Over the past two weeks, I had the opportunity to try out the Urbanista Seattle Wireless. To cut to the chase: I’m a fan!
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Urbanista Seattle Wireless
The Urbanista Seattle Wireless couldn’t be more different from the Aftershokz Sportz Titanium I wrote about earlier.
The Seattle Wireless is a Bluetooth headphone in the DJ headset class. That means you’re back to wearing a pair of earmuffs. Especially if they have a nice design like the Seattle Wireless from Urbanista.
Unpacking it, you immediately get the feeling of holding a piece of quality in your hands. Both the packaging and the design of the headphones exude this. The box also contains a cable to use the Urbanista when the battery is empty.
Sound Quality
The Aftershokz Sportz I described yesterday allows you to keep hearing your surroundings. However, I want to be able to lose myself in the music I hear. Partly because I mainly work from home and don’t have to consider colleagues. As a fitness fan, I want to drown out the music played in the gym.
Good music delivered with good quality is like a warm bath. Putting on the Urbanista Seatle Wireless is like dipping your toes in the water. As soon as you put them on, you notice that the ambient sound is significantly muted. When you then play the music, it’s like sinking further into the bath and drifting away on the music.
OK, maybe a little overly poetically described, but as I said, I’m a fan. Good sound, with a delightful bass. No distortion even at higher volumes.
Gym Proof?
So, I was really looking forward to going to the gym to try out the Urbanista there. The day before yesterday wasn’t the first time I complained about the music in the gym. The Urbanista blocks this out wonderfully. This meant that I didn’t need to raise the volume as much to drown out the music in the gym as with other headphones I’ve worn in the gym.
At home, I had already updated my gym playlist on Spotify. As the first song to try out the Urbanista Seattle Wireless in the gym, I chose “Front to back” by Buku. A dubstep track where the beat is built up agonizingly slowly.
But once that beat breaks, you feel like breaking barbells.
The Urbanista isn’t specifically designed for exercising. However, it performed well in the gym. The fact that it can be used wirelessly is of course convenient. With wilder movements, it will slip off faster than, for example, the Aftershokz Sportz Titanium I described yesterday. However, my training regime is not that wild. The bench press test is always important to me. Does the headphone stay on my head when I’m horizontal? Always a challenge for DJ headsets. The Urbanista just managed.
However, I had the advantage of testing the Urbanista Seattle Wireless in winter. However, when training legs, I did experience some of the usual “sweat and slide” problems of a DJ headset. As usual, I solved this by wearing the Urbanista Seattle Wireless on top of my hood. So, if you’re someone who gets annoyed by gym thugs wearing a hoodie in the gym, know that there can be a practical reason for it. Now, even in the middle of summer, I wear a hoodie myself, but this may not be an option for everyone in high temperatures.
Comfort
The Urbanista is comfortable. With a DJ headset, it’s always a matter of finding the right balance. If it has a lot of ‘clamping force’, it will slip off less easily, seal better, but also feel more uncomfortable on the ears sooner.
After wearing it for a longer period, I did start to feel some irritation behind the ears, but that was mainly because I wear glasses and the frame of the glasses is clamped between the ear and the head. However, after wearing it for a few days, I had less trouble with this.
Swiping
You navigate by swiping. By swiping over ‘the ear’ on the right side, you can skip between tracks, pause and play, activate Siri, adjust volume, and answer calls. If I had published this review two days earlier, I would have seen this as a negative. Until yesterday, navigating mostly went wrong. Pausing instead of skipping, activating Siri instead of increasing volume, etc. However, yesterday I found out that you have to swipe not with the fingertip but with the entire finger.
Since then, it’s been working fine.
Price
The Urbanista Seattle Wireless is currently being sold for 99 euros.
