Before I discovered the price of Tribit’s XFree Go headphones, which wasn’t provided until weeks after the product showed up, I was thinking they’d retail for $100—or maybe $80 given Tribit’s penchant for lowball pricing. In my book, they sound every bit as good as the Sony set I use on a regular basis.
Discovering that they were selling on Amazon for just $25 was darn shocking. I’ve never heard a worthwhile headset priced less than $50, let alone one that sounds as good as this. But then I started watching movies.
A SHOWSTOPPER OF A FLAW
I quickly discovered a major problem: The XFree Go became unresponsive after a relatively short period of sustained use. They’d still produce sound, as long as the Bluetooth connection remained, but I couldn’t adjust the volume or even turn them off. There was no indicator LED to show what was wrong—no nuthin’.
The only way I could unfreeze them was to plug them back into an AC outlet and wait. I don’t know if every XFree Go suffers this glitch or if a new production run will fix the problem. Thinking I just got a defective unit, I had the company ship me a replacement—which suffered from the very same problem. That tells me the issue could be common or even universal. I’ll revisit this review—and my verdict—if Tribit can send me a pair that doesn’t exhibit the flaw, but for now I have to say: caveat emptor.
DESIGN AND FEATURES
This story is from the April 2021 edition of Macworld.
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This story is from the April 2021 edition of Macworld.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
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