Intro

Having never owned anything quite so “Iron Man” I couldn’t resist purchasing the Bragi Dash Pro’s after reading about them on Engadget, I thought I purchased them in time for delivery before we went abroad in June so I could go swimming with them but sadly they faced delays and I went on holiday sulking.

After having a reason to come home from Greece I eagerly ripped open the package rescued from my next door neighbour to find a small box, different to those I had seen on YouTube for the original Dash and nowhere near as fun. I took all of the components out and put it on charge as instructed. After that I underwent the update process which was very shaky to say the least, but I muddled through successfully after a couple of retries.

Sound and Comfort

This was a really tricky thing to master, Bragi get Brag-y about “Perfect Fit” and have included comply foam tips this time around following feedback from Dash users, this means that presumably no matter the shape of your ear-hole the correctly selected foam tip will magically plug them, my tips were a little mangled looking which I assume is down to a manufacture defect, no two were the same size but regardless I selected the closest fit. The sound was great, not excellent, probably on par if not a little better than the Sennheiser Momentum IE2’s I was using prior. What bothered me was that I could never get the ear canal fit and ear area fit snug at the same time, the fit sleeves would fill the outer ear but create a poor seal in the canal whereas the foam tips would fit the ear canal but not the outer area. It’s worth mentioning that the heart rate is only going to work properly with the fit sleeves on unless you have small ears. The solution? Cut the rubber tips off the fit sleeve and use a foam tip in conjunction.

Features

In ear computers right? The Dash and Pros alike come with an impressive sheet of features and coming soon’s most of which are fun at first. My use case scenario is this, I cycle to work most mornings so I wanted something without cables to snag, something light weight, comfortable with the ability to pass through sound from the outside so that I don’t move around a parked car into the path of another vehicle to end up splattered on the road. All the boxes were ticked and audio transparency with wind blocker a key feature here.

Audio transparency worked, until you play your music, you can vaguely hear outside noise unless you turn your phone’s volume is very low and the Bragi’s volume very high but then your music is pretty quiet and hard to enjoy, whats more wind blocker works too, without it on the wind noise is ear piercing but there’s another but, I presume the sound of a car is quite similar to the sound of wind blowing over the microphones so unfortunately cars get cancelled out too so that’s a bummer for me.

4D menu, cool at first but you look like an absolute burke using it and you’ll probably take your eyes off the road trying it on a bike.

Cheek tap thing, set it up, awesome because the touch controls hated my cycling gloves. But go down a bumpy road and my music gets paused, my transparency on whilst paused lights up without wind blocker and it’s almost like Darth Sidious is shooting his lightening fingers at my ears again.

Touch controls, like I just said they get really finicky with gloves, the point of optical instead of capacitive sensors was to prevent this but no dice. Sometimes the left one would see my helmet strap nearby and simply refuse to confirm any commands.

Fitness tracking, As stated earlier on, the HR doesn’t work with my ears unless you have a fit sleeve on since they’re optical, Vo2 is a coming soon but has been for a long time. Something it did phenomenally well which I’ll never understand is measure cycling cadence, it was almost spot on with my crank sensor. Running cadence would be a little easier to measure so I assume that’s just as good. Never got a chance to try the swimming values such as laps and breaths, we’ll get into that later. The Bragi app doesn’t talk to other services so your info is trapped in there.

Assistant and Phone calls, here’s where my problems started. For whatever reason when you’re doing anything based on the telephone Bluetooth protocol it offers up the microphone as a below 44.1Khz device and something about cassette tape quality in windows. On android, triggering Google assistant presents a tinny and distant sounding version of the familiar voice. The major problems started shortly down the line where my voice could not be heard by anything and the Dash Pros were busted. Audio transparency worked fine but calls did not, My theory is that the bone conducting Mics weren’t functioning, the conventional mics were but there must be some sort of algorithm that mutes those if the bone conductors aren’t hearing anything, usually this would translate to only your voice being picked up however in my case nothing was getting picked up. I’d read about similar issues with some Dash units but never a solution.

Connectivity, I can’t complain too much, I wasn’t riddled with issues like some original Dash users were but the human body still posed a problem for the Pros, in particular if my phone strayed too far into the bottom of my back pack more towards the left side then the earphones would start to drop out and skip, in open space and even through a thin wall they worked well indoors.

Conclusion

Although they are super cool and eye catching I don’t think they’re worth the effort or the money particularly in my case as most of the features were unusable or disabled. If you’re after fitness tracking get some sort of fitness watch and a good pair of earphones. I went through loads of hurdles with support to try and diagnose the problem only to have them RMAd, after I sent them back it went quiet until I prompted them and they said they have none in stock for a few weeks so quite frankly I was happy to accept a refund instead. There are better sounding earphones for a lot less, there are similar wireless earphones for a lot less and there are more reliable ones too.

Maybe the Bragi Dash Ultimate (Maybe?) will get it right 3rd time.

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