Review of Sony WH-CH510 stereo Bluetooth headset
The Sony WH-CH510 is a relatively affordable Bluetooth headset. It has a fairly balanced sound and it is quite compact. It also has a very long battery life. The full price is £50 but it’s been priced at around £34.99 from shops such as John Lewis and Currys for a while.
The headset is quite compact, but it is, I would say, a little plasticky. In its favour, however, it has a long battery life of 35 hours. A 10-minute charge will give around 90 minutes of listening time. You can’t use an audio cable with this headset if the battery runs low, but the long battery life should mean that this is not an issue. This headset is charged using a USB C connector which means that you can put the plug in either way round which makes connecting these headphones to power much easier than those which use the older Micro USB connection.
The WH-CH510 has decent sound quality for a set of headphones of this type. There is plenty of bass and the treble is quite acceptable though mid-range can perhaps be a little understated. For the price, however, it’s hard to criticise the sound.
The controls for power and volume up and down are easily reachable on the right-hand cup of the headphones. Helpful voice prompts let you know when you power on the headphones as well as when you choose Power off or the power turns off due to low battery level. There is also a voice prompt to let you know when Bluetooth is connected or disconnected. There is a microphone built into the right-hand cup of this headset so you can use the voice assistant without taking your device out of your pocket or bag.
Pressing the power button once briefly will pause audio and pressing the same button twice quickly will launch the voice assistant on your phone. If this is an Android phone, pressing power twice will launch the google assistant. On an iPhone pressing power twice will launch Siri. When connected to my iPhone 8, there was a bit of a lag using voiceover. This was definitely noticeable but no more so than with most Bluetooth headphones.
If you want to disconnect the headphones from the Bluetooth device currently being used, such as a phone, you must either turn off the phone, turn off the headset or disconnect the Bluetooth connection from the phone or other device.
The accessibility of this headset is pretty good. You generally can’t see any display on headphones while you are wearing them so there is often plenty of audio guidance to let users know what is happening. voice prompts should however make these headphones particularly easy to use.
Using these headphones should be straight forward for those who are used to this kind of equipment, but it is often difficult to read instruction manuals if you are visually impaired. The manual may not be online and even if it is, it is often a PDF file full of pictures that do not work well with Screen reading software.
The WH-CH510 headphones have a useful web-based guide that should answer most questions. It is great to see a web-based guide that is reasonably accessible. It is available here.
In conclusion then, these headphones are certainly well worth the price of £34.99. They sound decent and they are straight forward to use and quite comfortable.
Graham Page, Access Technology Adviser
3 December 2019
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