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Plantronics Voyager Focus UC

February 06, 2017

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PROS: Very comfortable. Long battery life. Excellent voice quality. Balanced sound signature for music.

CONS: Bluetooth only. No wired option.

BOTTOM LINE: The Plantronics Voyager Focus UC Bluetooth headset combines quality music playback with fantastic voice quality and unrivaled comfort.

If you're going to have a headset on all day, you might as well feel like a boss. The Plantronics Voyager Focus UC ($299.95) is the best Bluetooth headset we've ever tested for all-day conversation. It successfully brings together solid stereo audio, high-quality noise cancellation, a boom mic, all-day battery life, and long-wearing comfort without the trade-offs you get from using either a mono headset or headphones designed primarily for music. That makes the Focus UC our Editors' Choice for stereo Bluetoo headsets.

Physical Design

The Voyager Focus UC ($185.60 at Amazon) looks like a high-end, professional product. It's mostly black, with a silver metal band and tasteful red accents. Two soft pads fit over your ears, while a 2-inch boom can swing down for conversation or up out of the way. It also swivels so the headset is reversible.

On one earcup, there's a voice-command button; on the other are music control buttons and a volume rocker. All of the buttons are large and easy to press. The earcups swivel flat to fit in an included neoprene pouch, but the headset doesn't fold; you're traveling with a 6-inch-wide object no matter what you do. It weighs 5.5 ounces.

Comfort is a big plus here, and a lot of what differentiates the Focus UC from other headsets. The springy metal band keeps the earpads on your ears, but isn't tight enough to cause a headache over several hours. And the padded headband has plenty of give to protect hairdos.

The headset supports standard Bluetooth hands-free and headset profiles, and can pair to two devices (for instance, a phone and a PC) at once. It has about 30 feet of range before quality begins to degrade, which is on par with most Bluetooth headsets.

The Focus UC charges in a stylish USB-powered cradle that can plug into a PC, or into any random USB charger you have lying around. You can also plug a micro USB cable directly into the headset. Four blue lights on the side show the battery level while it's charging. I got 14 hours, 50 minutes of talk time on a charge, enough for even a challenging workday. That's without noise cancellation. Turning it on will likely drop battery life closer to 10 hours. The VXi BlueParrott S450-XT ($179.00 at Amazon) is the undisputed winner, at 31 hours, 29 minutes.

Sound Quality and Performance

Sound quality is surprisingly good for a headset that you initially think is all about conference calls. Music gets very loud without distortion, and there's noticeable but not overwhelming bass, like the muddy S450-XT—there's enough treble edge here to make for a balanced sound signature.

Plantronics has some of the best noise cancellation software out there. For inbound noise cancellation, you can flip an "active noise cancellation" switch on one of the earcups. That does a very good job of removing the typical low background rumble you get on trains, airplanes, and such, but, nodding to the UC's use as an office headset, it will not cancel out voices, keyboard sounds, or the like. There's an HD Voice option you can turn on in the associated smartphone app that delivers even better voice quality than the standard mode.

For outbound calls, there's a soothing level of in-ear feedback of your own voice that will prevent you from yelling. Outbound voice quality is very good, even in noisy scenarios. It's not perfect: If you have construction-site-level background noise, you'll get some computery artifacts. But it's up to the level of the Plantronics Voyager 5200 ($108.99 at Amazon) and does much, much better than other stereo Bluetooth headsets with built-in mics, like the Plantronics Backbeat Pro 2. Background noise is killed off in a way you don't get with most boomless headsets.

Bluetooth connectivity is as good as can be expected. If you bury your phone in a pocket and cover the Bluetooth antenna with your hand, you'll get dropouts. But connectivity with the phone in a pocket is better than it is with the BlueParrott headset, for instance.

Bringing the Focus UC back to my challenging office environment, though, created problems. Music played loud and clear, but voice quality didn't measure up to a wired headset, with noticeable pops and crackles. This is the case with all Bluetooth headsets in PC Labs, though, because it's so noisy with wireless signal. I was left wishing for a wired option like the Plantronics Backbeat Pro 2 or Bowers & Wilkins P5 Wireless ($298.95 at Amazon) have, so I could cut through the static with a cable when necessary.

The headset has "smart sensors" that are supposed to pause your music when you take it off and resume it when you put it back on. Pausing worked with a range of applications. Resuming, on the other hand, worked with smartphone music apps, but not with clients on the PC.

Voice commands are, by and large, dependent on your smartphone platform. On a recent Android phone, pressing the voice command button pulls up Google Now, which lets you dictate text messages, request directions or make calls. On an iPhone, it brings up Siri.

To improve voice commands, you can download the Plantronics Hub software onto your smartphone, PC, or Mac. On a PC/Mac, it gives you mute and battery life in your status bar. On a smartphone, it gives the headset the ability to read out text messages (although not messages in other apps) as they come to you.

Although you can get the Focus UC with a USB Bluetooth dongle to attach to non-Bluetooth-compatible PCs, the headset has no way to plug into our PBX landline system, or indeed into most PBX systems. That's going to keep most office workers on their Plantronics Encore or Savi headsets. Those other headsets don't work with PCs or phones, of course. There is no truly universal solution.

Comparisons and Conclusions

You can find the Plantronics Voyager Focus UC for $199 at most retailers. Even at that price, it costs more than a standard mono Bluetooth headset. But it replaces a lot of devices. For road warriors, its sound quality is good enough to use as a standard pair of wireless headphones, and its active noise cancellation—while not as perfect as you get with Bose—helps with both conversation and entertainment. It's a great buy if you normally carry around both a Bluetooth headset for conversation and a pair of headphones for entertainment.

We compared the Focus UC most directly with the VXi BlueParrott S450-XT, which costs a little less at $179. The BlueParrott has even longer battery life, more powerful bass, and a wired option, but the Voyager's superior comfort and voice quality make it our overall pick. I wish it worked with office PBX systems so that it can be called a truly universal headset. But as it stands, it's the best stereo Bluetooth headset you can buy, and our Editors' Choice.

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