Cutting the wire with any audio product is what we ultimately want. Yet the dilemma of weaker audio quality when compared to its wired nemesis still seems quite real. SACKit knocked the ball high out of the park with their portable Bluetooth WOOFit Jam speakers, so will their magic also cast to their first entry into the headphone space? We’re certainly excited to find out. 

Design

Gold is quickly becoming the new black nowadays, so we opted for the former out of the two colour choices. Extravagant is the word that springs to mind when looking and feeling the SACKit WOOFit Bluetooth headphones. They shun any image of being ‘techy’ and are instead ripe for both modernist male and female tastes, with their eye-catching proportional thin leather headband and circular flat ear cups. 

Aluminium is generously used to construct the ear cups and sliding height adjustment mechanism, which we should add is very agile. In fact, durability is one of this set's trump cards; we’ve travelled with them in and out of backpacks and they are still sparkling away. They’re a strong pair! Despite the fact that they cannot be folded up, the 168g small dimensional profile, without the wire, stands them well for commuters.

Comfort & Noise Isolation

Whatever can be padded is - generously; this includes the headband and ear cups. As a complete package we have no complaints to make about our head feeling restless and want to pay particular praise to the headband design, as it is barely noticeable resting on the head during lengthy periods of listening. Our ears however do become squished feeling after 3 hours or so of listening. The cups are little bigger than your traditional on-ear ones, so are sort of stuck in an in-between of sorts, but include true active noise cancellation with microphones surveying your exterior environment of sound, cleverly keeping it out of your music. Toggled by a switch on the right ear cup, the difference between this being off and on is enormous; it truly works to scoop out the surrounding pedestrian and car sounds on morning walks.

Battery Life

The 12 hour claim seems to ring near to the truth! We squeezed out just a notch above 10 hours with volume dialled up at around 75%. Not too shabby when we take into account these are powering substantially bigger audio drivers than a pair of Bluetooth earphones like the RBH EP-SB earphones with their 6 hours of battery life.

Bluetooth & Inbuilt Controls

Unsurprisingly the Bluetooth 4.0 performance was stable across all our tablets, smartphones and notebooks. We had hardly any issues when toggling between different devices. The range was also confidently around 10 metres and these headphones don’t stutter through walls or from active movement, which is always a nice plus! What’s more, we don’t need to reach into our pocket to grab our smartphone to control music, instead all these functions can be done wirelessly via volume up/down buttons and a Bluetooth multifunctional button. This can pause/play tracks, skip music and answer calls thanks to a decent inbuilt mic.

Performance

We wanted to report that playing music via Bluetooth 4.0 and over the cable is now on a par, but differences are still prominent. This means the audio via the cable informs us of just how capable they can be, with a dynamically warm sound that includes a respectably resonating bass, when taking into account the size of the 40mm drivers. Playing the new release ‘Downtown’ by ‘Maclemore’ these smashed out a more impressive bass response than the £250 Sennheiser Urbanite XL headphones. It really is an impressively deep bass for an on-ear pair of headphones and the volume gets too loud for us, but the bass refuses to distort.

’September in the Rain’ by ‘Dinah Washington’ is a nice example of the underlying bass retaining the energy, along with the high frequency violins and vocals that need guts, and at times a sparky mid range too. So yes, we are very happy with the range performance individually and amongst one another when playing a diverse selection of different genres through the SACKit WOOFit Bluetooth headphones. What’s odd is that the breathing space between them all is quite evidently wide, with accurate stereo separation, but despite no real presence of a sound stage surrounding your head, audio just projects straight into the ear canal with no fancy effects. Nevertheless, songs with lots of individual musical elements do well not to tread on one another. Despite all of this, audio performance over Bluetooth is just a little bit more subdued than that through the wire, with volume levels dumbed down and pure potential prominence across all ranges mildly weakened too. For the sake of engineering this could be deliberate in order to maximise battery life, which we were, incidentally, extremely happy with, although our inkling is that the maximum potential of Bluetooth is dampened by the digital compression that still occurs even with the newest standalone Bluetooth 4.0.

Overall

A good Bluetooth pair of headphones, but a great wired pair. Nevertheless, for the £130 price tag, they provide what we would consider honourable value for well groomed convenience of wireless audio and a high level of performance for satisfactory daily listening.