ag WHP01K NC wireless headphones

Bargain ’phones, tuned by a premium brand.

Affordable ANC tuned by a high-end brand.

This is a new brand on us, called ‘ag’ — as in ‘pipe’, though inspired, we’re told, by the old Japanese word arigatakimono, which Google translates as ‘thank you’ but which the press release says can mean ‘one of a kind’. ‘ag’ is a sub-brand of Japanese headphone company Final Audio, whose rather higher-end D8000 Pro models are reviewed elsewhere in this issue. The connection is announced obliquely, as “sound tuning by Final”, rather than a direct connection, but it’s certainly a good opening recommendation for a pair of wireless noise-cancellers at what is a highly affordable price-point.

At this level — they sell for just $149.95 — money has clearly been saved on materials for the AG-WHP01K. The earpads squeak as you compress them; things feel a bit tight all the time, and the controls are cheap plastic studs that are labelled rather dimly in grey on grey, so it’s hard to read them.

As with many headphones these days, you get voice feedback as you invoke operations, and here it is delivered in a curious voice which sounds like Yvette from Allo Allo speaking with her cod French accent. ‘Power ooon”, she says, “Device coonectared...” It’s curiously exotic, we suppose, if not the height of communication clarity.

The power button doubles as a pause button (one tap), or a voice assistant invoker (two taps, the usual shortcut for next track, so we did that a lot). Holding the + volume button for two seconds invokes next track, the same on the ‘–’ button restarts the track. You can also use the headphones for answering or rejecting calls. Power and volume up/ down buttons are on the right headshell and an ANC button on the left headshell.

As for the sound, we found it rather lumpy and thick until noise-cancellation was invoked, then sharpening up once ANC was selected — Final’s sound tuning is clearly optimised for listening with ANC. There was still a general lack of airiness, a slight thickness to everything, so that there was no zing to the guitars in Alex The Astronaut’s Happy Song: a grey day rather than a sunny day. But the fundamental balance is good enough; it doesn’t thrust a bloated bass in your face, or shriek or tend towards sibilance, and to be fair, things opened up somewhat once we used the volume buttons to push the volume higher, although distortion was significant up at the top three stops. The Bluetooth connection was notably excellent — from our MacBook laptop we could wander far further than the usual 10 metres. Latency was also a strong point — even with the AAC codec there was unusually little delay when watching video, and those with devices supporting aptX Low Latency can presumably enjoy even less.

It’s also possible to attach a cable; again things are very soft unless you engage ANC, at which point they delivered their best and most balanced sound, if still a little dull.

There’s one notably odd implementation. After the funny voice said “Power off”, the green light stayed on, for ages afterwards, so were they really off? No they weren’t; when we put them back on, the noise-cancelling was still on. Sure enough, in the manual, as an asterisk, as if they’d realised at the last minute, it warns you not only to turn off the headphones but to turn off the ANC separately. Otherwise (we tried) the battery drains in a couple of days. While this does mean you can have ANC without having the power on, it’s a slightly eyeball-sucking ANC implementation, so we wouldn’t want to do that anyway.

Average sound at best, cheap buttons with otherwise reasonable build, sucky ANC and some odd implementations: they’re not for us.

More info: www.busisoft.com.au