Gennum Z-E-N 350

Design/Comfort
The Z-E-N sports a wide crescent that loops over the ear and a speaker arm that swivels from the top of the crescent. The speaker uses a flanged rubber tip to fit inside the ear canal. A few minutes of experimentation with the flexible rubber arm yielded a surprisingly lightweight fit that stayed comfortable over many hours. A recessed Volume dial sits at the crescent’s back. In theory, Gennum’s approach of holding down either the side or bottom button for varying beep/flash lengths to enter different modes is easy, but in practice we often resorted to the manual.

Features
The power jack doubles as an audio input, so you can connect the bundled adapter cable to an MP3 or CD player and listen to music. The headset ships with an eight-band Graphic Equalizer desktop applet that modifies the headset’s audio settings with Bluetooth, which can improve the music playback.

Performance
The Z-E-N impressed us with an excellent talk time of 9 hours and 40 minutes, but noise canceling results were mixed. With music playing behind us, Gennum’s FRONTWAVE technology cut the noise to almost nothing. With the music in front of us, we couldn’t make out soft speech. Signal quality stayed strong out to about 15 feet through a couple of walls, then grew increasingly distorted. Overall, we heard more background hiss than normal and even with the eight-band EQ, the Z-E-N’s music quality can only be described as tinny, faint, and barely suitable for audiobooks.

Verdict
Gennum has good ideas, but the Z-E-N is in need of much more refinement and quality control, especially at this price.