A Relaible Jabra Elite Active 65T True Wireless Earbuds Review | Mobile Accessories

Jabra Elite Active 65T True Wireless Earbuds Image 1

Earlier this week, we kicked off our Jabra coverage with a review of their flagship Evolve 65T True Wireless Earbuds. Today, we’re taking a look at their little brother, the Jabra Elite Active 65T. They’re extremely versatile for wherever you need great audio, customizable, and have sensors to double as a fitness tracker. Is it worth $189? Join us as we find out.

Specifications

• Current Price: $189.99
• Key Features: True Wireless, HearThrough, EarGels™ Silicon rubber ear gels (3 sizes), Auto turn-On When headsets out of charging case, Auto pause Auto pause when one headset out of ear, Integrated motion sensor to track exercise
• Headphone Form Factor: True Wireless
• Speaker bandwidth: Music mode 20Hz to 20kHz
• Speaker bandwidth: Conference mode 100Hz to 10kHz
• Noise Cancellation: Passive
• Microphone concept: A four-microphone ambient noise cancellation technology
• Microphone frequency range: 100Hz to 10kHz
• Microphone bandwidth: 100Hz to 8kHz
• Onboard Controls: Calls, Media, Voice Assistant
• Voice guidance: Double press to access “Amazon Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant
• Battery:
  • Talk time: Up to 15 hours (with 2x recharging in charging case)
  • Charging power & time: Around 2 hours, full charge with dedicated USB wall charger (500mA)
• Wireless:
  • Bluetooth standard: Bluetooth 5.0
  • Wireless range: Up to 10 meters (33 feet)
  • Bluetooth pairing list: Up to 8 devices
  • Simultaneous Bluetooth connections: 2
• Box contents: Charging case, micro USB cable, 3 sets of silicon EarGels,
• Headset weight: 6.5g right headset 5,8g left headset, charging case 67g
• Warranty: 2 year

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Here at MMORPG, we cover lots of different tech and computer hardware. True Wireless (TWS) earbuds are an interesting development in the headphone world. At the moment, many seem targeted specifically for exercise; it’s a perfect fit with the lack of wires but hardly the only reason you may want a pair. Instead, I’d say that the name of the game for these headphones is versatility.

What I love about headphones like the Jabra Elite Active 65T is that they’re up just about any challenge you could throw at them. Since they’re Bluetooth, you can easily connect them to your phone one minute and your PC the next (if your motherboard supports it). The snug fit makes them the perfect choice for going for a run or hitting the gym and the custom EarGels keep them comfortable even over multiple hours of wear.

They’re also more resilient against the elements, so you really can wear them on the go. The Elite Actives are IP56 rated, which makes them dust and water resistant, even against strong sprays, so you can wear them in the shower (just don’t submerge them).

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In many ways, these are made to be your “everyday” headphone no matter where you may go. Unlike some true wireless headphones, they’re more recessed into your ear so they won’t get strange looks like some larger headphones do. They’re also shaped to fit naturally into the grooves of your ear so they won’t fall out. It is important you choose the right size EarGel to get a secure fit. If they do fall out, Jabra has also built in a “Find My Jabra” feature that notes the location every time they disconnect, allowing you to easily track where they became lost.

I also like how intuitive the controls are. The right earbud is dedicated to calls and activating your voice assistant with a single button. The left side has two buttons that default to controlling volume but also act as track controls. I use Google Assistant more than anything and found that it worked perfectly and I was understood clearly in all but the noisiest situations (or if a fan is blowing into the mic - hello summer). It also features Amazon Alexa integration, which is a great addition we still don’t see often in TWS earbuds.

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One of the more unique features of the Elite Active 65Ts is the built-in motion sensor. It’s not quite as fully featured as the original Elite 65Ts, but does include an accelerometer to track your steps and give you some statistics on your run. This pairs very well with Jabra’s HearThrough feature that activates the 65Ts microphone array to allow you to hear the outside world. This can be turned on by entering Active Mode or double tapping the right earbud, which is great if you need to hear for a moment and don’t want to worry about taking out the whole earbud.

I’m also a big fan of the Sound+ app, available on the Google Play Store or iTunes. Inside the app, you can choose from a good number of EQ presets or create your own, as well as enable features like motion tracking or “Where’s My Jabra?” It’s a fully featured app that offers a lot of utility and really allows you to dial in exactly the sound you enjoy.

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Out of the box, the Elite Active have a flatter sound profile with slightly touched up bass and mids to provide a full sound with elevated vocals. This is also a solid tuning for picking up competitive cues in games, though I’d recommend tweaking the middle-highs and treble up a bit more for that. Going with a more neutral tuning makes a lot of sense, however, because the intention is clearly to craft your own sound.

Using the Sound+ app, choosing a preset is as easy as tapping your choice. You could easily swap song to song or put on a custom playlist and tune your own EQ exactly how you like it on a 5-band equalizer. I wish Jabra included the ability to share these EQs like JayBird does, but I like that your settings are saved to the buds themselves, so you don’t have to keep the app open after you’ve made your changes.

And man, these earbuds are really open to EQ. You can tune them to be bass heavy hitters or to pull out tiny details hidden in the treble. Some buds start to distort when you play with them too much but the Elite Active 65Ts are wide open to make them exactly what you’d like. That means, you can have one profile for listening to music and another custom tuned for competitive gaming at your PC and yet another dedicated just for movie watching.

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When it comes to battery life, you can expect about 3.5 hours at 80% volume or around 5 hours at 50%. The charging case is good for another two charges, giving you a maximum of 15 hours of playback before needing to recharge the case. Charging times are good, with 15 minutes giving you 90-120 minutes of playback and two hours to get back to 100%. Throughout the day, I often put the earbuds back in the case for safekeeping which keeps them perpetually charged and ready to go. Even using them regularly, I only need to recharge about once a week.

You’ll also be pleased to hear that the microphone is perfectly fine for Discord and VOIP chat. It’s a bit compressed and, because it’s positioned way back in your ear, has enough gain to pick up other things in your room, but you’ll be clearly understood and won’t sound muffled. It’s a no-go for streaming and broadcast but playing games with your buddies is perfectly fine.

Final Thoughts

At $189, the Jabra Elite Active 65Ts aren’t cheap but genuinely offer a great set of features for the money. They look good, give you full media and call controls, access to voice assistants and Amazon Alexa, and even track your motion for exercise statistics. The biggest feature, though, is just how tunable they are. The Jabra Elite Active 65Ts are ready for whatever you throw at them and definitely earn their asking price.

 Jabra Elite Active 65T True Wireless Earbuds Check On Amazon

Pros

• Wonderfully resilient to EQ
• Intuitive controls for media and calls
• Stylish - they don’t make you look silly while wearing them
• Good battery life
• Motion tracker
• Full-featured app

Cons

• Battery life still falls short of some of the competition

The product discussed in this article was provided by the manufacturer for the purpose of review.

Relaible Jabra Elite Sport Affordable Earbuds review | Mobile Accessories

Jabra has created great sounding wireless earbuds with fitness in mind. Find out more in our Jabra Elite Sport review.

 

Jabra Elite Sport Earbuds Image 1

Should I buy the Jabra Elite Sport?

The Jabra Elite Sport are fairly pricey but you get a lot for your money thanks to additional fitness features. Accurate heart rate monitoring and clever tracking combine to make these great for running and working out. Sound quality is decent, too, but if you’re not going to use the sporty features then look elsewhere

Price when reviewed

Jabra Elite Sport Buy From Amazon 

Jabra Elite Sport full review

As the demand for wireless headphones increases, so does the popularity of wireless earbuds. Some are made especially for fitness and this pair even has a heart rate monitor. Here’s our Jabra Elite Sport review.
The firm is claiming these headphones are ‘the most technically advanced true wireless sport earbuds’. That’s fairly specific and the word ‘true’ in the area of the market means there are no wires whatsoever.

Jabra Elite Sport: Price

You’re not going to get technically advanced headphones for cheap and the Jabra Elite Sport are £229.
It’s a lot considering rivals from the likes of Sony and Jaybird are cheaper, but you don’t get things like the heart rate monitoring and other features.

Jabra Elite Sport: Design and build

The Elite Sport earbuds are fairly chunky but not too heavy. The size is only really an issue if you have quite small ears.
Everyone has very different ears in terms of size and shape and wireless earbuds require a really good fit so they not only stay in place but also sound good.
At first we couldn’t get them to fit very well but Jabra supplies the Elite Sport earbuds with six different pairs of tips (half silicon and half foam) and three sets of wings. That’s plenty of combinations so you should be able to find the right formula.
Being built for sport, the headphones have an IP67 rating so they’re dust and waterproof up to one meter so you don’t need to worry about them too much. It also means you can give them a wipe or wash. If you register them, you get a three year warranty against sweat damage.
Each earbud has two buttons with the left for volume and skip track and the right for other things like play/pause and toggling the Hear Through mode we’ll explain below.

That’s a really good amount of control but pushing the buttons can easily ram the earbud into your ear canal which is painful. We’ve found it better to grip the earbud then push the button.
The Elite Sport earbuds are available in two colours: Black or Lime Green Grey with the wings being green.

Jabra Elite Sport: Sound quality and features

As well as being wireless headphones, Jabra has added a bunch of sporty features so make the suitable for fitness and sporting activities. That’s partly why you’re paying the price for these headphones.

With a clinical grade heart rate monitor and TrackFit motion counting sensor (tri-axis accelerometer) there’s plenty you can do with these headphones. Via the Jabra Sport app you can track runs but also do other workouts such as cross-training. You can use other apps like Strava if you want to, though.
The Jabra Coach will talk to you in real-time (if you want) and you get tonnes of data and feedback so you can improve. You can track all kinds of things including speed, distance, pace, steps, cadence, calories, heart rate, heart rate zone and VO2 max estimation.

There’s plenty for fitness enthusiasts to get stuck into here and the heart rate monitor is very accurate.

Jabra Elite Sport Earbuds Image 2

When you’re out for a run or just using the headphones normally it’s not always the best thing to be cut off from the world. The Hear Through feature means you can hear what’s going on around you without taking an earbud out.

Microphones on the outside of the earbud mean the Elite Sport can play you whatever you would be hearing if the headphones weren’t in. This means you’ll be more aware of dangers when out and about or have a conversation without any hassle. The microphones are also used for hands-free phone calls.

In terms of battery life, the Jabra Elite Sport will last up to four and half hours on a single charge. That’s with or without activity tracking and the compact charging case will charge the headphones twice giving you a total of 13 and a half hours.
Last but not least is sound quality. All of the above would be fairly pointless if these headphones sounded rubbish.

Gladly that’s not the case and we’re pretty impressed with the sound quality of the Jabra Elite Sport. There’s no driver size listed but the firm describes them as ‘bespoke bass-enriched speakers’ and they have a frequency response of 20-20,000Hz matching the human hearing range.
When you get a nice fit, the earbuds sound generally really good. The bass is rich but nicely controlled so doesn’t drown everything out. Mid-range is perfectly good but it’s the top-end that’s particularly impressive.

The headphones are very bright and detailed which overall sounds good. Some tracks can end up being more top-end than mid so lose vocals resulting is a slightly harsh sound but this doesn’t happen too often.

Review: The Best Jabra's Elite 85h noise-cancelling headphones | Mobile Accessories

Noise-cancelling headphones are popular among business travelers, those in loud, open office spaces, and frequent commuters for a reason: they make life just a little bit less stressful. But good ones remain a product largely aimed at those with a good amount to spend - Bose and Sony's popular models retail for $300 and $350, respectively. The new Jabra 85h are priced to match Bose's jetsetter staple (seriously, the number of QC35s you'll see in business class cabins on airplanes is crazy), but have already dropped to $250 in promo sales.

While matching or even undercutting Bose for price, Jabra's headphones offer noticeably superior noise cancellation in most situations, better audio, and much better battery life. While the Bose name enjoys far more cachet among frequent flyers, Jabra's given them every reason to do a double-take with these headphones.

Check It Out On Amazon

The Good

Audio	A reasonably bass-forward profile with balanced mids and highs make the 85h noticeably different than Bose's headphones, and I think they're just more pleasant to listen to.
Battery	Jabra rates the 85h for 36 hours of music playback with ANC turned on, and I've had no reason to doubt it. This absolutely destroys Bose's QC35 II figure, and is a good 20% better than Sony's XM3.
Features	Twist the ear cups to power them on or off, USB-C for charging, multi-device pairing, Jabra's hear-through technology, play/pause on-ear detection, intuitive volume and easy playback controls.
ANC	The ANC on the 85h is excellent in most situations and, I found, was less prone to having problems with aberrant vibrations in settings like airplanes.
Price	At $300, the 85h are a clearly a superior value to Bose and Sony's products. At $250 on sale, they're a no-brainer.

The Not So Good

Weight	The 85h have a larger battery and substantially sturdier headband than most wireless headphones, so they're pretty bulky (though I never found them uncomfortable).
Price, again	$300 is a lot of dough for most people to drop on headphones, and cheaper ANC over-ears do exist.
Limited Assistant	While the 85h support "one-button access" to Assistant, it's not true Assistant built-in, just tap to activate - meaning no deep integrations with notifications and poorer response latency.
No aptX / LDAC	While not a high priority on ANC headphones - which distort sound significantly anyway - some people really need to know their headphones do a Special Audio Quality Thing.

 

Design, hardware, what's in the box

 

 The Elite 85h use a low-tension band system to stay attached to your head without putting too much pressure on your ears. When I first tried them on at CES this year, the engineers told me they'd specifically designed the 85h to be comfortable for individuals who are, let's say, cranially gifted. As in, people with big heads (being from the Scandinavian region, Jabra considers this a real design priority). As such an individual, I felt the 85h were very comfortable and did not squeeze my noggin. The ear cups are large and spacious, too, minimizing pressure.

Controls on the 85h are dead simple once you've figured them out - the right ear cup has volume up at the top, play/pause in the middle, and volume down at the bottom. The Assistant button is out the outside of the ear cup and is easy to hit with your right thumb. On the left ear cup, you've got a single button for activating or deactivating noise cancellation, and a middle setting that turns on the "hear through" mode, which will play ambient noise into the headphones. It works surprisingly well thanks to Jabra's multi-microphone array, though don't count on it for more than basic left and right directionality (because, well, that's how stereo audio works).

Power off (left), power on (right)

Turning the 85h off and on is merely a matter of twisting the right ear cup into the deployed or storage position, making it unlikely they'll accidentally get turned on in a bag. There are 3.5mm and USB-C connectors on the left ear cup as well, the latter is for charging, the former if you want wired audio to increase the already ridiculous battery life of the headphones.
The 85h come with a carrying case, 3.5mm cable, USB-C charging cable, and an two-prong airline adapter in the box. They're warrantied for two years against water or dust damage.

Sound quality, features, battery life

The sound quality on the 85h exceeded my expectations, with full, balanced bass and reasonably strong mids, and highs that are clear but not shrill. Compared to the Bose QC35, bass feels less muddied and highs less screechy, though some may prefer the more "boosted" audio profile Bose is known for. I found the 85h comfortable to listen to for extended periods on a long flight, and didn't notice any fatigue.

 The quality of active noise cancellation is excellent. Unlike my QC35s, the 85h seemed less susceptible to aberrant seat vibrations causing an annoying and excessive alteration of the noise cancellation signal, which I came to really dread when trying to sleep with the Bose. Overall, the cancellation seemed to adapt well to most situations and conditions, though obviously isn't capable of magic: loud car engines and voices weren't really muted at all, but that's just the nature of ANC - no headphone drowns out those noises very successfully. I did notice that the lower threshold for the noise cancellation was an issue, which could cause random, quiet hisses to come through as the headphones attempted to adapt. It wasn't a super big problem, but if you use ANC headphones all day in a quiet environment or home office, it could get annoying.

There's a companion Jabra app that offers profiles for different noise conditions, but I found the detection of "scenes" was unreliable at best and tended to be slow to respond or flip-flop between audio profiles, essentially making the feature useless. I also don't like that the app is a constantly running service on my phone, so I uninstalled it pretty quickly.
Battery life, as I said in the summary points at the beginning of the review, is rated by Jabra at 36 hours with ANC enabled while playing back audio at a reasonable volume - I felt no reason to doubt that figure, and I rarely had to even charge them during my testing.

Should you buy?

Yes. Unless simultaneous two-device pairing is absolutely essential in your ANC headphones (Update: The 85h do support multi-endpoint pairing, for whatever reason I couldn't get it to work the first time I tried), I believe the Jabra 85h are the high-end ANC cans to get for all but some serious corner cases. The Elite 85h are extremely comfortable, charge via USB-C, have incredible battery life, and are designed thoughtfully with easy access to playback controls and Jabra's well-executed hear-through tech for that occasionally-needed situational awareness. Jabra has built what are easily the best value and overall experience in ANC headphones right now.
The lack of a built-in Assistant or features like aptX and LDAC high-fidelity codecs shouldn't concern most people. Access to Google Assistant (or Alexa, should you be so inclined) is still one-button simple, you just won't get audible notifications for things like texts and reminders. As to audio quality, the 85h are going to sound great to most people even streaming 128Kbps MP3s - these high-res codecs just don't matter much on headphones where the primary feature you're paying for is the ANC, which perceptibly distorts sound anyway.
Barring real hang-ups about the above, I think the best choice in ANC headphones right now are the Jabra Elite 85h, and I'm giving them our Android Police Most Wanted pick.