I have tried almost every bluetooth headset out there and none, I repeat, NONE work in high noise environments. Why? Because we don’t speak with our ears yet the industry continually embeds their microphones in the earpiece instead of next to our mouths. (Why not just put the mic on the back of our heads or under our arm pits?)

How many times have you tried a new bluetooth headset for your cell phone and the party on the other end of the line complains that they can hear you but not over the background noise at BestBuy, or with your car windows rolled down, or at Starbucks with 50 other people yammering in the background, or at that construction site you’re standing next to. Do you think it might have something to do with the fact that the microphone is behind your jaw instead of in front of your mouth?

We don’t need ineffective noise canceling headsets that proclaim to pull voice frequencies from the ambient noise. What’s the point if you are standing in a room whose ambient noise is comprised of other human voices. We need headsets designed to pick up the sounds that we make with our (and not other people’s) mouths which means putting the mics close to our lips.

Kudos to Zivio for pushing conventional wisdom and putting a properly engineered device out on the market. I only hope that the in-ear acoustics are as good for my hearing pleasure as the microphone acoustics are for the receiving end of the party.