep the equipment cooled and functioning, the racked mounted equipment holds high RPM fans that are extremely loud and push a lot of air.
Since a server room is secured by sound damping walls and a locked door, the air needs to be recirculated and cooled to prevent the fans from cooling the equipment with hot exhaust air. Modest server rooms will run off of their own HVAC air conditioning unit that will continuously dump cold air into the room.
What do we get in return? More noise.
While there is a lot more to a server room, the underlying point I am making here is that a server room is loud. Your normal inside voice isn’t good enough in a server room, and it’s even tougher when you are troubleshooting a failed backup battery over a mobile Skype call.
Since server rooms run the businesses production systems, they can’t be shut down. If the power goes out, they will failover to the backup battery as they wait for the generator to turn on. Without that minimal failover to the backup battery, the generator would be too slow, and the equipment would turn off.
So, when your backup battery is displaying a critical warning about a power fault, it’s worrisome and time to take action. On a Friday morning at my workplace, this is exactly what happened.
Our backup battery unit had a critical internal fault causing a key component inside the unit to melt and destroy itself. With all of the server room power flowing through it, it had brought down an entire business.
As we begin to troubleshoot the onscreen display to enter the backup battery into bypass mode, our infrastructure administrator is having a tough time hearing the technician on his Skype call, which is on his phone. Remember that a server room is quite loud.
As I see him struggling to hear and understand the technician, a light bulb goes on above me. I have a new headset that I have been reviewing that has active noise cancellation. I run back to my desk, grab them and a 3.5mm headphone jack and return to the server room.
He puts them on, flips the switch, and like magic the loud server room sounds empty and as if everything was turned off. He could hear the technician in a crystal-clear tone, and the technician could hear him thanks to the iPhone’s microphone noise cancellation.
This was expected to be a typical headphone review where we discuss how well they sound, yet they performed in a situation that MPOW could have never imagined.
Welcome to my review of the MPOW H5 Wireless Headset
Design
These office-grade headphones are becoming familiar as the market for them is continuing to grow. As the fifth pair of office grade headphones that I have reviewed, the MPOW H5s are some of the most comfortable I’ve ever used for the office.
At any place the headphones make contact with your head, there is a soft leather-like material that feels great to the touch. Behind the soft outer layer, the H5 headphones have plush foam that gently rests on your head, not squeezing it.
Starting with the earcups, they are oval in shape, which I personally prefer. The oval-shaped earcups are padded and wrapped with the material mentioned a minute ago. Inside the earcup where your ear is, is a felt pad that covered over the plastic speaker grill. Adding this felt pad is unnoticeable to you, but it prevents your ears from becoming irritated against the plastic.
On the outside of the earcups, there is a large gray MPOW logo that is laid on a glossy black finish. I would have preferred a matte or brushed look as the glossy finish does show fingerprints easily.
Unlike other headphones, the H5s have buttons and inputs on both earcups. Beginning with the left earcup, you’ll find the internal microphone, micro USB charging port, volume down, Bluetooth/Power, and a volume up button. Then, the right contains the 3.5mm input jack and a switch for the active noise cancellation. Both earcups contain small indicator LEDs as well.
The buttons on the H5s are easily locatable when the headphones are placed on your head, and they have a satisfying click to them.
Everything on the H5 headphones is made of plastic, but to add a more premium look and feel, they are coated in a rubber material. You’ll find this rubberized material on the earcups and top of the headband.
The headband connecting the two earcups together has a few great design aspects to it. For starters, it allows both earcups to rotate 90 degrees to allow the headphones to easily lie facing outwards on your chest when placed around your neck.
Additionally, the earcups can collapse into the headband and be placed into the banana-shaped hard nylon carrying case.
On the part of the headband that rests against your head, you will find that same material and foam found on the earcups. With the multiple adjustments that the headband offers, most people should easily find that it fits them well and comfortably.
Additionally, I found that these headphones leave a minimal hair indentation when placed on your head for long periods of time.
As it’s made of plastic and rubber, my headband cracked due to excessive bending outwards when I quickly took them on or off. The crack is minimal, but, nonetheless, worth mentioning.
Functionality
For the past two months, I have been using the MPOW H5 headphones exclusively at work with exceptional success.
I paired my H5 headphones over Bluetooth with my laptop. The first thing I instantly noticed was how far I could walk away with my headphones. With the laptop on a docking station and the office being a large open area with cubicles, the range in the H5 is incredible.
The rated range with the H5 is 33 feet, but I was walking up to 50 feet away and even had large objects blocking the way between myself and the laptop. While the laptop pushes out a strong signal, the headphones played music just as well as they would have at 5 feet away.
Next, I noticed how long the battery lasts on the H5s. Rated for 18 hours of talk/play time, I was getting three full eight hour working days with on and off listening.
People often need my attention, or I take breaks to listen to music, to assist others or for lunch, so I didn’t go for an extremely long period of music listening, but they were always powered. Some weeks, I would go an entire week without needing to recharge them and would throw them onto the charger on Friday evening.
Recharging the headphones is quick and efficient. Over the last two months, I have only once heard the woman’s voice informing me of a low battery. I put them on the charger for 10 minutes and was given enough juice for the rest of the five-hour day. Total recharge time is about two hours.
One annoyance I had with charging the headphones is that they cannot be used over Bluetooth while they are being charged. If the battery is completely drained, you will need to use a 3.5mm headphone jack.
Used in a busy office environment, I play these headphones at a low to medium sound level, and with the active noise cancellation (ANC) turned off, they still easily block out everything around me. A co-worker often can yell my name, and I cannot hear them depending on the song that is playing. Turned up a little louder and it blocks everything.
The speakers do leak sound, so if you sit close to somebody, say on an airplane, keep the volume a little lower.
If you want never to be bothered with the sounds around you again, you can turn on the ANC. With the ANC turned on, literally everything goes away. People’s voices are hard to hear when they are standing next to you, building air conditioning disappears, and you feel as if you are in a silent room with your music. Moreover, I feel that with the ANC turned on, the music sounds better with more focus on the vocals. With it turned off, the music is louder though.
It shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody when I say that turning the ANC on and leaving it on rapidly drains the battery.
When we were using the H5 headphones in the server room, it changed me forever, causing me to keep a pair of noise cancellation headphones in a server room. This ANC is stronger than any other past headphones I have used, and it’s seriously impressive.
Regarding music, I used the H5 with Pandora Plus and used a Bluetooth 4.1 connection. I listened to a mixture of mostly rock and roll but included top 40, and classic pop music.
Everything I threw at the H5’s 40mm drivers sounded clear, crisp, and accurate just as it does on my expensive Beyerdynamic headphones and configuration at home.
I would easily say that anybody who is using these in an office setting will appreciate the music and the sounds that the H5 produces. For those listening to any genres, watching your favorite Twitch Stream, or listening in on a conference call, it works for it all.
Lastly, I used the internal microphone on a conference call at work. The microphone is average, and I wouldn’t recommend it for anything other than quick calls. This, sadly, is typically the case with all headphones of this style.
My Final Thoughts
These MPOW H5 headphones are easily my favorite office headphones, and I have been using them every single working day. They are the perfect travel buddy or even decent enough to use at home for everyday computing.
Priced at $55.99, I find that they are a steal and worth every dollar. The comfortable padding, great sound and foldable speakers will block all the noises around you and do so with a little bit of style. All music genres I tried sounded flawless and even coworkers enjoyed how they sounded.
Plus, they come with a hard carrying case and included cables. This is something that is hard to find included even for headphones in this price range.
Buy it now:
© 2018 Justin Vendette