Poly’s New Voyager Free 60+ Earbuds Fit the Bill for Hybrid Work

Since the pandemic, I have been searching for a headset/earbud solution that allows me to take video calls without disturbing others, as I work from home office. The earbuds must provide professional-grade audio that picks up my voice clearly and delivers the same clarity from the other end. Enter the Poly Voyager Free 60 line of earbuds.

In between calls while I’m nose-deep in a Word document, I typically throw on some tunes to put me in the zone. However, my home’s acoustics are a little wonky. Noise from my speakers travels very clearly from my home office down the stairwell to the rest of the house.

I’ve experimented with a few different headset/earbud solutions. My first experiment to equip myself for remote working was a gaming headset that I rarely used. In all honestly, it did the trick for a few weeks during the initial lockdown phase of the pandemic. However, the gaming headset was huge and didn’t have the luxury of Bluetooth. I tried a few different other headsets from audio and collaboration manufacturers, which were significantly better. Despite all that, I wanted something that could transition conveniently from taking work calls at my desk, to quickly leaving the house to walk my dogs while listening to podcasts.

About the Poly Voyager Free 60 Series

Poly has an extensive portfolio of videoconferencing and collaboration devices for a variety of different scenarios, but much of the company’s new releases center around one idea: simplicity and flexibility. The Voyager Free 60 earbuds are no different.

The Voyager Free 60 series are wireless earbuds designed for work, but are equally suited to be taken on walks, bike rides, or the gym. (Poly doesn’t recommend hard workouts with these in your ears, but they seem to hold up just fine.) These earbuds are versatile enough to replace multiple sets of earbuds or headsets that hybrid or remote workers usually have for different scenarios.

The company’s newest earbuds come in three versions:

• Poly Voyager Free 60 with a standard charge chase, support for premium calls and music.
• Poly Voyager Free 60 UC with the same standard charge case but equipped with enterprise-grade audio and music and certifications for Microsoft Teams and Zoom.
• Poly Voyager Free 60+ UC with the same features as the Free 60 UC but with a touchscreen charge case.

Poly Voyager Free 60+ features

For our purposes here, we’ll focus on the Voyager Free 60+. Poly markets these as built for work, but designed for everyday life, and I’d say that is a very accurate assessment.

The Voyager Free 60+ earbuds feature a stem design with six microphones, as well as noise cancelling technologies that makes the user’s voice the focus of work calls. Specifically, they feature the company’s NoiseBlockAI and Acoustic Fence technology that blocks out unwanted noises and focuses only on the user’s voice.

The Voyager Free 60+ UC earbuds come with a dongle but can also be connected to another device via Bluetooth, so users can seamlessly transition from a work call from their desktop to music streaming from a mobile device.

The company claims up to five hours of talk time with ANC on, and the charge case provides another 10 hours of talk time. I’d say those claims ring true, as I rarely need to charge the charge case itself. However, it seems to charge quickly.

With the company’s Poly Lens app, users can customize their experience with a range of tools, with the ability to change settings such as wearing sensor, active call audio, auto-answer, auto-pause, noise cancellation and a range of other settings.

For control features on the earbuds themselves, the Voyager Free 60+ UC includes gesture controls for volume, ANC, mute and more. A physical button can pause music or start and answers calls.

However, the charge case itself has a touchscreen with even more functionality, such as call control, media playback control, battery status and other features.

If you’re like me and have a few dozen pairs of airline earbuds because you live in 2023 and don’t own any wired headphones to watch in-flight entertainment, the Voyager Free 60 earbuds have you covered! The earbuds come with an option to plug the charge case into a headphone jack that will stream audio to the earbuds.

Another great feature is transparency mode that allows you to hear your surroundings without having to remove an earbud. If you find talking with earbuds or headphones weird, then this feature can help you to hear your own voice. This really does make a difference. It can be configured to pick up any sounds in your environment or just voices.

Seamless Audio Connectivity

Essentially everything Poly says about these earbuds rings true, and they could compete with other earbuds on the market in terms of sound quality. However, what makes these stand out from others is just how simple and intuitive they are in work scenarios, especially with the charge case.

I’ve had some Bluetooth headsets and earbuds that routinely lose connection and can’t easily transition from my laptop to my mobile device, but the Poly Voyager Free 60+ UC earbuds do so seamlessly. This helps me leave the house to run a quick errand with them still in my ears, but also allows me to hop on a work call when I return.

Earbuds can be uncomfortable to wear for more than a few hours. The Voyager Free 60 earbuds have three conical-shaped earbud tip sizes and are comfortable enough to use all day, if you find the right size.

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