The Best Headset for Keeping Track of Your Friends on the Slopes
Smith’s Aleck 006 pair of headphones is fine for music but better for staying in touch.
Photographer: Janelle Jones for Bloomberg Businessweek
Anyone who’s organized a group ski trip knows that bombing down the mountain is the easy part. Keeping track of everyone—coordinating après-ski or meeting at the right lift—is the real double-black challenge. Breaking out your phone every time leads to dead batteries and numb fingers, earbuds under a helmet are uncomfortable—and have you ever tried to find an AirPod that fell in the snow? The $130 Smith x Aleck 006, on the other hand, is a wireless audio system that operates through your phone, slipping into your helmet’s ear pads to enable walkie-talkie style communications between you and your team. Its Aleck Go! app has a friend finder feature as well, which pinpoints everyone in your party on a map.
THE COMPETITION
• If your adventures take you beyond the range of cellphone towers, you’ll need to go with old-school walkie-talkies. The $190 BC Link two-way radio 2.0 uses the FRS frequency band, though it’s capped at 2 watts and thus has a relatively low range.