Headphone cables can be a hassle, getting tangled up in your pocket or caught on the treadmill when you're at the gym. Bluetooth wireless technology promises to rid our lives of unsightly and annoying wires forever, and Koss wasted no time in putting out a set of Bluetooth headphones designed to do just that: the Cobalt. Featuring a transmitter that plugs into your music player of choice, a USB dongle for equipping your computer with Bluetooth, and a pair of headphones to receive all this Bluetooth action, they give you everything you need to go wireless. However, you will pay dearly for the right to give up wires, as the Cobalt costs a hefty $180. Is it worth it? Should you toss your normal headphones in the garbage and say goodbye to wires forever? After spending some time with the Koss phones, I learned that the answer is a definite no.

The first thing you need to do when you take the headphones out of the box is plug them in to charge them. Fair enough. But then you also need to go out and buy some AAA batteries for the transmitter. Why couldn't the transmitter have been rechargeable as well? Maybe I'm spoiled by the recent influx of rechargeable gadgets, but the only thing I have lying around that takes AAAs is my TV remote, so I don't exactly have a pile of them sitting around. Koss should have either made the transmitter rechargeable like the headphones or at least included a couple of AAA batteries in the packaging. It's a small nitpick, but something that definitely hampered my use of the product.

One of the most important aspects of any set of headphones is how they feel when you wear them, and this is where Cobalt fails the most. These things are just huge. They hang over your ears with a hard, nonadjustable strap that goes around the back of your head. If you have hair that goes over your ears at all, you pretty much can't wear these. They stick out a good half-inch from your ears, and any hair over your ears will stick straight out over them. Even if you're a jarhead, they're too heavy to hang on your ears, and they feel like they're about to fall off. Furthermore, they don't fit tightly, making you feel like you're missing half the music.

The poor, bulky design of the headphones themselves makes them pretty much useless, at least as far as I was concerned. I didn't even have to turn them on to know I would never want to wear them. Anyone used to the small earbuds that come with the iPod or other earphones of that size will have a really hard time adjusting to the Koss's awkward, uncomfortable design.

To get your music player streaming to the headphones, you need to plug the transmitter into it. The transmitter is a small white box with a headphone plug sticking out the middle of it, kind of like the Griffin iTrip. You flip a switch to turn it on and a short tone will let you know that it's connected properly. The design makes it seem like it's meant for older-generation iPods. My 60-GB iPod that I used to test the Cobalt has the headphone jack over on the side rather than in the center like older models, meaning when plugged in the transmitter sticks off your iPod awkwardly. It's also thicker than newer iPods, making it a strange fit in your pocket.

The transmitter works fine, however. I left my iPod sitting on my desk and wandered around my apartment with no loss in sound quality at all. Unlike an FM transmitter like the iTrip there was no fading in and out and no clicks or pops. The sound quality was passable, but due to the poor fit they sounded distinctly worse than a set of decent earbuds.

While the idea of wireless headphones is a good one, Koss clearly just hasn't figured out how to make a quality pair yet. The design is so poor I would be ashamed to be seen wearing them in public; there's no point in having wireless headphones if you don't want to wear the headphones in the first place. For what Koss is charging for these you could get an excellent pair of either earbuds or padded headphones that would sound 10 times better than these while being more comfortable. The pocket-saving wireless feature isn't that pocket-saving when the transmitter doesn't fit properly on the most ubiquitous music player on the market, so really the only reason you would want these was if you had some obsession with getting rid of wires. If you have some patience and wait it out, I'm sure that in a year or two there will be much better wireless headphones on the market for a fraction of the price. — Adam Frucci