the power of the sun
back in the year 1949 a man heard a very
fast baby say its first word he said Adidas and that's when John Adidas had
the idea to found a company that makes sports apparel like shoes and pants and
now headphones ooh today we're gonna be
taking a look at the rpt02 Soul headphones from Adidas I don't know if
it's supposed to be repeat I assume it but I've been pronouncing it armpit like
carpet so what makes these really interesting is that they're solar powered yes by the gods raise the cast
down upon the Earth you too shall listen to music through his Goodwill and
actually it's the sun's nuclear fusion UV radiation on the top of this on the
headband there's a whole uh there's like a solar panel which is a pretty neat so
what features does Adidas have on their headphones aside from the solar panels
well they have one powered by light we
covered that two built with from recycled Plastics that's cool three
designed for durability four up to 80
hours of stored play time and five they
have intuitive controls and because they're actually solar powered they
don't include a charging cable luckily you can still charge them via USB-C now
an interesting thing about this is that Adidas obviously doesn't make headphones so somebody else is making it for them
it's a company called zound Industries they're behind Marshall like the amp
companies headphone division they also make Urban ears which I haven't seen a
product from in a long time but I remember like maybe six seven years ago
Urban ears were like really popular because they were like a style focused
headphone and now there's a lot more competition in the style focused
headphone and here they are one of the things I
really like about how these look is first off they have this cool texture
all along it it's a consistent theme across the top of the headband and the
other thing I like is the weaving of the fabric that goes on the headband on the
inside and on the ear cups it's very reminiscent of some of the really cool
kind of weaving patterns that are on the upper soles of like a lot of their shoes
so these kind of remind me of like the like Yeezy boost 350s or some of their
Ultra boost lineup you have like a solid weave there with this cool modeled
pattern that goes into like this full cross Hatchet and they do another cool
thing that they do with the shoes which is like having a bottom layer that's colored so as you can see these have
these little specks of this like neon green that's coming through because
these are actually removable the fabric which is great because what are you
going to be doing with these headphones these are really designed for you know what Adidas wants you to do Sports so
you can take off the whole piece you can wash it this is just solid plastic you
can also take off the headband come off
and the same deal you can take the fabric off and wash it which is great
because you're going to get sweaty in these especially if you're like I don't
know in the Sun going for a run which is what I did with them this whole headband
is the solar panel it's this textured plastic that they have it doesn't look
like your usual solar cell there's an adjust there's adjustments it's this
textured plastic that allows you to adjust I think the way they put the
labels is really cool too which is great because you might get these a little mixed up another thing that was smart
about what they designed is that you can see that here there's a USBC port and if
I took this off nozzle pass-throughs separate from it so they actually have a
label on the inside of the ear cup and on the inside of the headphone so that
you can line them up when you're trying to get them back on so might be thinking
hey these are pretty small ear cups so that's because these are on ear
headphones as opposed to over ear headphones whereas these have a lot of
climbing ports and they go right on your ear so that when you put them on and
you're moving around they stay relatively in place which is great when
you're running or if you're doing movements like if you're at the gym
doing movements like lifting and stuff that like
they say pretty firm I had no issues my
usual gym and workout headphones are the Beats Solo 3 which has another pair of
on-ears they're about the same size so on the controls you have this a one button it's a multi-purpose button by
default one press is that it lights This Little Light here up so what this is is
that it's your light meter it tells you how much charge you're getting in from
the headset so if you're like in direct full sunlight you'll see this turn on
and all three layers will be lit up on this side this is kind of neat it's a
joystick it's like a you can go up down left right or press it's like the
navigation nipple on the back of your uh it's like that navigation nipple on your
back on the back of your monitor it's like the navigation nipple I didn't have
any issue controlling things accurately but I did notice like when I was wearing
these and laying down on the couch it might push up and like push this in a
Direction so it's like my videos kept changing I was watching YouTube videos these just look like sucks I know well
they look I was gonna say they look like the uppers on a lot of uh like a lot of Runners I mean Adidas does make socks
yeah they also make Runners did you not know this is this you see no okay I was
like Adidas makes shoes man that's like their thing well we'll talk about that
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10 today let's look at these headphones so these have Bluetooth 5.2 they also
have Qualcomm aptx HD for that high quality audio as well as I believe AAC
as their default codec with the iPhone I
think they just default to AAC ldac would have been nice to see especially
on a new pair of headphones I understand if that might be a little bit of a high
power codec and you wouldn't be able to benefit from it because these are solar
powered they're supposed to sip on it you know they give a little sip sip they also have ipx4 sweat resistance so
splashes sweat it's going to have you covered there I would have liked to see
a little bit of a higher IP rating for water just because if you're like I
don't know getting soaked out in the rain on a longer run you want to just be
sure that these are going to be okay especially if you don't have a place to stash them like if these could fold in
to be smaller that'd be great because the whole point is I want to toss these in like my gym bag and have them be as
small as possible and I'm carrying as little on me as possible sadly they
don't fold so this is the size and they also don't come with a carrying case
which at their price is very disappointing speaking of price
229. compared to my Beats which are 199
but like they've been on the market for a long time and you can get them for
just substantially cheaper I saw them at Costco for 150 that's when I or I guess
180 Canadian was what I bought them for so like 150-ish probably less and now
we're gonna take a little listen psych I've already listened to these so I
don't need to do it right now I have a few thoughts on them one is that they
have a lot of bass like a lot of bass which is great for when you're working
out because it's you want that pulse that kind of pushes you I think these
sound amazing for all of the music that I'm listening to in my pumping playlist
which is you know for Pump and iron they're not detailed they're not
reference at all and I say out of the box they're way too boomy but they have
an EQ in the app which we're going to take a look at in a moment and you just
crank that down it sounds a lot better you still get that oof but it's not
overpowering and destroying the music I
usually get annoyed when apps are kind of essential for headphones but in this
case I think there's it makes is a better point when you get into the app you can see the drain and the charge
that's currently happening to the headphones so right now they're draining
because we're in a studio there's no sunlight and they're just wirelessly
connecting if I start playing music on it you can see that the power usage
increases and down here has historical data so you can see like in the last six
hours how much charge and discharge there's been so they've been off for the
most part and they've just been slowly just a neutral level discharge just because the
batteries slowly discharge over time but if we take it outside like if I run
outside right now you should see should see it to see the app it'll show you how
much sun is getting so you can see I've left them literally on the ground
outside and you can see in the app right here that says plus 6.7 milliamps so
that's because it's actually currently charging because we're playing music it
is discharging but if I go and if I pause the music just down here you'll
see that the power is just going down it was at 10 now it's at six yeah there we
go it's turned yellow so as you can see we're now gaining
charge so it does depend on your angle towards the Sun as well as the
conditions when I had perfect sun on it over the weekend it was charging at
about 30 milliamp hours which is not fast at all I left it in the sun for
like two hours and it went up from 50 to 56 which is really not much but if I was
running outside right now I'd be losing almost no charge and if it's actually
sunny out I gain charge I gained battery on a run at one time I went from 53 to
54 which is nuts and speaking of battery
life these claim 80 hours which is kind
of crazy but also really hard to test because if you literally leave these
anywhere near a window they just charge you use them in the sun outside they
just charge I was unable to make them
drain I got them when I unbox them they're at 51 I use them for a couple of
hours inside they dropped to 49 then the
moment I had like there was any sunshine shine in the room and I wasn't listening
to them they started charging just passively and by the end of the weekend
they charged to like 58 50 60 and that was with continued use trying them out
it's really neat honestly as long as you
have them like out and about which makes kind of I guess kind of lends Credence
to the idea that they don't give you a case because you're gonna just leave
them out in the sun that I I would worry
about like maybe some of the degradation of the other materials in here leaving
things in the sun is uh pretty famous for you know being bad for Stuff other
things in the app you got equalizer you have an equalizer you have some presets
you can also just make a custom equalizer you can see this is how I've made set my equalizer this is what I
thought sounded the best bumped up a little bit in the higher frequencies and
turned everything down really low in the base I have a couple of issues with the
app so one thing that I find really annoying about this is that it has a
permanent notification icon in my shade that tells me that my headphones are
connected I know I can I can turn off the notification shade but it's so
stupid why why is this here and the worst part is that if I disconnect the
headphones from turning them off the app will still stay up here you can change
this button they call it your action button so it allows you to take so
single press or hold is always tied to checking the lighting conditions which
is dumb because if they're on my head why can't I press that once to do
something like just I'm not I can't look at it you can change it to double press
and these are your three options you get three options default voice assistant
Spotify and Adidas running why are you limiting me I ca I get the idea of like
you know integrating it into your running routine so the idea is running
Apple allow you to do like segments so this would like to start and stop a segment or pause and resume your running
and with Spotify you can just like have a button so that like you go this is my
workout playlist I just want my playlist to be played on shuffle and it'll just
automatically integrate with Spotify well I can't integrate with integrate
with other apps also why is it the default voice assistant the only options
it's just like it just you could give me other things that aren't covered by the
joystick with your multi-directional control nipple you get power hour a long
transfer power longer press for Bluetooth one press for play pause right
and left are skip up and down our volume you're doing anything like fast
forwarding or rewinding through a song you can't scrub anything would be nice
so yeah I guess I got a little angry there I did get a little worked up and I'm a little hot it's a RGB sweater from
lttstore.com is a they're getting me a
little bit sweaty so hence the name sweater but that's just because it's
warm down here it's great in almost every other circumstance not too hot not
too cool lttstore.com
and this is a mic test of the Adidas rpt02 Sol do I sound like a robocaller
or do you get to hear the details of my sultry baritone let me know in the
comments would I recommend these at 230
dollars yeah I think they're actually pretty good at what they do their build
quality is quite good it is all plastic but still feels very strong very premium
the fabric covers are great for being able to just easily being able to wash
them because you're going to get sweaty with these and I think that they're pretty comfortable I mean any sort of
on-ear headphone is going to suck especially if you wear glasses and your
ears are going to get a little sweaty but that's why you got all this fabric here they sounded pretty good and the
charging works a lot better than I thought it would it charges really slowly but it charges faster than it
discharges and if you want to charge faster you do have the option of USBC
one thing that would have been nice is if they had like an auxiliary input so I
could listen to them attached to something and then not use any of the
battery at all because with all of the charging and discharging Cycles I would
wonder if 80 hour battery life is going to degrade but quickly and then also
like I don't know how the battery longevity is going to be affected by it
I think they're pretty good they're great for working out they've nailed
that aspect compared to my solo 3s on sale these are a bit of a hard recommend
if you're going to be if you're looking for something in this price range though that's specifically for working out I
think these are great they've nailed the features that you want to see from a
from a exercising headphone and I really
enjoy these because I don't like putting things in my ears when I'm running or
when I'm working out you get all the body noise when kind of plugging your ears these end up being a great option
some of you might be like oh there's no noise canceling well you can't do noise canceling with on-ears and they actually
do a pretty good job of isolating anyways I would I don't know I like them
a lot I think they're really good and I think they nailed what they set out to
do the price is kind of expensive and I think you really have to be the judge of
whether or not you want to spend 230 on what I'd say is a dedicated exercise
pair of headphones thanks for watching ShortCircuit if you like these solar
powered headphones maybe check out James's review of the urbanistas there
are solar power headphones that he did not like as much