Simple Summary:
Before we begin a more in-depth explanation of these earbuds, we understand that most people do not want to get too deep in audiophile acronym bingo land. As such we have included a rather brief synopsis that covers the key points.
The Blast Plug 81’s offer a ton of bass. Unfortunately, and is very common in this price range, it sacrifices precision in order to offer mass quantity. They can and will shake your brain if you let them. The highs are the (pardon the pun) high point of these earbuds and while the treble is front and center they are rather decent in their clarity. The mids unfortunately are easily overwhelmed by the fairly inaccurate bass and forward highs. A lot of people like this combination and it is pretty much typical ‘mainstream’ profile. If you like pop music, EDM, or other comparatively simplistic music profiles the BP81’s will be a good investment. The same holds true for spoken word music and audiobooks. For most Jazz, classical, Motown’s “wall of sound” and other music genres that have layer upon layer of instruments blended together they will not be as impressive. You will notice the loss in clarity compared to similarly priced wired buds. The easiest way to think of this loss in clarity is to say that it is like an audiophile listening to a high bitrate MP3 version of their favorite songs instead of a loss-less (e.g. FLAC) audio track. Still enjoyable, but lacking in nuance.
InDepth Look
The easiest way to explain the Silicon Power Blast Plug’s abilities is to start with their sound profile. For those of us who lived through the ‘disco era’ the BP81’s has a very common ‘disco smile’ sound profile. For those who do not know what this means… it means a ‘happy V’ or ‘smiley face curve’ setup on an equalizer with both the highs and lows pushed to the foreground and the mids being almost overpowered by the highs and lows.
As such for those who prefer ‘neutral’ or ‘monitor’ or ‘studio grade’ devices, this… tweaking of the sound engineers’ profile will be a tad annoying. They are overly warm in their reproduction and if you are listening to music that prioritizes mid-frequency tones it can be fatiguing to listen to. We did find ourselves increasing the volume to try and hear the mids that were being drowned out. This is a shame as the mid tones are rather decent. Not perfect, but easily considered above average for even wired headphones in the sub-forty dollar market.
In either case, the typical music listener prefers a warm sound signature – and why many high priced ‘audiophile grade’ speakers/headphones/IEMs/etc have a warmth to their sound reproduction. So do not write the BP81’s off for giving the market what it demands. Also noteworthy is it is fairly easy to tone down this warmth in by simply using an Equalizer and inverting the V. By bringing the mids forward and recessing the highs and lows you can get a fair semblance of neutrality. Not perfect, but pretty decent.
If you do not do this the mids are so recessed that women’s vocals do loose a bit of their punch. For pop and the like the differences are not going to be noticeable… as most vocals are auto-tuned to death these days. However, if your tastes run more towards artist such as (previously known as) Heather Alexander and their “War Trilogy”, Evanescence, or most of the ‘goth’ and ‘emo’ music genres a lot of the subtly and emotional impact will be lost. Once again, if you do move the mids forward this issue is somewhat alleviated and the emotional / visceral impact of these types of genres is greatly improved. Improved enough we would consider the BP81s only slightly below average in mid frequency response, but you will have to modify their sonic profile to get them to be ‘good enough’.
Moving on, high frequency / treble response and surprising clarity are actually the main selling feature of this BP81s. These headphones easily maxed out our hearing abilities and can easily reproduce at least up to the 19KHz range. It most likely can hit 20KHz… but our ears can no longer ‘hear’ above 19KHz due to decades of shooting. In either case, while we would be hesitant to use terms such as ‘bright’ or ‘sparkly’, the BP81’s reproduction abilities with only moderate roll off did surprise us.
With high quality encodings of songs such as Eric Clapton’s Tears in Heaven (unplugged version), Dave Brubeck Quartet’s “Take Five”, or even The Verve’s “Bitter Sweet Symphony” you can pick up minute details that the typical sub-$40 set of headphones usually do not reproduce. Minor things like the raspiness from years of abuse in Lemmy’s vocal cords during his unplugged take on “I Ain’t No Nice Guy”; Clapton’s finger rubbing across the guitar strings, the raspy brush of the individual hairs in a drum brush skidding across the top of the drumhead. All of these are reproduced unexpectedly well. Certainly, more muddled than say FiiO’s F9 or F9 Pro’s… but those IEMs cost two to three times as much as the BP81s and are wired not wireless based.
Some of this rather decent clarity, with only moderate roll off comes from the fact that the BP81’s actually have good noise reduction abilities. You can still vaguely hear your surroundings but they do offer (estimated) double-digit passive Noise Reduction. This good blocking of ambient sounds/noise in conjunction with a surprisingly large sound stage makes them very enjoyable for certain types of music such as simpler Jazz songs. Unfortunately, their polyrythmic handling abilities are only moderate and songs such as “BadBadNotGood” by Speaking Gently is a little sloppy. As such free-form Jazz with multiple collaborators all riffing over each other does loose a good bit of its ‘wow’ factor – and you certainly will not ‘feel’ like you are in a smoky bar listening to them live.
The same holds true of Classical music, especially opera’s like Wagner. Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen does loose a good bit of its punch. On the other hand, some of Mozart’s collected works was pretty decent. It really will come down to how many instruments are playing at once. The BP81 (like pretty much every inexpensive headphones ever made) abilities’ fall off as the number of simultaneous instruments playing increases.
The Blast Plug BP81’s produces a veritable ton of bass. Arguably too much bass. Enough bass that they rumble and introduce frequency artifacts from their plastic chassis sympathetically vibrating. So much bass that one can easily call them ‘bloomy’. Though not as imprecise as ‘SkullCandy’ earbuds, this issue is a shame as we prefer clarity over mass quantity. As such if you like bass heavy Funk, or musical genres where the bass guitar plays a central roll you will not love the BP81’s sound reproduction abilities – or at least their default sound reproduction abilities. If you do EQ the bass down to a more reasonable level the response does become much more nuanced. This is because they can reproduce frequencies all the way down to 20Hz. Not perfectly, but pretty decent for bass heavy earbuds.
So, in their default configuration things such as EDM, OG gangster rap, some bass heavy metal, death, thrash, baby/japan metal all will help your rock out while you get your Gym time in. US/K/J/etc Pop music with its rather limited sound profile also work well. With tweaking you can add in more musical genres to the ‘good’ category – such as Brazilian funk. In between these extremes is genre’s like country music which can be very decent to good (especially if you favor more pop type country), but probably not bluegrass. The same is true of ‘Reggae’ genres. Fishbone and other ska type-bands will be decent, but Dance-Hall style reggae will sound better (e.g. YellowMan’s zungguzungguguzungguzeng was certainly enjoyable). It really will depend on how your musical tastes run.
Overall we consider the Silicon Power Blast Plug BP81’s to be surprisingly good for this price range. So good we did forget these were BlueTooth based and not wired. This is a first for us and just underscores how big a game changer BT 5 is… and how good a value the BP81s actually are. You really will have to hunt down ‘best of the best’ in wired ‘value’ headphones to get noticeably better results. That certainly is not too shabby to say the least.
