"Andrew Sarangan" wrote in message
. 158...
[...] The trouble is, not many pilotshops
seem to carry Peltor products. I am not sure why. Even the Peltor website
does not have any information about their aviation headsets. Any info on
this would be appreciated.

Maybe because their first outing into the ANR market wasn't all that good.

I have two Peltor ANR headsets, purchased as a gift for me together, based
on my love for my passive Peltor headsets (which I think are excellent). I
don't hate the ANR headsets, but compared to others on the market, there are
some miscues.

Probably the most serious is that there is sometimes a squeal in the audio.
In fact, one of the headsets is sitting unused, waiting for me to get around
to shipping it back to Peltor, because the squeal became permanent and has
made the headset unusable. Someone get me a round tuit.

I have to assume that the electronics thing is not a constant across all of
the headsets Peltor produced, because if they were all like that, the line
would have died instantly. However, there are still some other things about
the headset that are sort of annoying.

One is that the battery is contained inside one of the earcups. I
originally thought this was a good idea, until I learned that a) it makes
the weight of the headset somewhat lopsided, and b) when the battery is not
in the headset, the passive noise reduction on that side suffers.
Obviously, the latter is solveable just by always leaving a battery in the
headset, but it just seemed silly to me.

Another issue is the switch, though this is an issue shared by many other
makes and models. That is, it has a switch. I think it's silly for a
headset to have a switch that is required to be used in order to avoid
killing the battery. The ANR should have a way to be switched off, of
course, in case it fails or otherwise should not be used, but by default,
the electronics ought to sense whether they are needed or not, and turn
themselves off when not.

There are headsets on the market that do this, and if (when) I buy another
ANR headset, I will only consider those that don't have to be switched
manually.

I honestly don't know anything about the current Peltor model. From the
pictures I've seen, it looks like it might have been changed a little, but I
don't know if it's been changed to fix the issues I have with it.

Now, all of the above aside, the audio quality of the ANR Peltors is
*excellent*, even better than the passive headsets I already owned, and they
were pretty good too. Passive reduction on the ANR headsets isn't as good
as on my non-ANR Peltor headsets, but it's pretty close. I love how the
Peltors fold up, and they are one of the most comfortable headsets I've worn
(though this is very fit dependent...they may not fit differently shaped or
sized heads as well, I don't know).

If you've already worn the Peltor ANR headset and like it, I think that
ought to be recommendation enough. It's not a *bad* headset, it's just not
as good as I think it ought to be, coming from a company like Peltor.

By the way, when I bought my Peltor passive headsets, I believe that
Sennheiser was actually the company that manufactured their products.
Perhaps they still are. In any case, Sennheiser now sells their own ANR
headset, with similar usability features to the Peltor (like the way it
folds), but with what appears to me to be better solutions to issues I found
with the Peltors.

Hope that helps.

Pete