Feb 18, 2025 07:07 AM By  Dylan Crete

We weren’t originally planning to get the M3 at launch. but the Pro 3 and Beam 3 have been on our list for quite some time now, we’ve just been limited in the headphones we can purchases since our testing resources were a little low for headphones. At this point, it isn’t clear that we’ll get any of them any time soon unfortunately!

Ok, no worries. Thanks for the update!

Hey guys, great work as usual. Any plans on getting the JBL Tour One M2, upcoming Tour One M3, Tour Pro 3 and Live Beam 3? This will make this article more accurate since you will have more of JBL’s latest offerings in the headphone and earphone lineup. Thanks!

Feb 12, 2025 02:25 PM By  Jasper Lastoria

Hey! Thanks for your question. Honestly, it’s a tough call between these earbuds. The ‘best’ pick is usually the one we think everyone will like the best, but if it’s on the list, we like them. That said, at this tier of ANC buds, it’s more about preferences than necessarily pure performance. People tend to prefer touch controls (as on the Sony) over buttons on the Jabra, for example, but that doesn’t mean the Jabra are worse. Also, Jabra announced they no longer plan to continue producing true wireless earbuds, while Sony are still making earbuds and updating the apps and firmware. We don’t expect this discontinuation will impact the performance of the Jabras, but in the interest of future-proofing people’s experience, it’s easier to place the Sony at the top. Hope that helps!

Got it, thanks!

Hey guys! As always, love the work that you do. Curious as to why the Sony WF-1000XM5 is considered the best wireless earbud when your own comparison against it and the Jabra Elite 8 Active 2nd Gen is as follows…

“The Jabra Elite 8 Active Gen 2 True Wireless are a better choice for most use cases than the Sony WF-1000XM5 Truly Wireless. Both buds offer similar levels of comfort and stability, though the Jabra are better built with an IP68 rating against dust and water damage. The Jabra headphones have a more balanced default sound profile and even have a ‘smart case’ that allows you to connect devices via a wired USB-C or aux connection. While the Sony headphones are well-known for their excellent noise isolation performance and passively isolating tips, the Jabra buds offer even more attenuation, and their silicone tips also provide a solid seal. The Jabra have a better-quality mic with better noise handling. Given the Jabra retail for less, they seem like the natural choice for most users unless you value the Sony’s LDAC compatibility or more bass-heavy sound.”

Shouldn’t the Jabra’s be the best on this list?

Feb 05, 2025 01:08 PM By  Dylan Crete

Hey folks! Just wanted to jump in here and say while we can’t make any guarantees. We expect to buy them once we start buying more headphones for testing again! So, sometime in the near-ish future!

Awesome!!

Aug 09, 2024 01:27 PM By  Stephen Eldon Kerr

Hey Protomize,   We agree that these products perform similarly. The headphones team frequently debates the relative merits of the Jabra Elite 10 and the Sony WF-1000XM5 Truly Wireless, for the very reasons you’ve mentioned. It’s worth noting that some of the differences you highlighted, such as the Neutral Sound scores, are very small. Moreover, different headphones can reach similar scores in different ways, so if a particular use case is important to you, it’s worth digging into the relevant test results. Regardless, in this case, both of these headphones are main picks. The Sony come out on top in part because of their superior battery life, which we tested at almost 9 hours, compared to the Jabra’s 7.5. That could be the difference between getting through your workday without charging or not. Many of our users are also audiophiles for whom high-resolution audio is important. The Sony’s support of LDAC means those users would be better served by the Sony WF-1000XM5 Truly Wireless than the Jabra. The Jabra are also a bit cheaper than the Sony, which is why they’re our upper mid-range pick. That said, we recognize your position has a lot of merit, and are excited to review the Jabra Elite 10 (Gen 2) to see how they stack up. Please let us know if you have any further questions!

Thanks for the detailed response! Keep up the great work!

Hey guys! Curious as to why the Jabra Elite 10 aren’t the best earbuds when they have a higher neutral score than the WF-1000XM5, better mics for calls, better overall ANC and streaming service agnostic spatial audio unlike the WF-1000XM5? They also are more comfortable to more people since they don’t have foam ear tips like WF-1000XM5 that need to go deep into the ear canal for optimum seal. They also have a better control scheme which also allows you to mute the mic of the earphones while on a call which the WF-1000XM5 does not allow. Build quality is also superior on the Jabra’s over the Sony’s. The codec differences aren’t that important since 256kbps AAC is virtually transparent to the human ear (which is supported on iPhone and Android) and most, if not all video streaming services compensate for any latency. If you are a hardcore gamer on a mobile device, that would be when Aptx low latency would be of use which neither the WF-1000XM5 or the Jabra’s support.

Aug 05, 2024 09:30 AM By  Dagobiet Morales Alfaro

Hi Protomize, Thanks for the heads up, we will look into the firmware update changes and update the review. Cheers, Dagobiet

My pleasure!

Hey guys, please update the statements that the Bose QC Ultra earbuds do not support multipoint Bluetooth. They do now with the most recent firmware update 4.0.20. Thanks!

Hey guys, please update the statements that the Bose QC Ultra earbuds do not support multipoint Bluetooth. They do now with the most recent firmware update 4.0.20. Thanks!

Hey guys! Looks like an editing error was made and the Apple AirPods (2nd generation) Truly Wireless was listed as the best noise cancelling earbuds for iPhone when it should be the Pro model 2nd generation..

Jul 25, 2024 04:24 PM By  Jasper Lastoria

Hey Protomize, It’s a tight race between the Samsung Galaxy Buds FE and the Nothing Ear Truly Wireless. We’ll likely add the Nothing Ear Truly Wireless as an alternative choice in the article because they’re great sounding earbuds with a lot of customizable features (parametric EQ and codec selection), but their performance-to-price ratio is less appealing than the Galaxy Buds FE. The Galaxy Buds FE feel very comfortable and sound great out of the box, but you get fewer tools to customize their sound profile, which is fine because they’re already rather neutral sounding. Also, pinch controls on the Nothing are pretty divisive! I don’t think you can go wrong with either pair of earbuds though. Thanks for asking this question! Sorry for the delayed reply; it sparked a fun back-and-forth discussion in the workplace.

Thanks for the response!

Hey guys!

In this review it was mentioned that these do not have a power saving feature. They in fact do after a non specified amount of time turn off when not in use to save power.

Hey guys!

Nothing Ear got a firmware update to 1.0.1.52 stating improved connectivity, ANC in windy environments and voice clarity during calls. Please test and confirm.

Thanks!

Hey guys! Will the Nothing Ear replace the Galaxy Buds FE as the best bluetooth earbuds for sound quality?

Hey guys! I am getting reports that firmware version 5.6.3 seems to significantly improve the ANC performance. Can you guys please re-test the Momentum True Wireless 4 with the new firmware version and see if there are quantifiable improvements in the ANC? Thanks!

Jun 21, 2024 12:54 PM By jbpro

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Vanessa, I think is interesting to compare with the big boys like airpods max, sony xm5, bowers & wilkins px7, beoplay hx, bose ultra confort and anothers cheaper like beats studio pro and souncore q45 Also as an apple user how it works with the apple ecosystem, some things like multidevice, standby, conecting first time to a new iphone, etc Also spatial audio and dolby atmos works with apple music on ios or not? Thanks

I tried the Sonos Ace with my existing Apple ecosystem and it worked well. You won’t get the iCloud based automatic device switching that AirPods have but the Ace can simultaneously connect to 2 devices and any more paired devices that tries to connect to it will just replace the 2nd device that is connected. Connecting to an iPhone for the first time is simple. You just put the Ace into pairing mode by holding the power button for about 5 seconds and select it in the Bluetooth settings of your iPhone. After that, the Ace when powered on will auto connect to that iPhone when it is in range.

Dolby Atmos from Apple Music can work on any connected speaker or headphone since the decoding is done on the device. You will have to activate head tracking in the Sonos app to get the Ace to track your head movements to further enhance the effect.

Jun 20, 2024 06:26 PM By  Dagobiet Morales Alfaro

Hi Protomize, When we do microphone testing, we do not enable Noise Gate settings in the app. That said, we will run additional recordings to show the performance of “JustMyVoice.” Cheers, Dagobiet

Thanks!

Wow, those ANC results are fantastic! Similar to what I heard when I tried them. Stood toe to toe with my Bose QC Ultra Headphones. Just wish it had more upper treble presence in its tonal balance. The EQ is very barebones and helps a bit tho.

Thanks for the review! I have one question… Did you guys enable “JustMyVoice” in the app before testing the microphone pickup quality of the AZ80’s?

Aug 30, 2023 02:09 PM By  Vanessa McCuaig

Hello again! Sorry for the delay! You’re absolutely right. It was a mistake and we’ve updated our review with the correct value of 2.0 charges. Thanks again for bringing this to our attention. We really appreciate your feedback! :)

Glad to help!

Aug 25, 2023 03:19 PM By  Vanessa McCuaig

Hi there, Thanks for letting us know! We’ll look into this and get back to you. Have a good weekend! :)

Thanks and you too!

Sony WH-1000XM5

Apr 21, 2023 12:04 PM By  Dagobiet Morales Alfaro

Hi Protomize, Sorry to get back to you a bit late on this. We have just concluded our sanity retest for the Airpods Pro 2nd Gen. We performed several passes and found no changes in FR or in ANC with firmware 5E133. Cheers 🙂, Dagobiet

Thanks for the update!

Apr 19, 2023 04:55 PM By  Vanessa McCuaig

Hello again Protomize and LightOfVoid! I wanted to reach back out to you sooner, but I have an update that may be of interest to you. First of all, a thank you is order; we’re able to do what we do because of you. Your feedback and comments allow us to see flaws in our methodology. The second thing I’d like to note is that you’re both mentioned in our Improving Headphone Testing article! Our team has been taking in comments such as yours and using them to pinpoint how and where we can improve our testing. If you have the chance, we’d love to hear your thoughts on it. 🙂

Awesome article! The world of audio is such a complex field. I personally think more and more products are going to come out with some sort of user driven self EQ system such as the one in Nura, Apple and now Bose. We all hear differently which fundamentally makes sound quality such a touchy and subjective thing. But measurements still hold importance as it provides a consistent and objective analysis which an informed customer can use to help in their buying decision. Keep it up guys!

Apr 18, 2023 12:12 PM By  Dylan Crete

Hello again! If you’re able to send over some of the reports, we’d love to look into them. I’ll also make sure to pass this along to our testers for additional consideration as well. While I can’t make any guarantees, we’ll keep an eye out for other reports and consider upping the priority for the retest!

Here’s a video with measurements and sound examples. https://youtu.be/p8nvDNdjaO8

Nov 28, 2022 03:07 PM By  Dagobiet Morales Alfaro

It’s a very good point that you bring up. When looking at the Airpods Pro, their tip design allows them to enter the ear canal. However, compare to other in-headphones they don’t enter the ear canal as much. Currently, we want to make sure that it is clear and concise at what point do we consider the difference is between in-ears and earbuds: how far do the tips enter the ear canal, and at which point would the buds be classified as in-ears? At the moment, the “earbuds/in-ear” question only seems to affect a small amount of headphones like the Airpods Pro’s and Bose headphones like the QC 20 and Soundsport Wireless.

Thanks for the clarification.

It’s the custom tune tech which is only in the QC Buds II.

Nov 24, 2022 10:26 AM By chairman_mao

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Whoa RTings people, the latest design change is the worst yet. You are literally making it harder for people to find your content. Why are you doing this? Product reviews should not take more than one click from the homepage to get to, but now they’re buried in menus. This is the first time I’ve begun to question the utility of this site. EDIT: Ok I see reviews are in the top nav menu now, but I think the latest reviews should be more prominently displayed on the homepage. It would be interesting to see the traffic performance analytics after making this change.

Agreed. Not digging the new changes.

Nov 22, 2022 01:47 PM By  Dagobiet Morales Alfaro

Hi Protomize 🙂 , sorry for getting back to you so late. We are finalizing our review for the final publication. We did look into the FR changes at different listening volumes and did notice that when paired to iOS devices the Headphones FR will increase the Bass and Treble at lower volumes and decrease them at higher volumes. This is not the case when paired to a PC or Android devices since it’s the H2 chip that is only compatible with iOS devices. This change is to mitigate the effects of equal-loudness contours (and more specifically, the Fletcher-Munson curve). Here is a screenshot of the results with ANC On, Link

Thank you for update and measurements!

Nov 22, 2022 10:59 AM By  Dagobiet Morales Alfaro

Hi there Protomize, We are happy to hear that you enjoy our work. Since we do not consider the Bose QuietComfort Earbuds II in-ears headphones due to their “tips” shape, we did not apply the in-ears target curve to them. Their tip design, which is oval-coned shaped, does a good job at sealing the ear canal but they do not go into the ear-canal itself. Link Our “earbuds” target curve does not have the +5dB boost like our “In-ears” target curve has and instead it matches that of the on-ears and over-ear target curve. For more information about our Target Curve you can always read our article here, Link. We have opened up a TB suggestion regarding what we qualify as in-ear vs earbuds, since it could impact several other headphones we have tested and this is something we will look into in future TB updates. If you have any concerns or more questions please let us know 🙂

Interesting… I feel like the AirPods Pro fit similarly and should have the on ear or headphone target curve applied to them, no?

Nov 17, 2022 04:10 PM By Elieser

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do own them? do you recommend them?

I’ve had the QC35II but not the gaming variant. I thought the regular QC35II were stellar.

Sep 06, 2022 12:12 PM By  Dylan Crete

Thanks for letting us know, I just added this to our retest queue. Once we’re able to get to it, we’ll update our review with our results!

Hi Dylan, just checking on an ETA for the update. Thanks!

Sep 07, 2022 09:52 AM By  Dylan Crete

An update for this was posted in our review back in mid-July. This is what we said: We’ve retested these headphones using firmware update 4.0.8, which added a High-End Fine Tuning feature. This feature improves the sound quality and has changed the scoring of all sound tests except for ‘Noise Isolation’ and ‘Leakage’. While testing, we also discovered an impulse issue with our unit and ordered a new unit to confirm our results. However, the new unit performs similarly to our previous unit. Hope this clears things up!

Thank you for the update guys! Can’t wait to see your Momentum 4 Wireless review.

Good point. The Sennheiser Momentum TW3 has a similar adaptive ANC as well and when I turn on the vacuum while in my quiet home, it takes about 2-3 seconds for the ANC to kick in and silence it.

Almost half a year now, any update? Thanks.

Mar 10, 2022 04:39 PM By  Dylan Crete

We just had a look on our end and we can confirm that the volume notches does seem to move in large increments and there’s no way to make the volume go in ‘smaller’ notches. With the NC700, the notches seemed smaller, and it felt easier to reach the desired volume level in comparison (so our experience varied slightly with yours on that front). As for the songs being different volumes, we’ve experience that with other headphones, but it was more of ‘source’ issue (the song itself) than issues with the headphones. All that being said, we’ll update our review to reflect this information, so thanks for sharing. As for the distortion at 80% of the volume, we had another look and measured 90.4dB at 80% volume, which seems to be in line with the information we already included in the review (we reported 90db and 100db during testing). Hope this helps! :)

Thank you!

Dec 02, 2021 01:20 PM By  Shea Angus

UPDATE We confirmed these changes and updated the review with the details! Thanks again for the heads up!

You’re welcome!

Dec 02, 2021 11:08 AM By  Dylan Crete

We’re just wrapping up our retests so we’ll be updating the review in the next few days! :)

Great!

Nov 19, 2021 02:00 PM By  Dylan Crete

Hey there, Thanks for bringing this to our attention. We’ve added these to our retest queue and we’ll do our best to look into this ASAP. Once we do, we’ll update the review with our results! :)

Great!

Sep 20, 2021 03:35 PM By  Dylan Crete

We’re unsure at the moment as we haven’t gotten our new unit yet, but yes there are some concerns that our unit could have been defective. We’ll be sure to keep everyone posted once we do though! :)

I just noticed under the H512a-H review it says this: Updated Sep 17, 2021: Updated sound and latency test results and texts after testing a new unit.

Are you going to update more portions of the review?

Thanks!

Ok, cool! So the results you guys have for the M512a-H6 are of a potentially defective unit?

Feb 16, 2021 03:11 PM By  Shea Angus

Hey! We mention this in our Controls box now :) Thanks!

Awesome!

It’s because the Bose has better sound stage.

I believe the posted frequency response graph is with ANC on.

My pleasure!

Aug 14, 2019 10:38 AM By  Ian McPhail

We know of two occasions when it’s possible for the frequency response of a speaker to change with music compared to a sweep: The first is if music playback is very loud and the music is full range. This puts the headphones under more load than a sweep does, which causes compression and pumping artifacts. This is a limitation of measuring harmonic distortion, since a single sweep doesn’t put the headphones under as much load as a full-spectrum, bass-heavy piece of music. The second is with headphones that do real-time audio calibration, like the Beats Studio3 Wireless. To test headphones like these, we use pink noise to cover the full sound spectrum since a sine sweep doesn’t capture a frequency response that is representative of their performance.

Got it, thank you!

Aug 12, 2019 09:39 AM By  Jake Thauvette

Thank you for your comment. You’re right; we don’t test the headphones with music, but rather with sweeps covering every frequency. As of right now, we don’t have a test that can give us the kind of results you’re asking for, but we are currently working on it and it’s on our list of priorities for a future testbench update.

Is it possible that when music is played, the frequency response of a speaker can change from what was measured with a sine wave sweep?

Jul 26, 2019 03:41 PM By  Ian McPhail

Sure, we’ll take a look and post the compensated graphs early next week.

Hey Ian, wouldn’t this make the QC35II and NC 700 rate lower in sound overall since the compensated frequency response at max volume is what you guys rate the sound score at? Most people are not listening to these headphones at max volume, but most likely at medium volume in which the bass emphasis is higher than you guys have posted as the compensated frequency response for these headphones.