BlueAnt Ribbon Stereo Bluetooth Streamer

cant fault it except for the price – I bought this little thing to convert my Bose QC 25 into a wireless set of head phones. Main concern was if it would compromise the excellent sound quality of the head phones. Not a problem. I use it a lot in the car (I know, who has a car without Bluetooth?) it was cheaper than changing the car. Easy to connect, takes phone calls, but needs to be connected to charger if you use it a lot in the car. I do.

A little expensive but small enough to be very versatile. Much cheaper than a new car.

Best Bluetooth receiver – Firstly let me start by saying this; Bluetooth receivers are hard to find. Most of them are China made no name brands that maybe, possibly, could be, what you want for the speciously low $10 price tag. I did however, manage to find a Bluetooth receiver at a retail shop but the product didn't quite hit the mark. Its sound quality was ok, price was good, but the range wasn't. Disappointingly as soon as I turned around or smothered the receiver in my hands it started to drop out or stop completely. This is where I learned a valuable lesson about those weird Bluetooth versions out there; like anyone knows what they mean. But I tell you this, the Bluetooth version does matter if your serious about high quality music (boring lesson coming). So each Bluetooth version 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 are a measure of transfer speed (except 4.0 which is power saving). So why is transfer speed important? Because the higher the music quality, the more speed that is required to send that sound to your phone smoothly (no lag, drop outs). So if you listen with your songs at 320Kbs or higher, then Bluetooth 2.0 may struggle as it has a max speed of 1000kbs. So as soon as you start moving away that speed drops fast and you get skipping. Bluetooth 3.0 has a much faster speed of 10,000Kbs and therefore, is less affected by distance. Ok so with the geek stuff out of the way; the review. I chose BlueAnt because they are known for making great Bluetooth products; with the Ribbon being exactly that.

The design is well created and easily clips onto your shirt. Packed with a pause, volume, song skip controls and even an on phone screen battery it certainly isn't short of features. Its rubber lid over the charging port suites my purposes well as it is used for sporting activities and stops sweat getting into the device. Battery life is great and features a sound alert when the battery is getting too low. However, the range is what impressed me the most. Bluetooth isn't designed to go through walls and this showed with the Ribbon. Audio quickly began dropping out when going around a wall. However, when in clear line of sight then I achieved 18 meters of range! Which is way above the 10 meters listed. Now I know I have harped on about distance a bit but audio quality is also important. As Bluetooth will generally degrade your audio quality to some extent than just physically plugging it into the phone; however, this wasn't the case with the Ribbon. This is all due to BlueAnt including Aptx into the Ribbons Bluetooth. Aptx is a new Bluetooth technology that greatly increases audio quality and allows for almost no quality loss.This is a good selling point if you plan to use the 3.5mm headphone jack to connect your own high quality headphones. Overall this is the best Bluetooth receiver I have used. Even though it has a high price tag I would say its defiantly worth it over a cheaper product that will annoy you with its flaws. Battery, Bluetooth range, audio quality, design and functions Expensive, only comes with headphones