You just got a new cellphone equipped with a slick Bluetooth headset. You love the wireless freedom and you idly wonder if the same technology could alleviate the tangle of wires from your portable cockpit gadgets. While you dream of this luxury, you realize that your cellphone headset doesnt always work quite right and you question if Bluetooth in the cockpit is the best idea. Youre right in both views. Bluetooth wireless is one of those great ideas that works we’ll most of the time and can be quite useful, especially with a hands-free cellphone headset. But its tender enough to cause frustration for some users, especially if the equipment isn’t we’ll designed or there’s electromagnetic interference where you happen to be. (These days, that can be everywhere.)

With the exception of GPS, hardly any segment of the GA gadget and accessories market lacks for competition. Thats especially true of headsets, where there are dozens of models to pick from in both active and passive noise reduction designs. There are so many, in fact, that its impractical to test them all. So for this article, we picked seven popular passive headsets and wrung them out, both in the audio laboratory and in an impartial, focus-group aircraft test.Interestingly, our lab findings and inflight results diverged dramatically on some of the headsets. It turns out that just because a headset has good lab numbers doesnt mean its a go-to model in the airplane. Comfort and perceived audio quality can and should rule the decision.

There are so many headsets on the market today-ANRs, passives, in-the-ear, featherweight designs-that we often wonder if there are enough buyers to keep all of the companies in business. And even if there are, what distinguishes one headset from another sufficiently to choose it? There’s no simple answer. In the past, weve evaluated headsets purely on a subjective basis and for this review, were doing that again. But this time, we also subjected the headsets to a thorough battery of audio laboratory testing.