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A few weeks ago, my friend, former SoundStage! Solo editor, and current co-host of the Audio Unleashed podcast, Brent Butterworth, sent me an email with the subject “This is BEGGING for a Geoff Morrison review.” The only thing in the body was a link to the Aiwa Water Bottle with Speaker and Earphone Bundle, aka the Aiwa Get Fit Sports Kit. In one package, you get a pair of “Wireless Sport Earphones” and a “Water Bottle with Wireless Speaker.” The price for this epic, legendary, genre-defining product? $11.44 (all prices USD) as purchased, by me, immediately. It’s probably more by the time you’re reading this, because REASONS, but let’s ignore that for now.
Well, Brent, you are correct. This sure does seem like something I’d hate-review.
In the box
In addition to the earbuds and bottle with mounted Bluetooth speaker, you get two USB-A-to-Micro-USB cables and two additional eartips. For such a budget product, the second USB cable seems an unnecessary cost. There are also separate instruction manuals for the speaker and the earbuds. So maybe they’re leaving their options open if they change suppliers? None of the eartips are particularly small, but I got a decent fit with the medium-size ones that came pre-installed, so unless you have really small ear canals, you’ll probably be fine.
Use
The “Wireless Sport Earphones” have a wire, though they are wireless. They’re connected to each other. There are certainly pros and cons of tethered earbuds, and for sports use, there are probably more of the former than the latter. It is amusing, however, that on the box there’s a very visible wire coming from the earbuds that fades to white in the exact same way manufacturers of traditional wired earbuds photograph their products.
The earbuds have an over-ear loop design, and while they’re on the larger side, they feel surprisingly secure. The right earbud has power and volume buttons that can pause and skip tracks. Not surprisingly, they feel very inexpensive, but the texture isn’t slippery, so there’s that. It took a few tries to connect to my Pixel 9 Pro, an issue the speaker shared, but both had one of the better built-in voices I’ve heard to let me know they were “powering on” and “connected.” The earphones claim to be IPX4, so you can splash water on them, and they have “up to seven hours playtime.”
The Bluetooth speaker screws onto (or off of, depending on your perspective) the water bottle. The speaker itself faces up, toward the interior of the bottle, with the power, play, and volume buttons facing down. You can place it speaker-down and still hear it thanks to vents in the sides of what was the lower portion of the bottle. It has a claimed eight-hour battery life.
The water bottle holds 400ml, which is pretty small to me, but there is a loop on the cap so it’s at least easy to carry. It’s not, however, easy to open. It also reeks of chemicals. I didn’t test the taste. I have enough microplastics in my brain, thankuvrymch.
Sound
The sound of the Aiwa Wireless Sport Earphones is . . . something. Look, we need to grade on a curve here. I bought these for $11.44, and that included a full-on Bluetooth speaker and a plastic bottle that presumably holds liquids. They’re wireless earbuds, and they make sound! Your music comes out of them! Not all of your music, at least not well, but they do actually work.
The frequency response is lumpy, to put it nicely. Acoustic instruments sound extremely artificial. Vocals are much higher in the mix than they should be, and there’s a lot of sibilance. There’s some extra bass, which you’d typically want in a sports earbud, but it’s pretty sloppy. Bass-drum hits have a soft thump to them. There’s no high treble either. I guess if you’re listening to music with lots of vocals, or podcasts or something, they’d work fine.
A while back I reviewed a trio of earphones I got cheap on Temu. The standouts, if you could call them that, were the Onikuma T20 earphones. At $19, I praised them, again if you could call it that, as “exceedingly not bad.” They were true wireless, and their limited cost and power meant that, even though their sound was passable, they were extremely quiet. That’s one problem the Aiwas don’t have. At max volume they’re plenty loud. They sound like absolute trash at that level, but they’re technically “listenable.” I don’t know how else to say it, these are some of the worst earphones I’ve ever heard, but for the price, they do work, so . . . you can’t see it, but I’m shrugging my shoulders with my palms up. This, basically: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
The Bluetooth speaker, shockingly (or maybe not if you’ve read this far), sounds even worse. The downward-facing design only lets the frequencies escape that have conspired to punish nearby ears. It’s a shouty mess that somehow manages to be both muffled and piercing. When I flip it over so that the buttons are underneath but the speaker is open to the sky, it sounds much better. Not good, mind you, but better. There’s some snap in the upper midrange, so it’s not as muffled. There’s a strong “cupped hands” effect that makes sense, since the speaker is literally inside a cup. On the bright side, the speaker is so quiet that it never rises to the level of annoying. It’s only marginally louder than a good pair of headphones sitting on your desk.
Conclusion
A million years ago, I sold Aiwa portable audio gear at Circuit City. Since no one had ever heard of the brand, and fewer still could pronounce it (like “Iowa” I guess?), we were told to say it was Sony’s budget brand. That was sort of true, in that Sony owned 54 percent of the company. Today it’s just a name used by Towada Audio to sell stuff like this.
And what is this? It’s hard to mock headphones and a BT speaker for under $12. The earbuds, compared to any that I’ve reviewed here at Solo, sound quite bad. Compared to silence, or even worse, the sound of your own thoughts, they’re amazing. The Bluetooth speaker is also pretty terrible. It works connected to the water bottle, and if you’re like a bunch of people I’ve encountered in National Parks, it can dangle off a pristine backpack and pollute the sounds of nature with the worst music anyone nearby has ever heard. At least it can’t play very loud.
Everything is expensive right now, and that’s likely going to get worse. I know Brent wanted to read one of my patented product skewerings, but I honestly just don’t have the heart for it (OK, maybe a little). For less than the price of lunch, I got workout headphones, a Bluetooth speaker, and a bottle that I can fill with whatever beverage might get me through these interesting times. For that, good on you, Aiwa.
. . . Geoffrey Morrison
Associated Equipment
- Smartphone: Google Pixel 9 Pro.
Aiwa Get Fit Sports Kit
Price: $11.44 (at time of purchase by the author), $29.99 (at time of publication)
Warranty: One year
Aiwa Co. Ltd.
1 Chome-54-5 Akabane, Kita City
Tokyo 115-0045
Japan
Website: www.aiwa.co
