I along with the other Editors at Tech Bucket Blog use a Plantronics Discovery 655 headset. It’s old, but it’s small, recharges from a AAA battery and it was free. Tech Bucket Blog bought one of these for everyone here to use with their phones so we can always be connected while driving or on the move.

The problem with the 655’s that we use is that in the car they work great. Around the town, not so much and that’s where the Plantronics Voyager PRO comes in.

We’re not fans of over the ear headsets. Most of us here, except for Bubba and a few others, prefer in the ear models. They’re easier to put on and if you wear shades or glasses, in the ear models don’t get in the way.

That being said, the Plantronics Voyager PRO offers a comfortable design that’s perfectly balanced. USB port at the bottom and surprisingly lightweight behind the ear battery. Volume controls up top that’s easy to use and responds well. All the buttons have good feedback, not heavy, not light, but well balanced so you won’t be enabling any functions with errant button pushes. The boom mic is curved just slightly so as to not get buried in your cheek. A lot of thought went into this design and it shows.

The boom sports dual mics for noise canceling and they’re both of typical Plantronics quality, which is better than average.

There are a ton of bluetooth headsets out there that claim to have noise canceling or “active” noise canceling, while they all do it slightly differently than Plantronics, it’s really tough to find one that does it better than Voyager PRO.

Simply put, it’s the best that we’ve ever tested. Hands-down. That’s it, don’t look any further. We stressed it pretty hard and Voyager PRO came through with flying colors. The loudest conditions that we could create as far as wind noise was driving at freeway speeds (on the local freeway of course), all the windows down. You can imagine, going roughly 65MPH, it gets pretty windy in your car.

However, during our call test (paired with Droid, in-network call with full bars on both ends), the person we called reported no issue hearing our voice. We could barely hear the other party though, but we turned the volume up all the way and it got better.

The party we called definitely knew we were driving and could tell there was some background noise, but had no idea we were cruising at highway speeds with the windows down.

Really. That’s impressive.

When we received a call to our land line from our tester on the road, the results were stellar. Voices could be heard clearly and really didn’t carry any of the typical speaking through a can type sound you’d expect. In fact, you would have thought the call was coming from a wired boom mic. Quality was that good.

The secret? Plantronics explains there are 3 layers of wind canceling technology along with two active noise canceling mics on the boom. The metal screen, as well as internal hardware and electronics all combine to provide some stellar wind canceling.

We tested the headset walking around downtown San Francisco. The only problems we had was when the MUNI was less than 3 feet away, call quality suffered. Still, no complaints as folks could still hear us okay over the noise.

Typical issues that plague noise canceling mics like this usually result in some wispy noises and occasionally, you’ll hear some strange feedback noises in your headset as the noise canceling kicks in. With this headset, none of those issues during our weeklong test. Audio IQ2 or whatever else is going on here (space magic, I think), we’re completely blown away.

Built-in multi-point technology allows you to pair two devices to this headset without any issues. In our tests, we paired mobile and laptop without any problems. Skype, iChat, VOIP calls were absolutely stellar and comparable to wired sound.

Usually, I’m personaly skeptical about CNet Editor’s Choice Awards. Sometimes, they tend to be bit biased and others they try too hard in not being biased. Still, they’re the well known brand, not Tech Bucket Blog.

That being said, we have to agree with the smart folks at CNet on this one. You know what that means…Plantronics gets a second Golden Bucket Award for this awesome bluetooth headset. For excellent call and voice clarity and delivering on it’s claims of wind and noise canceling, Voyager PRO wins our seal of approval.

MSRP is $99.99 but you can score it on Amazon.com or other retail sites for around $77 or less. Available now.

For more details check out the product page at Plantronics.

(Legal Note: Our lawyer wants us to tell everyone that this is an independent review of Plantronics Voyager PRO. Tech Bucket Blog LLC did not pay for the product being reviewed. We requested and received this item from representatives of Plantronics. We are never and were not compensated for our opinions or recommendation of this or any other product we review. We offer our opinions based upon our own independent testing and offer no express or implied warranties on any statement that we make. It is simply our opinion. Your experience may differ. As our policy is not to be compensated for our reviews, we are never directed in one direction (positive or negative) about this or any product we review.)

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