In the first quarter of the year, a series of events happened because of which I didn’t listen to music as much I normally do. To add to that, I lost one pair of my fake AirPods and just decided to go no music for a couple of months. And even though music is ideally why I would think of buying a headset under normal circumstances, something different forced me to buy one a month ago.
I use public transport for my daily commute, and unfortunate for me, the people I ride with have both zero common sense and empathy. The person sitting next to you is either having an unnecessarily loud conversation with someone in the car, scrolling that stupid AI slop on TikTok on highest colume, or blasting music from their speaker. So for my peace of mind, I decided to get a headset to insulate myself from all that nonsense during my daily commute.
I wish I put as much time into my undergraduate research as I spent looking for which headset to buy. To be completely honest, a headset was not what I planned to get originally. I originally planned to get an airpod or just an earbud. But whiles checking out earpods, I stumbled across this headset and fell in love with what I heard immediately.
I looked at number of different brands known for making good sound accessories; JBL, Anker, Soundcore, and our very own Oraimo. What I wanted was a JBL, but I could tell from the price quotes I was hearing that the JBLs on our market were fake. Here, fake products are called “Banku”.😂 So I looked for the other popular brands and later found a genuine Soundcore P50i which I reallllyyyy wanted because of everything I heard from the reviews: Noise Cancellation (very important for my case), Soundcore App for sound customization, great sound quality.
Buttttt…I looked a little too deep and found that the Reddit reviews of the P50i NC consistently mentioned how quickly the battery degraded, or one bud starts to die much sooner than the other. Most people said their earbuds only held charge for less than hour after 6 months. As you imagine, that was an immediate dealbreaker for me.
For oraimo, the Spacebud 2 was what I had my eye own, but that mf costs pretty dime (It’s currently about $40 in Ghana). It had the right combination of battery life (I think it promised 45 hours or so of play time on a single charge), active noise cancellation (ANC), awesome sound quality and beautiful design, so I was enchanted. I stalked the earbud for days everywhere until I eventually decided I was going to pull some strings and make the purchase.
So I went on Oraimo’s Website to make the purchase, and after seeing a variety of their products, comparing the different products and features, the Oraimo BoomPop Lite seemed like the better value for me. I was sold on the promise of over 80 hours play time, the multiple mics for clear audio and Oraimo Sound app for sound fine tuning and customization. It also has Environmental Noise Cancellation (ENC), which is marketed as something similar to ANC, but after using this headset for a month, I’m not impressed with it because I live in an area that is often windy because it’s near the beach and people are always complaining when I’m receiving calls outside. Everything else promised was delivered and beyond expectations, honestly!
Why I eventually settled on Oraimo was because I wasn’t just looking for a sound accessory, I was looking for one that would last a long time. These days, I place a lot of focus on sustainability when buying gadgets, and Oraimo’s products have a one-year warranty if you buy directly from their website, so they had me there. This was important to me because even some of the reviews of Oraimo’s products had complaints of the headset not holding charge for the declared time after a couple of months, so I wanted to make that since this sounded like a common thing across the sound companies, wherever I was buying my earbud will have a warranty in case that turned to be the case for me.
In the one month I’ve been using this, I have had nothing bad to say about the headset aside the shitty ENC. The headset has a game mode which boosts the sound quality, but it for whatever reason also lowers the volume. It’s not a big deal, but I wish it didn’t do that. Oh I almost forgot about the discomfort on my ears after wearing it a couple of hours.
I’m not inconvenienced by people during commute these days because they barely exist after I put my headset on. And when someone gets annoyingly loud next to me, I just take the headset of, position it near them and blast the loudest song I can find to send a message. Until I buy my car next year, this is the plan.😂 So if you’re considering getting a headset, I think the Oraimo BoomPop Lite is worth considering.
