Hardware Bistro

Product: Sound P311
Manufacturer: Arctic Cooling
Supplied by: Arctic Cooling
Price: 37.95USD/RM120
Launch Date: July 2010

 

In old days Arctic Cooling was an outstanding brand with its Accelero but today it is no longer limited with this graphic card cooler but it's also known with other tremendous products such as CPU cooler, chassis, PSU, audio products and so on. Today let us review one of its latest audio product; Sound P311 which is a Bluetooth headset and suitable for mobile phone, laptop and other music devices.

 

Company Profile

ARCTIC COOLING is a privately owned company founded in 2001 with headquarters in Switzerland, offices in Hong Kong and the USA and production facilities in Asia. The ARCTIC COOLING team consists o f international highly educated people with business, technical and communicational skills. The attitude to work is based o n Swiss principles of innovative spirit and high standards of workmanship for which it is recognized internationally. This striving for excellence is integrated in all processes as a matter of course.

ARCTIC COOLING´s core competencies are multifarious including systematic noise reduction,copper and aluminum heatsink development, customization of thermal solutions, as well as designing quiet fans. More recently quiet and cool PC Cases and Power Supplies have been developed.

 

Features

• Ideal for sports and on the go
• Lightweight and discreet
• High fidelity stereo sound
• Powerful bass, crisp highs
• Invisible microphone included
• Travel case included
• Compatible with iPhone, mobile phone, notebook...

Package & Contents

 

Let us start with the Arctic Sound P311's packaging and basically it comes with a pretty attractive box with a large window. Features, product detail of Arctic Sound P311 are described well at the back of the packaging box with multi-languages since Arctic Cooling is shipped to multi countries.

 

Besides the outer paper box, Arctic Sound P311 is protected by another plastic container. For the packaging content, Arctic Sound P311 only comes with the Bluetooth headset, headset protective case, user manual and a USB charging cable to charge up the Arctic Sound P311; simple and neat.

 

A Closer Look on Arctic Sound P311

 

Frankly to tell audio products are not really apart of Arctic Cooling core products however they have launched plenty of audio devices quite sometime ago if you are not aware. There are three major sub lines, 2.0 speakers, earphones and headphones. Arctic Sound P311 is one of the headphone products and it is the only one Bluetooth headset; one of the trendy products due to its functionality and ease-of-use.

 

Bluetooth or wireless headset are much preferable than normal cable headset due to its convenience as hanging the headset's cable around the neck/shoulder is not really comfortable at all or giving you another reason not to move around too much. Besides that Arctic Sound P311 can work as a headset for mobile phone which is absolutely a value added feature for the customer; one bird two stones.

 

Arctic Sound P311 comes with supra-aural neckband wearing style which is another wearing style besides headband style and ideal for such lightweight Bluetooth headset. The net weight and dimension of Arctic Sound P311 are 71g and 54 x 23 mm; light and compact. Arctic Sound P311 is using V2.1+EDR class 2 Bluetooth which support 10 meters distance range with 3 Mbit/s transfer rate.

 

Although Arctic Sound P311 comes with two ear cups but the control system is fully built-in on the right ear cup to minize the cost. Same with other Bluetooth devices, blue LED is used on Arctic Sound P311 when it is activated and red LED will be flashed when switching off the device. Besides that the built-in microphone is also located at this control system and comes with great noise elimination feature.

Here is the function diagram of Arctic Sound P311 where there are total five functional keys; volume increase, volume decrease, a multifunctional buttons for handling the phone application while the backward and forward buttons are for music usage.

Here are the ways to operate the Arctic Sound P311 which is pretty simple but pairing the Arctic Sound P311 with Bluetooth device is the first step to bond them together. If the mobile phone does support voice recognition then the voice dialing can be made through Arctic Sound P311.

 

Arctic Sound P311 incorporates a one-size-fits all headband or we should call it neckband headset. It comes with closed acoustic ear cup style and the soft pads ear cup to provide great comfort and secure fit even for outdoor activities. However the outer layer of the soft pads can be worn easily after certain period of usage which is one of the disadvantages but it is still being widely used by most of the high end headsets especially those gaming audio devices.

 

Arctic Sound P311 is using rechargeable 400mAh Li-Polymer battery which is pretty sufficient enough to last more than a week usage. Based on date sheet of Arctic Sound P311, it can last up to 20 hours talk time or 400 hours standby time. The nominal charging time will take up to 4 hours max and it uses standard mini 5 pin USB cable to minimize its cost as well as to suit its the design.

 

In order to make Arctic Sound P311 much flexible, it comes bendable arm so that it can be stored inside the protective case without occupying much area. Due to this feature, Arctic Sound P311 has to be handled extremely carefully as we found that the arm can be easily broken either by over forced or folding in the wrong direction.

 

As you are aware Arctic Sound P311 comes with protective case which is pretty ideal for using it with mobile phone since it has to be carried around. The zippered protective case is a hard shell case which is 100% able to protect the Arctic Sound P311 safely and we strongly believe it is semi waterproofed with its built quality. 

 

Installation, Testing & Performance

Bluetooth pairing is simple but it might be difficult for newbies hence let us go through it briefly. Search for the Arctic Sound P311 Bluetooth signal and once it is appeared in the mobile phone then key in "0000" as the pass code to pair up them. The Bluetooth pairing function is mostly located at Setting > Connectivity > Bluetooth > Paired device; however different phone makers will have different path to setup the Bluetooth but the concept is still same (red & blue LEDs will be flashing alternately during Bluetooth device pairing).

Here is the right way to wear the Arctic Sound P311 and make sure the hook of the ear cup is upward direction (or the control system on the right hand side) as some folks may wear it in the other way. In term of the comfortable and fitting, Arctic Sound P311 is able to deliver what it should be as it is quite comfortable wearing it even for long hours. Besides that Arctic Sound P311 doesn't have any issue with this neckband headset where the headset is fitted perfectly and securely.

For switching on and switching off the Arctic Sound P311, just press and hold the multifunction button for 3 seconds until the LED is lighted up (blue for on, red for off). For music playing, the multifunction button can be used to play, pause or even stop music hence we will suggest Arctic Cooling to replace the phone logo with something else as it is quite confuse since it can be used for music application too.

For the performance, Arctic Sound P311 is delivering superb sound quality, uncompromised sound details and dynamics including strong bass, crisp highs with its high fidelity driver. However ARCTIC Sound P311 is not able to compete those earphones that come with silicon caps as the ambient noise is greatly minimized and bass response is highly enhanced; basically they are two different categories so we can't directly compare them side by side.

Anyway one of the reasons of such great performance of Arctic Sound P311 is due to Advanced Audio Distribution Profile (A2DP) technology where it is able to delivery clear and undistorted sound quality. Besides that ARCTIC Sound P311 is incorporated with Clear Voice Capture (CVC) technology hence noise distortion is no longer a problem here which is has the ability to filter out the unwanted background noise and only capture the user's voice for delivering clear & outstanding phone call.

Arctic Sound P311 is not the only Bluetooth headset available in the market as we have seen such similar headset before like Dell BH200 but it is sold much expensive than Arctic Sound P311; around 100USD. Both of these headset might be manufactured by the same OEM maker but we strongly suggest to take the Arctic Sound P311 due to its much lower price, nicer design and etc.

 

Verdicts

As we mentioned before audio products aren't one of Arctic Cooling's core products and we have strongly believe it previously but this statement has to be rewritten after this review. With the effort that Arctic Cooling has made on these audio products, we believe market will start to recognize it pretty soon. With only 38USD, ARCTIC Sound P311 is definitely worth for it as a normal mobile phone Bluetooth earphone is already cost more than that and don't even mention the great features and outstanding performance of ARCTIC Sound P311. Last but not least let's keep our eyes on Arctic Sound and hopefully it will continue to amaze us. 

 

Pros:

+ Compatible with mobile phone, laptop, music players & etc
+ Great sound performance & noise filtering ability
+ Bluetooth connectivity & cable-less
+ Ideal for outdoor & mobile usage
+ Comfortable & secure neckband wearing
+ Bendable arm for easier storing management
+ Light weight with 71g only
+ Comes with hard shell protective case
+ Comes with 2 year warranty

Cons:

- Bendable arm can be much stronger
- Prefer more unique shape for the volume/control buttons

 

 

Thanks to Arctic Cooling for providing this sample for us to review.

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