JBL Endurance Dive Wireless Headphones Review

The JBL Endurance Dive look fairly similar to the JBL Endurance Sprint Wireless and JBL Endurance Peak True Wireless, but with a slightly shorter and thicker cable. These headphones have a sporty look thanks to their ear-hook and bright, flashy color designs. The buds are quite large as there’s a touch-sensitive surface for you to register commands on the right earbud. The design is fairly bulky, and they protrude quite a lot out of your ears.

The JBL Endurance Dive aren't the most comfortable in-ears we’ve tested, and since their bud design is identical to the JBL Endurance Sprint Wireless and JBL Endurance Peak True Wireless, they’ll feel the same. These headphones enter your ear canal deeply, which can create an air-tight seal. The earbuds have a “twist-to-lock” wear procedure that can be a bit finicky and doesn't always create the best fit in the ears. Their ear-hooks are fairly bulky but are comfortable enough to wear for a while without feeling the weight of the large buds. On the upside, since their cable is shorter and a bit less loose than the Sprint’s, it fits nicely on the back of your head, and you won’t feel it wiggling around during physical activity. They also come with a few tip options to help you find the best fit, but there are only three different sizes.

The JBL Endurance Dive have a touch-sensitive control scheme on their ear-hooks, which is a bit hard to use as it's very sensitive and it’s easy to register unwanted commands. On the upside, if you’re not wearing the headphones and the magnetic ear-hooks are snapped to the bud, it powers off the headphones, so it won’t register commands like it could on the JBL Endurance Sprint Wireless, which seemed to be something that frustrated users. The touch-sensitive surface is slightly more responsive and easier to use, but we had issues with their pairing mode.

You get common functionalities like play/pause, call management, and track skipping with tapping commands. You can also control your listening volume by swiping up or down. To switch to their internal storage, you need to tap and hold the right bud for three seconds, and the three LEDs next to the Bluetooth logo will start flashing. This is useful for swimmers since Bluetooth won’t work in the water or for working out without your phone.

Like most in-ear headphones, the JBL Endurance Dive don’t trap much heat inside your ears, which means they’ll be good sports headphones as they won’t make you sweat more than usual, thanks to airflow. You shouldn’t notice a big temperature difference when wearing them, especially if you use them underwater.

The JBL Endurance Dive have good portability. Even if they're a bit bulkier than many wireless in-ears, they easily fit inside pockets or a bag. They also rest around the neck if you don’t want to cramp the cable in pockets. They're easy to carry around and to bring to the gym.

The JBL Endurance Dive come with a small rubber pouch that resembles the Beats BeatsX Wireless' case. It protects the headphones from scratches or light physical damage from falls. The case doesn’t fully close, and it's a bit hard to fit the headphones, charging cable, and tip options inside it at the same time.

The JBL Endurance Dive are well-built headphones and feel more durable than the JBL Endurance Sprint Wireless, thanks to their shorter and thicker cable. The headphones are also rated IPX7 for water resistance and advertised for swimming. They have thick and rubberized ear-hooks that feel durable.

The JBL Endurance Dive have good stability and will be suitable for most sports, running, and for working out. Their ear-hook design holds the headphones well, and they shouldn’t fall from your ears, even with a tug on the cable. The earbuds also have a sleeve that helps them to securely fit inside the ear without moving during physical activity. Although the enhancer attachment that goes around the tip of the buds helps by adding more points of contact with your inner ear, if you don't get the twist-to-lock wearing procedure right, they can pop out of your ears.

• JBL Endurance Dive headphones
• 3 tip sizes
• Rubber carrying pouch
• Micro-USB to USB charging cable

The JBL Endurance Dive have great frequency response consistency. Assuming the user can achieve a proper fit and an air-tight seal using the assortment of tips that come with the headphones, they should get consistent bass and treble delivery every time they use the headphones. We only measured a small variation of about 6dB around 8kHz. Also, if the user fails to achieve a proper and air-tight seal, they could experience a different bass delivery.

The JBL Endurance Dive have great bass accuracy. Their LFE (low-frequency extension) is down to 10Hz, which is excellent, indicating a deep and extended bass. On top of it, low-bass, responsible for the thump and rumble common to bass-heavy music and sound effects, follows our target curve accurately. However, the response goes under our target curve in high-bass, making the bass a bit thin-sounding. It won’t sound too boomy, but this won't be too audible.

The JBL Endurance Dive have incredible mid-accuracy. The response throughout the range is well-balanced and even, but it's slightly underemphasized by about 2dB. This thins out the vocals and lead instruments a little bit and nudges them towards the back of the mix.

The JBL Endurance Dive have excellent treble accuracy. The response before 10kHz is virtually flawless and follows our target curve accurately, resulting in detailed vocals, leads, and sibilants (S and T sounds). There’s a small dip in the low-treble, but it shouldn’t be too audible.

The JBL Endurance Dive have an excellent imaging performance. The weighted group delay is at 0.21, which is very good. The GD graph also shows that the group delay response never crosses the audibility threshold, suggesting a tight bass and a transparent treble reproduction. Also, the L/R drivers of our test unit were well-matched in amplitude, frequency, and phase response, which is important for the accurate placement and localization of objects (voices, instruments, video game effects) in the stereo image. However, note that these results are only valid for our unit, and yours may perform differently.

The JBL Endurance Dive have a bad passive soundstage. Since creating a large and speaker-like soundstage is partially dependent on having a speaker-like pinna activation, and in-ear headphones bypass the pinna and don't interact with it, their soundstage will be perceived as small and located inside the listener's head. Their closed-back design also means that their soundstage won't feel and open as that of many open-back earbuds, such as the Apple AirPods (2nd generation) Truly Wireless.

The JBL Endurance Dive have an impressive noise isolation performance. Although these headphones don't have active noise cancellation (ANC), their in-ear design provides good passive isolation. In the bass range, where the rumble of airplane and bus engines sits, they provide more than 11dB of isolation, which is pretty good for passive isolation. In the mid-range, important for blocking out speech, they isolate by about 22dB, which is very good. In the treble range, occupied by sharp sounds like S and Ts and A/C noise, they achieve 36dB of isolation, which is also very good.

Their leakage performance is superb. The JBL Endurance Dive don’t leak in the bass or mid ranges, resulting in very thin-sounding leakage. A significant portion of their leakage is concentrated over a very thin band around 5-6kHz. The overall level of the leakage is not very loud either. With the music at 100dB SPL, the leakage at one foot away averages at 26dB SPL and peaks at 48dB SPL, which is about the same as the noise floor of an average office.

The recording quality of the integrated microphone is adequate. The LFE (low-frequency extension) of 220Hz means speech recorded/transmitted with this mic sounds noticeably thin. The HFE (high-frequency extension) of 3.2kHz results in a speech that lacks detail and is noticeably muffled.

The integrated microphone has a sub-par noise handling performance. In our SpNR test, it achieved a speech-to-noise ratio of 10dB, indicating that it's best-suited for quiet environments as it may struggle to fully separate speech from background noise in moderately loud situations like a busy street.

The JBL Endurance Dive have a passable battery performance. They provide about seven hours of continuous playback off of a single charge, which is enough for a few workouts but won’t be ideal for long listening sessions or to use during a full workday. They also take two hours to charge fully, which some may find to be a bit long for seven hours of playback time. However, battery performance can vary with real-life usage, so your experience may vary. On the upside, they have an auto-off feature to save power when being idle, but it's set to five minutes, which is very short and a bit frustrating at times, especially since you can't change it. Also, they automatically turn off if you take the right earbud out, and the ear-hook magnetically snaps with the earbud.

The JBL Endurance Dive don’t have a companion app for customization options.

The JBL Endurance Dive are Bluetooth-compatible. Unfortunately, they can only be connected to a single device at a time and don’t support NFC for quicker and easier pairing, which would have been nice since we had a hard time pairing them to new devices.

They have fairly high latency with PCs and iOS devices. It's a little lower with Android phones, but overall they aren't ideal for watching videos or gaming. However, some apps and devices seem to compensate differently for latency, meaning that you may have a different experience.

You can't use these Bluetooth headphones with a wired connection.

The JBL Endurance Dive don’t have a dock.