Amazon’s second-generation earbuds have noise-cancelling and hands-free Alexa.
3 min
I’ve worn earbuds more over this past year than any other. Between video calls and workouts at home, it felt like I was constantly putting some sort of implement in my ear.
Wireless earbuds have become essential—as has noise-cancelling technology to drown out the sounds of housemates. If you’re looking for a new pair, and are leery of dropping $399 on Apple’s shiny Pro ’pods, consider Amazon’s recent update to its Bluetooth buds.
The Echo Buds come in white or black. PHOTO: NICOLE NGUYEN/THE WALL STREET JOURNALThe second-generation Echo Buds have active noise cancellation and built-in, hands-free Alexa. They’re smaller and sound better than the previous model—and they’re cheaper too.
The price—$120, or $140 with a wireless charging case—is why these headphones are worth your attention. Noise-cancelling earbuds from companies like Apple, Samsung and Bose all cost over $200. For significantly less, Amazon’s set offers similar audio quality and sound-blocking cancellation, with some trade-offs.
Active noise-cancelling doesn’t only seal out sound; it uses microphones to listen to ambient noise, then generates opposing sound waves to eradicate it. (If it helps, think of lining peaks with troughs, and troughs with peaks.) Good noise cancelling is difficult to do, especially in small, marble-size earbuds.
The AirPods Pro are my gold standard. They can’t isolate sound like bulkier over-ear headsets, but they successfully reduce daily din to levels that allow me to concentrate. During indoor and outdoor testing, I was surprised how well the Echo Buds 2 active noise cancellation held up in comparison—and for $130 less.
Outside, the grumble of passing trucks and the howling wind were imperceptible. Inside, I could hear my husband on his video call, until I put on music. Then, his voice faded into the background.
Noise-cancelling has to start with a secure seal. A range of ear-tip sizes (S, M, L, and XL) plus three pairs of optional ear-support wings are included in the box. You can test the fit in the Alexa app. A chime plays and rates the quality of your seal. With the default medium tips installed, my fit was “good.” Adding wings bumped my grade to “great.” My ears did feel sore after wearing the buds all day. Downsizing to small tips eliminated the pain, but broke the seal.
To ensure a good fit, the earbuds come with different-size round ear tips and optional ear-support wings. PHOTO: NICOLE NGUYEN/THE WALL STREET JOURNALA snug fit also improves the audio experience. Modern pop such as Griff’s “Black Hole” and classics like The Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go” sound great in the Echo Buds. The bass is particularly punchy, and the treble is clean. Competitors I’ve tested do produce more balanced audio, but at a much higher price.
The Echo Buds’ feature set is generally on par with competitors’. I got an industry-standard 5 hours and 15 minutes of battery life, with noise cancelling on and music playing. When you’re on the phone, an adjustable “sidetone” allows you to hear your own voice. There are programmable tap controls: a single tap can pause media, while a double-tap answers a call.
In other respects, the earbuds don’t meet the mark in the same way pricier buds do. For one, the important “pass through” mode—which allows you to hear outside sounds clearly while wearing the headphones—produces a noticeable, unnatural hissing.
You can only use Alexa hands-free while the buds are connected to a phone with the Alexa app. And while the assistant was fine at recognizing my voice, and telling me the weather outside or the date, Alexa had some trouble with other requests: “Set a timer for one minute” consistently yielded a “Sorry, I’m having trouble” response. An Amazon spokesman said the Echo Buds team wasn’t aware of the bug or how to fix it.
I often recommend that people get earbuds made by the same maker of their devices. They’re often optimised for connection reliability and pairing. But at this price, the new Echo Buds are a tempting proposition.
And if past Amazon deals are any indication, they’ll probably be even cheaper when Prime Day rolls around.
Reprinted by permission of The Wall Street Journal, Copyright 2021 Dow Jones & Company. Inc. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. Original date of publication: May 23, 2021.
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Randy Boyagoda’s new novel, “Lords of Serendipity,” delivers a biting satire of cheating, politics and dysfunction across modern universities.
5 min
Administrative cowardice. Rampant cheating. The soaking and scamming of undergrads and grad students. Performative wokeism. Intensifying competition for international tuition dollars from an expansive China.
These are either the latest dire headlines about American higher ed or the myriad subplots of “Lords of Serendipity,” an ambitious new novel by Randy Boyagoda. Unlike most campus fiction, its scope extends well beyond the cloister of the liberal arts classroom to whammy the entire university system, from its financial model to its function within a globalized economy. Along the way, it skewers its lightning-rod targets with a precision too sharp to be considered entirely fictional.
That its author is not only well-versed in satire, having written four other novels in the genre, but is also a professor of English at the University of Toronto and an experienced college administrator, further blurs the lines between comic fiction and brutal fact. It’s the kind of no-holds-barred book only a consummate insider would know to write—but only one who is also conveniently outside the American university system could get away with writing.
“This is someone who’s got the inside dope on what can go on at universities, especially with international students, and what kind of con games are going on,” said Margaret Atwood, a friend and fellow Torontonian.
The novel, like Boyagoda himself, is often very funny—even as the dilemmas its characters face read as tragedy. Its cast includes the bickering members of a Sri Lankan hotel cleaner’s family, insecure American freshmen, dead-end third-tier college professors and their highflying Ivy League counterparts and dispirited university functionaries. An old-fashioned Dickensian tale, it sweeps across continents and campuses, from a classic liberal-arts college to a stand-in for Harvard University to an urban technical school to the dilapidated buildings of a state-run university in Sri Lanka.
“I’m a joyful person,” Boyagoda said in an interview, though he prefers to see his outlook on academia as “hopeful” rather than optimistic. He smiles and laughs frequently. He bikes everywhere. He derives energy from his students and from his four daughters, ages 14 to 20. They help him and his American wife, Anna, also an educator, care for Boyagoda’s father, an immigrant from Sri Lanka who has dementia and lives with the family.
The germ of the novel came to Boyagoda during the pandemic, when he was serving as a vice-dean. An urban legend was circulating about a statistics grad student selling passing grades to international students. The cheating scheme itself may well have been apocryphal, but it felt tantalizingly plausible.
“As a novelist, it stayed with me,” Boyagoda said. “Who would sell grades for a stats course? Why would someone buy grades? What’s motivating them? Why wouldn’t the university be doing something about it?” What he didn’t want to do, he explained, was write “another novel about a creative writing professor and his drama with students.”
In addition to writing novels—the first of which was a finalist for Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize; he’s written eight books in total—Boyagoda teaches literature full-time. For his students next semester, kids raised in a purportedly “post-literature era,” he’s assigning three 700-page novels, he noted mischievously, books by George Eliot, Ralph Ellison and Kiran Desai.
On RateMyProfessors, students remark on Boyagoda’s heavy assignments, tough grading and distaste for cellphones, but also hail his “comedy.” When alerted to these reviews, Boyagoda laughed. “Guilty as charged,” he said.
“Randy’s one of those people in academia who is very well educated but doesn’t have an ounce of superiority about him,” said John Irving, who frequently guest lectures in Boyagoda’s classroom. “It’s amazing to see how willing students are to talk in his classrooms, how little afraid they feel of being mocked or put down—he gets complete candor out of them.”
Negotiating competing interests seems to come naturally to him. Like many college campuses, after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the University of Toronto was embroiled in protests, encampments and discord; part of the school’s response was to convene a working group on civil discourse. Boyagoda was put in charge, serving for two years. It’s the kind of thankless task many professors would flee from, but Boyagoda relished the prospect and thinks the group, which is ongoing, made progress.
He has since pivoted to another formidable academic concern: the waning prestige of the humanities. In July, Boyagoda became the director of the Jackman Humanities Institute and special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science. This fall, he is starting a series of gatherings he calls the Dead Book Club. (Dead writers feature heavily among his favorites: St. Augustine, Dante, William Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow.)
“The goal is to encourage students to read for its own sake and have conversation for its own sake,” Boyagoda said. “The importance of the humanities will be revealed to those who participate.”
“Lords of Serendipity,” which publishes next week, reflects Boyagoda’s commitment to the pursuit of knowledge: “I’m supposed to say I learn more from my students than they do from me, but no,” Boyagoda said. “I enjoy sharing my excitement and joy about literature and ideas. There are these moments when you are teaching and you can see someone’s face change because they didn’t know something and then they did. That moment when you’re actually watch someone enlarge themselves is deeply satisfying.”
In literary circles, Boyagoda is often referred to as a Catholic novelist, a description he embraces. “A novelist willing to give shape and voice to contemporary religious experience is needed,” Boyagoda said. “I understand myself as a Catholic novelist, provided that I’m not only a Catholic novelist, I’m also a South Asian novelist and I’m a Canadian novelist. I don’t want to be captive to one label.”
His characters, he said, are subjected to what he calls “Graham Greene character situations.”
“They are trying to do good in a fallen world and realize the most they can do is less harm than someone else would do in that same role,” he explained. “They have to accept they are complicit in something that provides some good thing to others. It’s a very Graham Greene way of thinking about sacrifice.”
The campus green they inhabit is a febrile zone in which lofty ideals and cynicism regularly collide. It’s a place where a traditional holiday college celebration is now an occasion for political protest. Kids freely police one another inside and out of the classroom with social media their constant, ready weapon of choice. International students, knowing their family’s financial futures hinge on their degrees, operate in terror of failure and deportation.
Early readers of the book include Gary Shteyngart and Junot Diaz, both of whom have taught at universities and written comic novels. They each contacted Boyagoda midway through to say, in essence, “You nailed it.”
As biting as “Lords of Serendipity” can be, Boyagoda’s faith in higher education remains undaunted.
“It’s absurd that we live in societies that make the decision to take people between the ages of 18 and 22, when they are most physically capable of contributing to our nations and communities, and tell them, ‘Go away for four years, and read and learn and have conversations,’” he said. “I want students to be aware of what an incredible privilege that is.”
Corrections & Amplifications
Randy Boyagoda is a special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science at the University of Toronto. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said he is a special adviser to the dean of humanities. (Corrected on Sept. 2)
