BT dongles and memory cards on the move
In the final piece in this series Jonathan Gorse considers some key accessories to enhance your listening whilst on the move, be it in the air, on holiday, or even on the train.
Twelve South Airfly Pro 2 bluetooth dongle
We all know how dreadful those headphones supplied by most airlines are. Fortunately Twelve South have come to the rescue with their utterly brilliant Airfly pro 2 bluetooth dongle (£69.95). This superb little device can be plugged into the headphone jack in your airline seat and when paired to your Bluetooth headphones enables you to enjoy the in flight movies and entertainment on your own high quality and noise cancelling headphones wire free.
It’s a genius idea and utterly revolutionises the experience of any flight – indeed after 57 years in the sky I can honestly say I have never enjoyed a movie at 37,000 feet more than I did using these. For the minimal cost they are simply fabulous and I will simply never ever fly again without one in my bag.
Technically the Airfly pro 2 integrates a Qualcomm QCC3056 audio system on a chip to handle bluetooth management, digital signal processing, and codec execution. Crucially, this chipset supports aptX, providing higher bitrates and reduced latency compared to ordinary SBC so the full quality of your wireless headphones is preserved. The Pro 2 also offers dual channel transmission which allows two Bluetooth headphones to be paired, so you could conceivably both listen to the same audio channel if watching a movie together. This is likely to be more useful if you wanted to watch a movie on headphones with a partner at home late at night rather than on an airliner in my view, but it’s a nice to have (or listen to the same audiobook).
For such a small and lightweight unit I was impressed to discover that these offer more than 25 hours of battery life, more than enough for your next circumnavigation of the globe. They charge via USB-C in two hours and there are physical controls for pairing, volume and mute and a status LED denoting battery condition or charging.
Frankly these are simply one of the most useful audio devices I have encountered since Ursula Andress emerged from the ocean wearing that legendary bikini. The joy comes from never having to use airline headphones again and being able to savour the huge uplift in noise cancellation, comfort and sonic quality of pairing them with high quality Bluetooth headphones. It’s a revelation, nothing less!
Sandisk Micro SD Express memory card
As a journalist and keen photographer I’m very selective about which storage solutions I trust with my precious photographs in particular. Over the years I have purchased countless SD cards from various brands and I have come to favour two brands in particular for their exemplary reliability – Sandisk and Lexar. Naturally when this trip came up I approached Sandisk for some suitably large and fast storage for the digital audio players and they delivered a Micro SD Express 512GB card (£186.99) .
These cards represent a significant architectural shift in removable flash storage because they don’t use the old legacy SD bus interface, but instead use PCIe Gen 3 and NVMe 1.3 protocol. Importantly this offers performance on a par with solid state drives with sequential read speeds of up to 880MB/sec and write speeds of 650MB/sec. If you’re copying half a terabyte of music across from another drive this makes a material difference in transfer times and delivers significantly faster performance. At these speeds they are also capable of supporting reliable capture of 4K video when used with a micro SD to SD adapter in your camera.
Since this trip was completed I began the process of moving from a lifetime shooting Pentax DSLR cameras to Nikon mirrorless. This move was promoted by a desire for a more capable video camera. I’ve never had a Sandisk drive go bad or let me down so naturally I will look at their range when selecting a suitable CF Express card.
Conclusions
The most gratifying part of this trip aside from all the spectacular sights, sounds, tastes and experiences India offered was discovering just how much portable audio has advanced in the past 40 years. As a schoolboy in the 1980’s I carried a Sanyo walkman around and back then I scarcely could have dreamed it would one day be possible to carry hundreds of albums on a small device connected wirelessly to headphones. Sonically all of these components deliver genuinely astonishing levels of fidelity – so good that you really do need to be looking at spending upwards of £10,000 on a conventional loudspeaker based system to deliver this level of quality.
There’s delight and liberation to be had from enjoying music in the highest quality while travelling, so make sure you’re packing something similar for your next travel adventure, it enriches the experience so much.