T+A Solitaire T

BLUETOOTH/WIRED HEADPHONES

- ROGIER VAN BAKEL

About a dozen years ago, I found myself sitting across from a disheveled gentleman in a near-empty lounge at LAX Airport as we both waited for a delayed flight. A well-loved leather suitcase stood at his feet. To my amazement, he wore a pair of Stax SR-L700s—full-on electrostatics he powered with an unwieldy amplifier he held on his lap, a power cord snaking to the outlet near his seat. It was absurd. And magnificent. He caught me smiling, smirked, lifted one earcup, and said, "If I'm going to spend another three hours in this godforsaken place, I might as well do it with Coltrane in my skull."

There, in his defiance of convenience, was a truth: Sound matters, enough to haul an electrostatic rig through Terminal 3, to trade portability for transcendence.

Most of us don't have the luxury—or the upper-body strength—to travel like that. We look for a balance between fidelity and practicality, between the pursuit of purity and the reality of overhead bin space.

Enter the high-end Bluetooth headphone. A human travel companion may sneakily take the middle armrest or jabber about Bitcoin at 30,000 feet. I frequently prefer the alternative: a silicon-based sidekick who shuts out the world when you need it to, providing relaxation or energy depend-ing on the playlist you feed it.¹

Listening while you travel can make for deep experiences. The music becomes fused with the location. Your brain creates a more endur-ing memory, seeding even old tunes with new emotion. At home, I've listened dozens of times to Here Be Dragons by the Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble, but the noir soundscapes never cut as deep as when I played the album with a pair of earbuds, walking the foggy, glistening streets of Rotterdam at 2am.