Sounds Good - and the Spouse is Sleeping Better

If you love movies, and you love the person you call your Significant Other, it really is possible to delight your ears without a trip to the divorce court. I won't go as far as to claim that these "cans" can save a troubled relationship, but when combined skillfully with other smart moves, they can make your homelife more peaceful and happy.

The RS-140 is part of a series of wireless headphones from Sennheiser. These are a bit more expensive, because they are specially designed for those of us whose hearing has been somewhat compromised, through fate, age, or some combination of the two. I love a good movie sound track, but one of my ears is much weaker than the other. The RS-140 lets me balance things out properly.

The headphones are powered by two AAA batteries. Included in the package are two mediocre NiMH cells. (Note to the novice - battery capacity is the mAh number. All things being equal, a higher number implies that the battery will be able to perform longer between charges.) Higher capcity NiMH cells are inexpensive, and I would strongly recommend immediately replacing them. A pair of fully charged, high capacity AAA cells can probably keep you going for over 20 hours. And since AAA cells are cheap enough, you can have a second set on hand to use when the first ones weaken. Removing and replacing the batteries is most simple. You twist the battery compartment open, and the batteries are in a spring-loaded holder.

In the instructions for the headphones, the user is told to initially charge the cells for about 8 hours. It is entirely reasonable to charge them faster with another unit. This system does include a nice "trickle charger", which helps to get the most out of the batteries.

The base unit, which holds/charges the headset, is also the emitter. This is a radiowave emitter, not infrared. It uses a 900 MHz radio signal. In my opinion, this is a very good feature. More and more devices use higher frequencies. If for example, you used a 2.4 GHz signal, and you had a WiFi network in your home (lots of us do), you would face heavy interference. Infrared is using a light signal, so it only works when you are in the same room as the emitter, with nothing blocking you. That works for watching movies, but if you have this hooked up to a more versatile system, you might want to listen to music .. perhaps in another part of the house. With infrared, that is not going to work.

I found that the drop off in sound quality was not much of an issue anywhere in my home. The system has some intelligent circuitry to help set signal strength to a good level, and it can work well within a pretty broad range.

My headphones are paired with my Denon S301 mini home theatre, and the pairing is very nice. The Denon has a Dolby headphone mode, and with it, movie soundtracks may not be as good as they are on a real surround system, but they do sound good - clear dialogue, nice sound effects, etc. With my hearing, I can hardly claim to be an audiophile, but I think it is reasonable to say that the unit performs well and is enjoyable.

Concerning the price of this unit, I would urge the potential buyer to shop around a little. some of the most popular electronics dealers get $200 or more for the RS-140, but with a little searching, you should be able to get them home for less than about $140. Of course this is still not really cheap .. but you give up nothing to save. If you enjoy superior hearing, you might buy the cheaper RS-130 unit, which seems to perform similarly - although I do not have direct experience with that model.

The headphones use an over-the-ear design, and I found that very comfortable, but I know that this is quite subjective. If possible, try them out in a retail outlet. We all have variations in our head sizes and sense of what is comfortable, and what works well for me could easily be awful for you.

In summary - if you are hard of hearing, and want a nice set of headphones for use with an entertainment system or home theatre, this is among the better choices. I do recommend it.