LG Tone Studio (HBS-W120) - Review 2022

When it comes to wireless headphones, gimmicks demand to exist one of ii things in order to be successful. They either need to be functional and compelling, or they need to be hands ignorable and non bear on the price. LG'south $229.99 Tone Studio fails on both fronts. It's a pair of Bluetooth earphones that double every bit a personal speaker, with four drivers that provide individual environs sound in improver to the earpieces. Unfortunately, the speaker function is mediocre for the listener and disturbing to everyone around them, and the earphones don't sound very good either. For the price, you can get a quality set of Bluetooth earphones and a skilful, portable Bluetooth speaker, and still accept change to spare.

Blueprint

The Studio takes the collar earphone blueprint of the LG Tone series and blows it upwardly into a large, goofy-looking grey horseshoe. The U-shaped neckband is thin and cylindrical in the middle, but chop-chop expands into inch-wide silver-colored wings that sit on either side of your cervix. These wings are necessary to hold both the Tone Studio's earpieces and speaker drivers, but they wait ridiculous.

The earpieces are small earphones mounted on the finish of very sparse eight-inch lengths of wire, and retract into the neckband's wings when not in employ. Upward-facing speaker drivers sit down higher up on the neckband, positioned just behind and nether your ears, while downward-facing drivers are simply in front end of your shoulders.

LG Tone Studio

The left wing of the neckband has a volume wheel, a pinhole microphone, and a micro USB port facing out, and a ability switch, call reply/end button, and an indicator LED facing in. The right wing features a rails navigation rocker and a 3.5mm aux input facing out, and a play/pause button and headphone/speaker switch facing in. The outward-facing ports are covered with rubber doors to protect them, and the inward-facing controls sit just forward enough on the neckband's wings that they can exist easily reached.

Despite its cumbersome-looking blueprint, the Tone Studio is fairly comfortable to clothing. The collar has enough flexibility that the wings don't push in on the sides of your neck, and at just 4.4 ounces, it doesn't counterbalance down your shoulders, either. The only real crusade for business is that the earphone wires are so sparse they feel like they can rip or stretch out with a slight yank, and getting each earphone to retract cleanly into its recess is a fleck finicky.

Earphone Performance

The good news is that when used as earphones, the Tone Studio shows no appreciable distortion when playing deep bass at maximum volume levels. The bad news is that it lacks much ability at all in either mode, no matter how loftier you plow things up. While the kick drum hits and bass synth notes in The Knife's "Silent Shout" have no crackle or popping, they also come up through as trivial more than gentle tapping. This bass weakness is apparent in LG's Tone Pro and Tone Ultra earphones equally well, but they respectively cost less than a third and half as much equally the Tone Studio.

Skid Row's "Youth Gone Wild" fares simply slightly meliorate through the earphones. The heavy metallic guitar riffs and screeching vocals can be clearly heard, though the kick pulsate loses most of its forcefulness and only comes through in the assail. Synth-heavy sounds get the best treatment here. The steady drums and poppy melody in Erasure'due south "Chains of Love" receive just plenty presence to stand alongside the vocals and produce a pleasant, balanced mix, even with little sense of low-finish.

Speaker Performance

The speaker mode is intended to be used by simply one person, providing a strange course of environment sound with its four drivers. This ways you lot are however wearing the Tone Studio simply every bit if you were using information technology as earphones—not off and sitting on a tabular array like a traditional Bluetooth speaker.

LG Tone Studio

Speaker mode offers more powerful (just not more clear or balanced) sound than the earphones, at the expense of cervix-tickling vibration and drawing the ire of anyone nigh you when you wear it. And the audio is simply audio anemic when it isn't around your cervix; stand more than than a few feet away, and any surrounding noise volition drown the Tone out. The surround sound effect is dubious at all-time, especially when the Bluetooth connexion doesn't really support dedicated surround sound and the earphones rely on their own sound processing to handle annihilation beyond stereo separation.

The Pocketknife's "Silent Shout" doesn't get any more bass response through the speakers than it does through the earphones, giving no sense of low-end to the boot drum hits or bass notes. "Youth Gone Wild" and "Chains of Love" don't fare any better, sounding shrill and unbalanced across the lath. And over again, I can't really imagine a scenario in which you'd want to listen to personal speakers that will perturb those around yous.

Conclusions

The LG Tone Studio is an interesting idea, but not a particularly expert one. A personal speaker you wear and use to smash out sound that only sounds remotely practiced to you won't make others nearby happy, not to mention the Tone Studio's functioning both as earphones and every bit a speaker is but mediocre. For the same price, you can get the Jaybird X3 wireless earphones and a Harman Kardon Onyx Mini speaker, both of which are Editors' Choice winners in their respective categories. Or, if yous but want very good wireless earphones, the B&O Play Beoplay H5 is a feature-laden, accessory-filled pair that audio magnitudes improve than the Tone Studio.