Gennum nXZEN Plus

Sporting what Gennum claims to be the most powerful digital signal processor in any Bluetooth headset, the nXZEN Plus offers excellent noise-cancelation while being easy to wear for extended periods. The Plus part of the product's name is explained by an included cable that plugs into your MP3 player. You can easily switch between calls and listening to tunes on the fly. Ultimately, this headset fares better with communications than entertainment.

Weighing just over 0.5 ounces, the nXZEN Plus uses a flexible, rubberized ear loop that flips to fit over either ear. The speaker pipes into a flanged rubber tube that inserts roughly 0.5 to one inch within the ear canal. In practice, we found that this does a far better job than other headsets of blocking ambient sound so that you can better hear your caller. In-canal designs are a strange sensation for many people, and you may not like the pressure inside your ear, especially since Gennum uses firmer rubber than Etymotic or Sony on their in-canal headphones.

Gennum touts the nXZEN Plus as a noise-canceling paragon, and in some situations, this was definitely true. In a car with Aerosmith and then radio ads playing loud enough to make it difficult to understand our caller, the nXZEN Plus did a mind-blowing job at keeping background noise so faint that the caller couldn't understand what was playing while even our fairly quiet-spoken speech came through clearly. On the other hand, once we rolled down the window, wind and road noise was quite audible.

Overall, we found voice quality to be sporadic, yet satisfactory. On some calls it was somewhat garbled; on others crystalline. We had to enunciate more for voice recognition systems, which is common with boomless headsets. We found that it took more practice than expected to master basic headset functions, such as volume, switching the call from phone to headset, and muting. The controls aren't that intuitive.

The nXZEN Plus features a special cable with three ends: 3.5mm audio connector, special connector that plugs into its charging port, and an earbud. Put it all together and you've got the ability to play stereo music from your digital audio player through the headset and its accompanying earbud. Gennum includes a rudimentary eight-band equalizer application that you can tweak on a Bluetooth-connected PC, but the audio was AM radio quality. There's zilch for fidelity, and the sensation of having a speaker buried in one ear and another speaker perched precariously on an ear fold was distracting at best.

We'd recommend the nXZEN Plus on its noise canceling merits alone. On other fronts, Gennum has several good ideas in need of further refinement.
www.nxzen.com