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There are a lot of choices when it comes to audio gear, but if you want something subtle that fits in your ear rather than a big cup that sits atop your ear, you have to compromise sound for convenience, right? Wrong. The amazing Beyerdynamic Xelento Wireless in-ear headphones, built around Tesla audiophile drivers, will blow away your expectations.
Tech expert Dave Taylor of https://www.askdavetaylor.com/ auditioned the Beyerdynamic Xelento Wireless and found them to be truly amazing, with lush, gorgeous, precise sound reproduction and some cool options for maximal user flexibility.
But they have a premium pricetag too, which brings up the question: Are in-ear headphones / earbuds ever possibly worth $1200? Dave's answer might just surprise you...
Check them out at https://www.Beyerdynamic.com/
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Do these $1,200 earbuds sound better than your headphones
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Let's find out. Dave Taylor here, and, you know, I'm not kidding
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$1,200 earbuds. Now, the company calls them in-ear headphones, and they are fantastic
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Just so there's no suspense, yeah, they do sound better than your headphones
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These are pretty darn amazing. There's some strange magic going on to get these to see
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sounds so good. What are they? They're the biodynamic Zolento wireless and the company refers to it as
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audible jewelry. Now, let's do a super quick unboxing because they do a very nice job with their packaging
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And basically you have the earbuds and this is a pretty typical Y design where you have the
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earbuds on the top, you have the inline controller on the right side and then at the bottom you have a
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battery. Now personally I kind of like this because this means I
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I don't have to every couple of hours put them into a little box to charge and then have nothing to listen to
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This actually gives me eight hours of playback time depending on volume and how complex your music is
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But they have even more tricks up their sleeve. So let's continue the unboxing
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First thing to notice is there is a ton of ear tips this comes with. It comes with seven silicone and three comply foam ear tips
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So between all of those, you will find the right size for your ears. and as you know, it is super important to get the right size because it will make a huge difference in the sound
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Now, where this gets even more interesting is when you pull out the little leather carrying pouch
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because the leather carrying pouch actually has stuff in it, one of which is the micro USB charging cable, not very interesting
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but it also has a wired alternative connection. So it turns out that the little earbuds pop off and you can
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put them on the wired connection. Let me get it on the right ear. There we go. And I can now use
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these as wired in line or in ear headphones. And you know what? I have a pair that are just wired
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and didn have this alternative and they sound fantastic So I knew when I got the wireless Bluetooth ones it was going to sound even better But I love this flexibility If there are situations where you don want to or can use Bluetooth
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then you have a wired option. And, of course, this doesn't need to be charged
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This will just run forever as long as you want to listen to music. But the Bluetooth is kind of where the fun is
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So we'll plug it back in. We'll put this back away. And as you can see, you know, it is a very nice piece of
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packaging and as you would expect because this is a very premium product this is not a
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product that you would expect to get in some boring brown cardboard right so put all
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this aside we get back to this and let me tell you these sound amazing now they
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actually have great frequency response 8 to 48,000 Hertz way better than my
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hearing and better than your hearing but it just gives it so much life so much
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dynamic range and it has an impressive 110 decibel sound pressure level so they can get pretty
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darn loud if that's what you want now in terms of what you compare this with via Bluetooth if you
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have Android a lot of Android phones actually have APTX or better APTX HD it actually is very
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happy with those if you have an iPhone the iPhones use AAC it works with that it also has
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SBC and high-res audio support so It's really designed for high-end premium listening, and you can tell when you listen
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Now, one of the other really cool things they have is there's an app you can download that will actually give you a hearing test and then customize an EQ setting based on your actual hearing left and right ear
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So if you do that, and that's the MIY app, or maybe it's called My, I don't know, and it's actually like five or ten minutes to fiddle around with it and get it all set up
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And then you have actual an EQ designed for your actual current hearing, which is an amazing thing
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You know, you think about all this other audio gear where it's just designed to be, you know
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whatever they want to set it up in the factory. And you don't have much in the way of choice
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Now, you don't have to use that if you want. You can just plug these in or actually you know pair them with your device and just get going And that going to sound really really good You can use your EQ settings on your audio source That going to work too
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But I really like being able to customize it to my own actual hearing
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And it gives me even that much more richness to the sound. Now, I will warn you, if you do the custom EQ settings, don't have it set all the way on maximum
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because when I was auditioning some classical music, it started to actually do a little bit of clipping
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because there was a little too much amplification going on. So when I just slid it down to like midpoint
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then suddenly everything just sounded great and I got rid of that sort of crackly sound at the high end
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So that was something that was my totally user error. So then I will tell you, get the right ear tips on these
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And these are, like I said, some strange magic going on because you will listen to these
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and they go over your ear and then into your ear. So it's a slightly different orientation than regular earbuds, but you will listen to these and you will not believe that they're just earbuds
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They sound that good. It's weird, actually. I mean, they're very immersive sound, very rich, huge sound stage
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They just sound really, really good. I mean, you know, if you have like $199 headphones or something and then you put these on, you're going to be really disappointed with your headphones afterwards
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all I'm going to say. There's a richness to it. There's, you know, a lot of base. It's just
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there's a really great clarity. And this is very much the whole Tesla speaker design and driver
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system that biodynamic has on a variety of their devices. There's just a crispness and an accuracy
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to it that's really remarkable. When you're listening to music, you can hear the mistakes the
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musicians make. You can hear the like tapping of metronomes in the background. You can hear people's
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feet tapping as they're doing like a trumpet solo or something. It's really that crisp. And I mean
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I can't say enough about how beautiful they sound. These are really, really good. They will make all
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your other audio gear just seem kind of inferior But they are also super expensive So that gets to the question of are they really worth this much money Who the heck buys something that this expensive I mean these earbuds are more expensive than either of these high phones right
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Does that even make sense? Well, hang on. Before we talk about that, let me ask if you can subscribe to my channel
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Really appreciate when you subscribe. And leave me some comments. Let me know what your thoughts are on high-end audio gear because, hey, I respond to my comments
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and I love to hear from you. Now, are they worth the money? Yeah, if you can afford it, absolutely, why wouldn't you want high-end gear
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Because there is a difference between the, you know, 999 earbuds that you pick up at the gas station
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and the $199 ones that are the high-end best buy, and then a product like these
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which are really just super premium. You know, if you can't afford a super premium house or a super premium car, hey, at least you can get super premium audio gear, right
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So that's a step in the right direction. So let me just real quick summarize
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These are the Biodynamic Zillenta Wireless. They are $1199 at biodynamic.com. I think they sound fantastic
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You know, they have the inline three button controller. If I can untangle this, let's see here
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So pretty typical design, you know, where you have forward and previous volume up, volume down, pause, play
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You obviously cannot answer phone calls. you can't do anything like that because this doesn't have a microphone
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This is not intended to be that device. This is just audio playback and it does it beautifully
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And I really like these. These are absolutely my go-to earbuds. And even calling them earbuds feels a little bit weird
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These are my go-to in-ear headphones. And if you have a chance to audition these, you really should because I guarantee you'll be impressed
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So with that, I am getting back to some of my music, which means I will count
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you in my next video
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