The Jawbone bluetooth headset and wind noise in a convertible

Have you been trying to find the best bluetooth headset to deal with wind noise, especially while driving in a convertible? If so, then you've undoubtedly read all about how the best noise-cancelling headsets can't do much of anything about wind noise. Holding out hope? Don't. When it comes to even relatively mild wind noise, bluetooth headsets suck. I tried three of the allegedly most wind-and-noise resistant -- the Plantronics 510, the Blue Ant Z9 and the much-touted Aliph Jawbone. The Jawbone was the best of the three, and also the most expensive -- but it still isn't half as good as the regular old handset, with no bluetooth headset at all, when driving in a convertible with the top down and the windows up.

What I did NOT find was very many sites with audio recordings of how the headsets performed in wind -- and the manufacturers' own promotional recordings aren't to be trusted. There's one excellent site that I did find: a thorough comparison, with postings, by Dan Craft at SiezeTruth.com. Since Dan didn't include any recordings of the Jawbone, I've included one below. While the Jawbone was the best of the lot, its outgoing audio in a convertible with the top down at anything much over 40 mph is peppered with spikes of wind noise every few seconds, and much more unpleasant for your listener than if you use no headset at all. Dan concludes that the best bluetooth headset for driving in a convertible with the top down is no headset at all, and I concur.

The solution? We might have to hold out until either the makers of The Boom come out with a bluetooth version, or until Motorola releases (what was) the Invisio Q7, a true bone-conduction headset which, unlike the Jawbone, uses no external microphone at all, but instead digitally reconstructs your voice from vibrations in your ear bones. Nextlink (the original developer of the Q7) released a few pre-production models before selling it recently to Motorola, which will release it who-knows-when. Early reports from these pre-pro Q7s were that they suffered from tinny sound, but that wind didn't affect them at all.

Until then, take a fashion hint from The Royal Tenenbaums' Baumer and strap your cellphone to the side of your head with a tennis headband.



(2007 Miata convertible, top down, windows up, 60-70 mph, backdraft windscreen, not much engine noise, very little cockpit wind)

The efficiency of free markets.

"Of course, imitation and adulteration are the essence of competition—they are but another form of the phrase 'to buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest.' A government official has stated that the nation suffers a loss of a billion and a quarter dollars a year through adulterated foods; which means, of course, not only materials wasted that might have been useful outside of the human stomach, but doctors and nurses for people who would otherwise have been well, and undertakers for the whole human race ten or twenty years before the proper time. Then again, consider the waste of time and energy required to sell these things in a dozen stores, where one would do. There are a million or two of business firms in the country, and five or ten times as many clerks; and consider the handling and rehandling, the accounting and reaccounting, the planning and worrying, the balancing of petty profit and loss. Consider the whole machinery of the civil law made necessary by these processes; the libraries of ponderous tomes, the courts and juries to interpret them, the lawyers studying to circumvent them, the pettifogging and chicanery, the hatreds and lies! Consider the wastes incidental to the blind and haphazard production of commodities—the factories closed, the workers idle, the goods spoiling in storage; consider the activities of the stock manipulator, the paralyzing of whole industries, the overstimulation of others, for speculative purposes; the assignments and bank failures, the crises and panics, the deserted towns and the starving populations! Consider the energies wasted in the seeking of markets, the sterile trades, such as drummer, solicitor, bill-poster, advertising agent. Consider the wastes incidental to the crowding into cities, made necessary by competition and by monopoly railroad rates; consider the slums, the bad air, the disease and the waste of vital energies; consider the office buildings, the waste of time and material in the piling of story upon story, and the burrowing underground! Then take the whole business of insurance, the enormous mass of administrative and clerical labor it involves, and all utter waste ..."

The Jungle, Upton Sinclair, 1906

Poetry and poverty.

"It is a kind of anguish that poets have not commonly dealt with; its very words are not admitted into the vocabulary of poets—the details of it cannot be told in polite society at all. How, for instance, could any one expect to excite sympathy among lovers of good literature by telling how a family found their home alive with vermin, and of all the suffering and inconvenience and humiliation they were put to, and the hard-earned money they spent, in efforts to get rid of them? After long hesitation and uncertainty they paid twenty-five cents for a big package of insect powder—a patent preparation which chanced to be ninety-five per cent gypsum, a harmless earth which had cost about two cents to prepare. Of course it had not the least effect, except upon a few roaches which had the misfortune to drink water after eating it, and so got their inwards set in a coating of plaster of Paris. The family, having no idea of this, and no more money to throw away, had nothing to do but give up and submit to one more misery for the rest of their days."

- Upton Sinclair, The Jungle