THE EMPIRE
Hey Team,
Some new headphones came over my desk so needless to say we gave them the good once over, usual BS – this is a review, not paid advertising, these are on loan from JBL for review purposes only and will be returned soon. Our opinions are not for sale!
Right as I was saying,
These aren’t the first wireless headphone we’ve reviews nor are they the most expensive, but they are new and shiny so,
In the box you get,
The JBL Live 650 BT headset
USB charging cable
3.5 mm cord ( a couple foot long) for direct connections
First thing I noticed when trying these on were they didnt seem to hug my head very well, now I have a pretty big head ( fuckin grow up) and thus things like hats and sunglasses are always a chore to try before I buy. That being said after a couple hours wearing them I forgot they were there so they settled in quite nicely quite quickly. I did find that the headband didnt sit directly over my ears, a bit further back on my dome for a comfortable fit. They sat tight and didnt move when in that position so that’s good so far.
Sitting at my desk I connected them to my phone, super easy just like most bluetooth devices, and it promted me to get the app ( I didn’t) and i proceeded to crank up some nice heavy metal to its fullest volume in an attempt to kill off my last few braincells. This was a telling experience.
First thing I noticed was at max output on the headset and my phone via bluetooth the bottom end was quite muddy, and that volume didn’t seem at the time to be that loud, we’l come back to that point but the thing with using your phone to drive your music is that you’re always limited, cell phone companies always have that warning when you go past 60% output to say that if you exceed it you’re a bad ass but you’re gona lose your hearing, we know that this is a legal thing but like other laws we chose to live our best life on the day. The problem is the signal send isn’t a very loud signal so I had assumed that I would need full everything for using these at the gym to drown out the god awful dance music my gym plays ( I’m pretty sure its the soundtrack for purgatory just to really finish me off) so needless to say I like to overpower that, and of course in that enviroment its nice to have good volume to keep you motivated and those such things. What I hadn’t accounted for was the noise cancelling, its really good. example, I was sitting on a bench in the gym, and everyone looked around at the same time I thought it might have been the apocalypse but it was a guy had dropped weights and it was appreantly very loud, I didn’t notice … +1 point to noise cancelling, I’d say they would be decent on a plane ( not tested just guessing) but far from ideal when driving.
The battery life so far has been impressive too, when you connect your phone it gives you a notification with a battery percentage of the headset, after 2 standard workouts I had only used 15% percent of the battery, which is about 90 mins per session, the claimed battery life is upto 30 hours or 20hours on bluetooth
I haven’t tried the alexa app yet partly cause I’m not a fan and partly cause I’m pretty sure I’m already on a watch list and the last thing I need is another wiretap in the house.
comes with a 12 month warrenty and at $269.99 ( listed on noel leeming at the time of this review) that’s not a bad buy, certainly decent quality sound if you’re not in the 95th percetile of volume capability and they are pretty comfortable.
I can’t yet comment on how rugged they are but they have lived up to a couple work outs and living in my gym bag so i would expect them to be fairly robust.
I ended up finding a happy place with the sound at 9/10 clicks on my phone and the same on the headseat, basically full noise with 1 click backed off, if you want more volume from your headphones you might want to consider an alternative source, do they even make Ipods anymore?
Plenty more tech reviews coming so keep us bookmarked and we’l see you soon
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