Review: Jays a-Six Wireless – 50-metre dash!

Jays a-Six Wireless

Sound

Let’s get the bad out of the way. It comes in two parts: hiss, and boom. Hiss in a wireless earphone is a design error. All circuits are are noisy. If an earphone and your ears are sensitive enough, you will hear hiss from the vacuum of space. A-Six, like RHA’s amazing wireless MA650 and MA750, hisses. The nature of that hiss is a bit swirly, like the signal is being finely chopped by a world-renowned chef. It does this because it houses a regular driver circuit plugged into regular Bluetooth DAC. Regular driver circuits are sensitive. Tailor-made circuits, like, say, Flare Audio’s Flares Pro, eliminate hiss by employing insensitive drivers. Which is the way it should be. Generally, Jays have a good thing going. I like how the a-Six fits. I like how it sounds. I love its functionality. But it shouldn’t hiss.

The second bad is that low bass detail is all but occluded by impact and a bit of high-bass bloom. Jays a-Six Wireless isn’t a terrible bassy headphone, but it sure punches, and can low enough to yawn the opening seconds of Marks Schulz’s Mainstage into life. It’s got great, airy impact, and anchors itself well, right in the middle of the head and just above the shoulders. It won’t play spatial tricks on you. But if you’re into organic bass detail and texture, a-Six isn’t your earphone. It eschews that stuff for high-impact high bass, that, when pressed wrong, will bloom. It’s the sort of bass that sounds great from small speakers and tight spaces.

The first bad: hiss, is a bugger. The second really isn’t, especially considering the a-Six’s price and overall utility, which really is tip top.

In general, a-Six sounds like what you’d expect from a modern, sealed earphone priced priced around fifty dollars. That is: plenty of bass impact, pretty clear mids, and highs that sparkle here and there but otherwise are compressed between bass impact and mid clarity. It’s not an earphone to bring out the sweet voice of your favourite audiophile diva. It pops, it’s well balanced, and its bass can push a lot of low-detail energy.

It’s stage is close, medium-warmth, and instruments are well separated. Percussion details rim farthest out, midrange strings following, with bass pulled into the centre. Particularly fitting is music chock full of large drums, shakers, and Norse pagan chants. That’s Wardruna, if you’re wondering. The bass recovers quick and lateral spread for upper midrange stuff is good, so that trance, too, sounds good, but again, you’ll not get much stereo or texture detail from the bass.

End words

For the most part, the Jays a-Six Wireless was designed with care. It works, is easy to use, packs up tight against sweat and can take a beating. It sounds pretty good, connects phenomenally well and obviates the worst interference. Here and there its higher bass band might bloom, but it’s a pretty good-sounding earphone. If it had more detail in the bass, and more importantly, didn’t hiss, it would be killer.

Mostly well done.

3.8/5 - (30 votes)
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Back before he became the main photographer for bunches of audio magazines and stuff, Nathan was fiddling with pretty cool audio gear all day long at TouchMyApps. He loves Depeche Mode, trance, colonial hip-hop, and raisins. Sometimes, he gets to listening. Sometimes, he gets to shooting. Usually he's got a smile on his face. Always, he's got a whisky in his prehensile grip.

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