If you love watching movies or listening to music and don’t live alone in the middle of the woods, I’d definitely suggest a good set of wireless headphones.  Admittedly, there’s nothing like the 770 Watts my Denon AV receiver can stuff into 7.1 channels of wall-to-wall sound, but my neighbors and wife have a different opinion, especially at night.  So, in an effort to prevent my tires from being slashed, I invested in a set of Sennheiser RS 140 wireless headphones.

The RS140′s transmit wirelessly in the 926-928MHz range, well away from the crowded 2.4GHz spectrum used by routers and cordless phones.  The sound quality is very good when the headphones are stationary and within line-of-sight to the transmitter.  But if you have to roam around the room or into another, random “pops” and hissing do become more frequent.  While I don’t do a lot roaming while using these headphones, I do require the transmitter to be mounted behind a sheet rock wall in my home theater, which without careful positioning can leave an annoying “hiss” as an undertone to everything else.

The 18-21000Hz frequency response allows incredibly accurate sound reproduction of even the lowest tones.  While unable to produce the room shaking bursts of a good subwoofer, the RS140′s do create amazingly thunderous bass.  Achieving optimal sound from the RS140′s took careful adjustment through trial and error of the source and headphone volumes to find appropriate levels of each.  With the source volume too high, the headphones were very susceptible to clipping.  With the source volume too low, the full potential of the headphones weren’t met.  The base does have a LED that flashes if the source input is too high or low, but it was easier and more accurate to find this balance manually.

Conveniently, these headphones feature automatic tuning of the base transmitter.  Pushing the “tune” button on the headphones initiates a scan until the headphones lock onto the base signal.  If the channel tuned to has interference, simply pushing “tune” again will change the channel of the system to a clearer one.  The volume and balance controls are easily accessible on the right side of the unit.  A rechargeable NiMH battery is included with the RS140′s which will last about 20 hours, but you’ll probably never run out of power since recharging the battery occurs automatically when the headphones are hung on the transmitter base.

With a street price below $150, the Sennheiser RS 140 headphones provide an excellent substitute for a full home theater sound experience when your family or neighbors don’t want to hear every explosion the soundtrack offers.  They’re comfortable and easy to use, but require careful adjustment and patience to properly setup.  Being an analog device, they do expectantly experience occasional RF interference in some settings.  But overall, they have the potential to save marriages, neighborhoods, and possibly the world.