Altec Lansing Backbeat Pro

Altec Lansing’s Backbeat Pro earbuds are some mighty fine earbuds in their own right. They sound great, they’re lightweight and comfortable, and they’re pretty stylish looking with gold trim complementing an overall black theme. The audio output is crisp and fairly expansive across all ranges, and in a vacuum in which they were the only such product on the market, they’d be easily worth their $99 price.


So why not a higher rating? When spending this kind of money on earbuds it’s wise to look around at similarly priced options before making your purchase, and as it turns out you can earbuds priced slightly above and below the Backbeat Pro’s $99 price tag that offer a superior overall experience. Shure’s SE115 earbuds sell for twenty dollars more and offer noticeably better sound quality, particularly in the area of expansive audio that sounds a lot larger and more spaced out than you’d reasonably expect from little earbuds. And if your budget doesn’t allow you to go all the way up to $119, you can still do better with Scosche’s $79 IDR600 than you can with the BackBeat Pro.



Maybe the Backbeat Pro is simply priced too high (or perhaps the competing products are priced too low). But in any case, it doesn’t make for a convincing argument when a less expensive product sounds better. So why would you want to go with the Backbeat Pro? The IDR600 has a higher than average bass-to-treble ratio, so if you’re no fan of bass, you might prefer the sound of the Backbeat Pro even though it’s not quite of the same overall quality. Or perhaps you greatly prefer the styling of the Backbeat Pro.



It seems self-contradictory to say that you’ll get your money’s worth with this product but that there are better values out there, yet that’s the best way to sum up the Backbeat Pro. No shame in buying these, but probably only if you’ve already ruled out the best of the vaguely similarly priced competing options.

Learn more at AltecLansing.com