Jabra has been known for creating Bluetooth earpieces that have good sound quality as well as the durability to last a long time. It’s no surprise that the next best move is to go into the pure audio listening experience and cater for the fitness group that mostly use music as a motivation for their work out. They went ahead and released a range of products that caters not only to the business group but music lovers as well as fitness freaks, but today we are going to take a look at the Jabra Elite 65e wireless earphones which comes with Adaptive Noise Cancellation.
On first look, you immediately know that the entire device is made to be tossed around, the entire earphone is covered with a rubber-like material which is good to repel sweat regardless if you are working out or commuting around the city in the blistering hot weather.
However, I am not sure if the device I received is missing some parts, or Jabra has overlooked one critical design flaw, the charging port which is located on the neckband is exposed. It was never a problem for me, but I am slightly concerned if dust or sweat gets in, it might compromise the earphones. We are just going to trust Jabra’s craftsmanship and say that this should be fine.
Moving along the band on the right, you will find buttons on both sides which can be used to control your music like increasing the volume as well as skipping forward or going back, and the middle button which can be used to pause the music or call up your respective voice assistant. On the left side, is the Adaptive Noise Cancellation button which can be activated by long pressing for three seconds and the last button is the mute call button. Overall, it does give all the buttons required on a Bluetooth earphone and the buttons are easy to press and are protected by the same rubber-like material.
The earpiece comes with medium-sized ear tips which are fine for my ears, but Jabra has provided a small and large tip as well. They also took the extra step by including different sizes of wing tips which will fit the different ear sizes, huge thumbs up for this.
Generally, the earphone is comfortable to wear, occasionally the wing tips do jab into my ears, but others found no issue with it, so I simply removed it and used it without the wing tips.
Now when it comes to sound that is where I have a slight issue with this earphone. To understand my issue, you must understand the type of sound profile I like. I like my lows and highs to be prominent, one should not be higher than the other and the mids fills in the gaps that the sound produces. I don’t find that the 65e can offer that to me, the highs and lows are flat, although the mid does have some body to it but it is hard for me to get pumped up with this earphone.
However, making voice calls with these earphones is simply put, marvellous. The audio call quality is superb, and it really was a pleasure making calls as the person on the other end can be heard with great clarity and they seem to have no issues hearing me even when I was keeping my voice down. It also shines when listening to a podcast, as the same vocal clarity can be felt. Jabra has released an app that goes with the 65e and it allows you to fine-tune the audio levels according to your liking but I still found that it comes close, but does not achieve the audio profile that I like.
As I mentioned before, the Jabra Elite 65e comes with Adaptive Noise Cancellation which does not work as well as a ANC headphone. It does remove some of the ambient noise but if you were to use ANC on the LRT, you will still be able to hear the screeching of the train tracks, as well as the announcement over the PA system. Something that will be filtered out if you were to use a decent noise cancelling headphones. I believe that it is tough to implement ANC on earphones as there is not a lot of room to place mics around to cancel out the sound.
Lastly, is the battery life which is very decent, it can easily give me up to two days of use without ANC on and when turned on, it would last roughly one to one and a half day of use. If you do run out of battery, it will take about 2 hours to give you a full charge based on my experience.
The Good
- Good build quality
- Excellent vocal clarity
- Battery life
The Bad
- Audio quality
- weak ANC
