Photive BTH3 Over-Ear Bluetooth Headphones Review

Editor rating

4/5 on July 21, 2016 Reviewed by: Peter Alexander

$39.95
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User’s rating

4,045 reviews

PROS

Very loud
Great sound balance
Unbelievable long Bluetooth range
Strong battery life
Impressive build quality

CONS

Sub-par sound isolation
Ears tend to get very hot

VERDICT

Let’s do some math together: The Photive BTH3 give you 80% of Bose quality for ¼ of the price. If this doesn’t equal excellent value, we don’t know what does. Mind you, Bose headphones have the advantage of active noise cancellation, which is something that the BTH3 just can’t do. Furthermore, the passive noise cancellation of the BTH3 is not as good as what you get from other closed-back Bluetooth headphones. But that just means that you need to avoid loud environments.

The Photive BTH3 are affordable headphones that share many similarities with headphones from Bose. We can’t wait to see how will a relatively unknown pair of Bluetooth headphones measure against the best noise-cancelling Bluetooth headphones currently available.

Design and Build Quality

If you are a fan of functional design that doesn’t try to attract the attention of everyone you see, the Photive BTH3 should be right up your alley. The manufacturer has decided to stick with black as the main color, which gives the headphones a professional appearance. The overall durability is excellent, with no detectable weaknesses.

Ear muffs are padded with firm but comfortable leather. Our ears started to get hot after about 45 minutes of listening, but it was nothing a 5-minute break couldn’t solve.

Each side of the headphones houses a set of volume and playback controls as well as USB port for charging. The Photive BTH3 use a lithium-ion battery that lasts around 12 hours and charges in under 2. The included aux input allows you to plug in any 3.5mm audio cable and easily connect to your smartphone or tablet without Bluetooth.

Sound Quality

The 40mm drivers promise uncompromising sound quality and excellent bass with clear highs and dynamic mids. Our testing reviled that the headphones work best with modern music genres, such as hip-hop, RnB, pop, and EDM. These genres bring out the best from the BTH-3. Jazz, for example, suffers from cut off highs.

In the introductory paragraph, we have compared these headphones to popular models from Bose. While true in many respects, the one area the BTH3 cannot be compared with any Bose headphones is noise isolation. Not only is there no active noise isolation, but passive noise isolation is also rather underwhelming. Not recommendable for travel and office use.