Novel and effective charging system; comfortable and well made; lively sound…
… almost too lively; noise-cancelling is a qualified success; app could be more comprehensive
‘Infinite’ is a tricky one, isn’t it? Something’s either ‘infinite’ or it isn’t. So when Urbanista describes its Los Angeles wireless noise-cancelling over-ear headphones as having “virtually infinite” playtime, that’s basically the same as saying the Los Angeles don’t have infinite playtime.
Although, to be fair to Urbanista, the Los Angeles get a lot closer than most.
At a glance, there’s nothing particularly noteworthy about the Urbanista Los Angeles. Like the Miami wireless headphones on which they’re closely based, they’re discreetly good looking and nicely finished. And like every Urbanista product, they’re named after one of the planet’s more evocative places.
It’s on the outside of the headband, though, that the Los Angeles suddenly become unique. ‘Unique’, like ‘infinite’, is an absolute – but currently, this is a description the Urbanista deserve. Because integrated into the outside of the headband there’s a big strip of a material called ‘Powerfoyle’ that’s supplied by a company called Exeger. It’s a solar cell material and it can derive energy from any type of light, from sunshine to the lightbulbs in your home. It’s always pulling energy, always charging, whether the headphones themselves are switched on or not. And it means the Urbanista Los Angeles will play for an enormous length of time without ever needing to be charged from the mains. Which, as unique selling points go, is pretty impressive.
This piece of engineering brilliance aside, it’s mostly Urbanista business as usual. Which means the Los Angeles are a robust pair of headphones, comfortable at every contact point and not (like so many rival designs) about to swamp the smaller-headed listener. Build quality is unarguable, the choice of materials is judicious, the colour options (‘midnight’ black or ‘sand’ gold) are pleasant, and there’s a degree of tactility about the Los Angeles that is by no means common in headphones below the £200 mark.
Wireless connectivity is via Bluetooth 5.0, which is adequate but hardly at the cutting edge. Sound is delivered by a couple of the same 40mm full-range dynamic drivers fitted to the (suddenly slightly lo-tech) Urbanista Miami. There’s three-position active noise-cancellation: ‘on’, ‘off’ or ‘ambient sound’, and hair-trigger accelerometers that pause music if you take the Los Angeles off your head (or even shift them slightly on your ears). Happily, the ‘on-ear detection’ can be defeated in the nice new Urbanista control app.
As far as headphones control apps go, it’s one of the better-looking and one of the more restricted in what it can actually do for you. There’s a nice big display that explains whether the battery is being topped up or drained, there’s switching for the three-stage noise-cancellation and there’s the ability to define the function of the physical ‘control’ button on the outside of the left earcup. That’s your lot.
That left earcup is also where you’ll find a USB-C input. This can be used to charge the Los Angeles’ 750mAh battery should you not encounter light of any kind for many an hour. Urbanista reckons spending an hour outside in decent sunshine will charge the Los Angeles for three hour’s-worth of playback (but given the shortage of decent sunshine around here at the moment, we can neither confirm nor deny this claim), while on battery power alone the headphones will run for a gargantuan 80 hours (with noise-cancelling off) or 50 hours (with noise-cancelling on).
These are figures that are a) scarcely believable and b) absolutely achievable. Should you find yourself down a well or something, you can be confident your Urbanista will last you for well over three days and nights.
On the right earcup there are three buttons, each too small and all too close together. Between them they cover ‘power on/off/Bluetooth pairing’, ‘play/pause’, ‘skip forwards/backwards’, ‘volume up/down’ and ‘answer/end/reject call’. Their size and placement make them more than a little hit-and-miss, so it might be easier and less frustrating to ask either Google Assistant or Siri to take care of these operations for you.
What’s conspicuous by its absence on either earcup is a 3.5mm analogue output. So unless you have a USB-C adapter, it’s not possible to make a wired connection to use the Los Angeles.
With the headphones (comfortably, securely) in position and a TIDAL Masters file of Sparks’ When Do I Get To Sing “My Way”? playing, it’s briefly disconcerting to realise that the Los Angeles’ audio performance isn’t actually the be-all and end-all. But their innovative charging system notwithstanding, these are a pair of headphones… and they’re just as upfront and energetic a listen as the Miami headphones on which they’re based.
This basically means deep, textured, detailed and undeniably over-confident low frequencies that impact just slightly on the midrange. It means a midrange that’s equally detailed and informative, able to give the characteristically mannered vocals in this tune real bite and attack. It means a high-frequency response that’s just the right side of hard and zizzy, and that walks this particular tightrope no matter the sort of volume you’re listening at (and the Los Angeles are capable of considerable volume).
They’re not the most dynamic headphones this sort of money can buy, and while they define a soundstage pretty well they aren’t the best at organising and expressing rhythmic intricacies. What they are, though, is fun to listen to. If you like it vivid and high-energy, with a stack of assertiveness throughout the frequency range, you won’t go far wrong here.
Noise-cancellation is a similarly qualified success. Switch it on and there’s no denying external noise is reduced considerably – but it’s at the cost of some three-dimensionality and some midrange positivity, and there’s also a mild, but definite, counter-signal introduced. ‘Ambient Sound’, meanwhile, does boost external sound but, unhelpfully, doesn’t lower the volume of your music while it does so.
Probably most important of all, though, is that the Urbanista Los Angeles make good on the promise of their remarkable configuration. The temptation to keep the app open at all times in order to check on the state of the battery is extremely strong, and we’ve done so for more than long enough to report that yes, the charging system here really works.
At the time of writing we’ve been wearing and listening to the Los Angeles for well over 30 hours, and at no point has the battery level dipped below 52 per cent. And it’s a very curious sensation to see the battery, while listening outside in daylight, has on occasion actually gained power while the headphones themselves have been operational.
We can’t imagine the Urbanista Los Angeles will be unique for all that long. This solution to the multi-faceted problem of keeping your headphones powered up is just too elegant and too effective to remain an Urbanista USP. In fact, JBL still hasn’t given up hope on the ‘Reflect Eternal’ solar-powered headphones it’s been threatening for well over a year now.
But, for now, at least, the Los Angeles are number one in a field of one.
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
