Thursday, June 22nd 2023
Denon Launches the PerL TWS Earbuds with Masimo AAT Support
Denon was a latecomer to the TWS earbud market and its initial offerings didn't exactly take the market with storm, largely due to lacking any headline features. The new PerL and PerL Pro TWS earbuds have plenty of headline features, but are in fact updated and rebranded versions of Nura's NuraTrue Pro TWS earbuds that originated on Kickstarter back in 2022. The reason for this is that Masimo, the company that owns Denon and Bowers & Wilkins, acquired Nura back in April this year. As such, Denon could leverage the work of Nura at the expense of Nura having stopped selling the NuraTrue Pro. That said, this should lead to a broader availability for consumers, which could be seen as a net positive.
The US$349 PerL Pro are more or less the NuraTrue Pro with added support for Masimo's Adaptive Acoustic Technology or AAT for short, as well as the use of the Denon app. We couldn't spot anything else that had changed hardware or feature wise, which means there's still support for adaptive active noise cancelling, Bluetooth 5.3 with multipoint connectivity, aptX Adaptive and aptX Lossless. The PerL Pro's are said to last up to 8 hours on a single charge and the case is good for another 32 hours. The non pro version of the PerL gets feature trimmed—but also carries a much lower price point of US$199—and get a more basic ANC, a shorter 6 hour battery life with only 24 hours in the charging case, Bluetooth 5.0, no multipoint support, basic aptX support and no spatial audio support. The only advantage of the non pro version is that each of the rather large earbuds weigh 1.5 g less than the pro version.
Source:
Denon
The US$349 PerL Pro are more or less the NuraTrue Pro with added support for Masimo's Adaptive Acoustic Technology or AAT for short, as well as the use of the Denon app. We couldn't spot anything else that had changed hardware or feature wise, which means there's still support for adaptive active noise cancelling, Bluetooth 5.3 with multipoint connectivity, aptX Adaptive and aptX Lossless. The PerL Pro's are said to last up to 8 hours on a single charge and the case is good for another 32 hours. The non pro version of the PerL gets feature trimmed—but also carries a much lower price point of US$199—and get a more basic ANC, a shorter 6 hour battery life with only 24 hours in the charging case, Bluetooth 5.0, no multipoint support, basic aptX support and no spatial audio support. The only advantage of the non pro version is that each of the rather large earbuds weigh 1.5 g less than the pro version.
12 Comments on Denon Launches the PerL TWS Earbuds with Masimo AAT Support
Even Sony doesn't have a great app, even though it has gotten better over time.
B&O had such a slow firmware update process that it was painfull, took an hour to do, but you had to keep your phone and headphones away from anything with a 2.4 GHz radio in it for it to work. At least Sony has figured out how to do that part. Even a cheap pair of $35 earbuds I got from Amazon had no issues updating the firmware, so it seems like it has nothing to do with how well known the company is or isn't.
And with hardware being closed/undocumented, nobody can write an app that will manage, say, 20 brands, so that we can rely on at least some level of support :(
Edit: Not earbuds related, but the software on my Roomba-lookalike asked for location permissions on startup, I allowed it and on the very next screen it asked me which country I'm in. This is the level of stupidity I have come to expect from such software.
TWS earbuds still feel like they're in their stumbling, tripping, falling early infancy with behaviour unbefitting a product category that's been mainstream for about a decade now.
I was actually given one of these and it sound amazing, but I never really use it due to its size.
www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/ESSential-USB-DAC#kf
I generally only use headphones with my phone when out and about, at home I have speakers or an over ear headset.
Bluetooth pairing, basic sleep/wake reliablity, and the bare minimum of volume up/down/mute and play/pause/answer should be an iron-clad standard with low probability of issues like it is on 3.5mm before abandoning said port for bluetooth.
Sometimes, a headphone cable isn't practical, and in those cases it frustrates me how bad the TWS ecosystem is. Outside of Apple's walled garden and Apple's own Airpods, I've yet to see a truly reliable solution and even with Apple it's not perfect (though it's good enough that I'm not as salty about Apple dropping 3.5mm)