I thought I would write a review for some stuff I own/use - long term reviews feel much more valuable for me, so maybe this will help inform others in the future.
Purchased these from JB Hi-fi on August 2024 - they were on sale for $300AUD ($400 RRP). Daddy got a nice tax-return and had money to burn, baby! At the time I was looking at a replacement for some cheap bluetooth Jabra headphones I had.
Things I needed:
Something a bit more high-quality and robust - no cheap plastic.
Noise-cancelation - my kids are rowdy after school when I WFH and I needed a way to drown them out a bit better.
Wouldn't make my head/ears ache if I wore them all day - coding + commute mean that some days they will get heavy use.
and most importantly; to have an option to connect via headphone jack.
The last part is vitally important for me, because not only is it inconvenient when batteries go flat, in my experience the batteries in these devices in general will only last a few years. It would be nice to eke out longer life from something you sink a lot of money into.
Aside: I was an owner of Gen 1 airpods, and while they were AMAZING for a time, the batteries couldn't hold a charge after 2 years. $250 kinda useless after two years sucked and I learnt my lesson; it's an enormous waste of money and landfill to just keep buying replacements. So I wanted something that would last and have fallback options. A cynical person might say that Apple designed it that way, but I feel like the tiny batteries in ear-buds simply wear out quicker. Bigger batteries (that need charging less frequently) and headphone jacks seemed like the answer.
The good...
I'm not a serious audiophile so take this with a grain of salt, but music and podcasts sound pretty good coming out of them. They're good enough that I could tell when playing lower bitrate audio (which I find you can't normally notice on cheap stuff).
The active noice-cancelling features seem ... alright. If you are sitting stationary at a desk they will knock out most white noise. Note: ANC does not work so good if you have glasses on, since most ANC requires a nice seal blocking out stuff, and your glasses stems will leave a gap on these rather large ear-pads.
They're comfortable! Not much more to add since this will be pretty subjective, but I never got headaches from my skull or ears being squished. They have held up over a year of being thrown into a backpack, and the ear pads haven't melted from touching oily skin - not made of cheap stuff thankfully.
They also have a neat feature of pausing whatever you're listening too when not on your ears (you can see a little light sensor inside the ear pad).
In general it does the "headphone" part really really well.
The bad...
If you are moving or jostling around (eg. Walking, jogging, getting shaken about on bus), that shaking seems to effect either the ANC or the bluetooth, and the sound quality drops dramatically. Just something about the resonance of the old bus I have to catch home leaves songs sounding like garbled mess. There's probably a scientific/technical answer that I haven't discovered, but I never really had this with other headphones before.
As opposed to buttons for volume/pause, these have a touch sensitive area on the outside of the right ear. I imagine there's some tradeoff for circuitry space, or cutting down on ingress or something, but this was a very poor design decision. You will knock this surface constantly when putting them on or off, or adjusting your glasses, or scratching your neck. Depending on a wayward touch, you could crank the volume, skip songs, turn ANC off/on, etc etc. It sucks. In theory you can turn it off in the companion app, but it always resets back to on everytime the headphones are powered down.
And holy shit their app is ROUGH. I'm very very tired of functionality being tied to a crappy apps, not everything needs an app guys. Please just engineer A Button to do The Thing, surely. Be warned: you will be forced to use this app to control EQ and ANC levels and what devices they are connected to here, which brings me to my next point...
These are sold as being able to be actively connected to two devices at the same time, which seems like a plus. If you only own two things, then that is great! Hit pause on your phone and start watching something on your laptop and its smooth. But if you need to connect to 3-4 things like me, then welcome to hell. When powered on, it can only connect to two seemingly randomly.
Example: I have my laptop, ipad, TV, and phone; I sync'd the headphones to all four, but it's a roll of the dice as to which two they automatically connect to when I turn the headphones on. If I was on the bus and turned on the headphones, then without fail it would connect with my laptop and ipad that were buried in my bag before connecting to my phone that was unlocked and right in front of me. In theory you can use the aforementioned crappy app to select which devices the headphones are actively connected to, but if your phone wasn't blessed an initial connection then it can't communicate to them to switch. Selecting the headphones from your device bluetooth settings has no effect. The far better approach is the old-school "connect to this device and then disconnect from the others" approach.
I have no solution to the connection thing; It's annoying enough I will actively avoid this feature in anything I get in the future.
Overall grade: B-
TLDR: Good sound, comfy, but totally annoying unneeded "features". Annoying enough that would suggest not paying full retail price for these.
I will probably stick with these until they're dead (I am aiming for 5 years), since these things are an investment to normal people. But I am openly hoping the kids need an upgrade to their own headphones and I can pass these down and be rid of them.