The first thing to understand about Aiaiai’s TMA-2 HD Wireless ($350) is that this is a “modular” concept. The headphones arrive unassembled, but no soldering or electronics know-how is required to put them together: earcups slide onto headbands, and earpads snap onto earcups. That said, other than the ability to replace (or upgrade) parts down the road, it’s hard to see the value this build offers. Sonically, the headphones deliver strong audio performance with rich bass and solid balance. There’s support for AptX HD 24-bit streaming audio, but no extras like noise cancellation or an app for EQ adjustments. These omissions aren’t necessarily cons, but for the price, there are plenty of $300+ headphones that offer similar or better quality audio and a more luxurious build than the TMA-2 HD Wireless, often with more features.
Design
When you open the TMA-2 HD Wireless box, you’re greeted with multiple sealed, tear-open pouches, each labeled with what’s inside, including a headband, cable, the speaker units, and the earpads. The headband pouch also contains the other essentials: a USB-C charging cable and the manual.
Assembly takes very little time, and soon you have a stylish matte-rubber circumaural (over-ear) pair of headphones. The earpads snap onto the earcups with ease, the earcup/driver units slide onto the headband, and then on either end of the headband, a 3.5mm wire extends from the interior of the headband padding to connect to the corresponding earcup.
The fit and feel is lightweight and comfortable enough, though the earpads are more comfortable than the headband. They’re made of a material called Alcantara, an eco-friendly choice that provides a comfortable, plush feel, even over long listening sessions. A secure, consistent ear-to-ear fit is guaranteed by the design of the headband, which allows for precise adjustment with visual markers. A high-quality 3.5mm cable (with a quarter-inch adapter included) connects to either ear for wired, passive audio.
Unlike most Bluetooth headphones we test, the controls and microphone for the TMA-2 HD Wireless are located on the headband, not on the outer panels of the earcups. For the most part, these controls are sensibly laid out—there are three buttons, with the middle button handling playback, call management, voice assistants, and track navigation (depending on how many times you tap it or how long you press it for).
The top and bottom buttons are volume up and down controls, but power on is assigned to the middle while power off is assigned to the top—it’s an odd choice to divide these functions, but not really a deal breaker, though it does seem possible to accidentally power down when you mean to adjust volume. Below these buttons, there’s a status LED, and below this, the pinhole mic. The charging cable connects to the USB-C port, located on the interior of the headband’s left side—in order to connect the cable, you need to slide the earcup out of the way, which is a minor annoyance.
Internally, the headphones employ what Aiaiai calls a “high-end S05 speaker unit with Bio-Cellulose” in each earcup. These driver units sell individually on the Aiaiai site for $130, so they constitute $260 of the cost. According to the company, “The speaker unit contains a diaphragm that is precision-grown from NAC Audio bio-cellulose, making it stiffer, lighter, and stronger than regular PET speaker units, and allowing the sound-producing diaphragm to vibrate without the levels of distortion found in other speakers. Each of these qualities results in more accurate and detailed sound with the ability to retain clarity of sound at high volumes.”
Thus, the justification for the kit’s $350 price is essentially a combination of its drivers and its AptX HD compatibility—the headphones support AAC, AptX, AptX HD, and SBC Bluetooth codecs, and are compatible with Bluetooth 4.2.
Aiaiai estimates battery life to be roughly 16 hours, but your results will vary with your volume levels.
Performance
On tracks with intense sub-bass content, like The Knife’s “Silent Shout,” the headphones deliver robust low-frequency response. There’s never any hint of distortion, even at top volume levels, and at more reasonable listening levels, the bass depth is rich and full.
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Bill Callahan’s “Drover,” a track with far less deep bass in the mix, gives us a better sense of the TMA-2 HD’s general sound signature. The drums here can sound overly thunderous on bass-forward headphones, but through these drivers, the drums sound full and round without overtaking the mix or delving into unnatural-sounding territory. Callahan’s baritone vocals get the ideal mix of low-mid richness and high-mid treble edge, and the higher-register percussive hits and the acoustic strums receive plenty of bright presence. Generally speaking, the drivers offer a lovely mix of low-mid richness and high-frequency detail and clarity. There’s sub-bass here, too, but it is more subtle and dialed back.
On Jay-Z and Kanye West’s “No Church in the Wild,” the kick drum loop receives a solid amount of high-mid presence, allowing the loop to retain its punchiness in the mix. The sub-bass synth hits that punctuate the beat are more dialed back than we often hear on bass-forward headphones. The vocals on this track also receive a strong high-mid presence—crisp, clear, and without too much added sibilance. The overall sound signature is about clarity first, and it delivers an excellent balanced portrait of the entire frequency range. There could be more sub-bass here, for certain, but the lows and low-mids are well represented along with the highs, so things never sound muddy or thin.
Orchestral tracks, like the opening scene from John Adams’s “The Gospel According to the Other Mary,” have a bright, detailed delivery through the TMA-2 HD Wireless. The higher-register instrumentation has an ideal high-mid and high-frequency presence, while the lows are dutifully delivered—they serve more of a subtle anchoring role in the mixes like this, and the drivers do a good job of not exaggerating them beyond their natural role.
The mic offers solid intelligibility. Using the Voice Memos app on an iPhone 8, we could understand every word we recorded, though there was still some typical Bluetooth distortion fuzzing up the edges. The mic level is slightly less strong than some Bluetooth headphone mics we’ve tested, likely because its location is somewhat precarious—since it’s located at the end of the headband adjuster, the mic can be covered by the earcups if the headband is adjusted to a wide setting. Regardless, the signal is relatively clear and others should have no trouble understanding you on a good connection.
Conclusions
The very concept of a modular headphone system is interesting, and Aiaiai offers multiple components so you can more or less build your own, with various headbands, earpads, and earcups to choose from. But the TMA-2 HD Wireless headphones, which are billed as upgradable, already use the company’s top-priced headband, earcups, and earpads, so the concept of improving this model over time isn’t a reality until Aiaiai comes out with new components.
So for now this is as good as it gets, but for $350, it feels like something is missing. The $300 Master & Dynamic MH40 Wireless headphones, for instance, have AptX support (not AptX HD, to be fair), but deliver a strong audio experience from a more impressive build for $50 less (and we have seen the price even lower). Alternatively, for $50 more, the $400 Sennheiser Momentum 3 Wireless headphones deliver excellent audio and top-notch noise cancellation (and again, we’ve seen them selling for less). It’s a similar case for the terrific Sony WH-1000XM3. From an audio perspective, the TMA-2 HD Wireless headphones are competitive with these models, but they otherwise don’t stand out.
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