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Review: Plantronics Voyager 5200 Bluetooth Headset

Trying to find a good noise cancelation solution for my home audio conferencing setup while working from home, I first tried the BlueParrott B550-XT (my review) as it had excellent reviews for its noise canceling capabilities. I liked the B550-XT, but found it a bit bulky. I wanted to find something that was small and light, while offering similar noise cancelation performance. With more research, I found several reviews that rated the Plantronics Voyager 5200 Bluetooth Headset very high. I ordered it online on Best Buy, and it was promptly delivered the next day.

The 5200 was paired easily with my iPhone. It fits comfortably on either ear, and is remarkably light. The The boom microphone stick is said to have 4 microphones, the the DSP running on the headset dynamically adjusts the gains on the 4 microphone to filter out ambient noise. So far I have done some limited testing with ambient noise and I am quite impressed with how well it is suppressed. I will do more detailed tests and compare it with the BlueParrott B550-XT in a review shortly.

The 5200 has about 7 hours of talk time on a fully charged battery. I have used it for two days and have attended about 10 meetings, and I can say that it is very comfortable to wear, and the sound quality is very good. I prefer this over the B550-XT because it is small and is hardly visible when I am on camera while video conferencing. I plan to use the B550-XT as a backup when I run out of batter on the 5200, and when working in very noisy conditions (e.g., with my dogs barking, or the gardener mowing the lawn, etc.) as I think it offers better noise cancelation (still to be confirmed with some good tests).

The 5200 also can connect to two devices at the same time, like two phones, or a phone and a PC. Connecting it to a Windows 10 PC directly as a Bluetooth device seems be a bit flaky. Plantonics’ solution is to use a Bluetooth dongle — the BT600 — on the PC and pair the headset to the dongle. I didn’t get the BT600 yet, but reading the reviews from other users, it seems to be a good solution.

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