Headphones
From 65-hour battery workhorses to flagship noise cancellers, these guides compare over-ear and on-ear headphones on the things owners actually report: comfort, real battery life, ANC that works, and honest value at street prices.
JBL Live 770NC Review: Fifty Hours, Flagship Money
At two hundred dollars the Live 770NC sits in the most uncomfortable price bracket in headphones: close enough to the flagships that people compare it to them, far enough below that it cannot win on the things flagships are bought for. It answers that by not competing where it would lose. The cancellation is good rather than exceptional. The battery is not merely competitive — it is longer than anything Sony or Bose sells at any price, by a margin large enough that it changes how you use the headphone rather than how you read the box.
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JLab JBuds Lux ANC Review: Forty Hours for $55
Budget cancelling headphones normally arrive with one impressive number and a set of quiet omissions. The JBuds Lux ANC arrives with several impressive numbers, most of which deserve the scepticism this site applies to any figure printed by the company selling the thing. What survives that scepticism is more interesting than the marketing: a very long battery, a genuinely useful app, and a two-year warranty at a price where one year is the norm and none is common.
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Labor Day Headphone Deals 2026: Which Are Real
Every Labor Day listing shows a struck-through price and a percentage. Almost none of them tell you what the thing actually cost last week, which is the only number that matters. We have been recording prices across this catalogue since late July — first weekly, now daily — so for once the claim can be checked against something other than the seller's own arithmetic. Three of the discounts live right now are real reductions against what we have actually observed. Several others are the price the product has been all along, wearing a badge.
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Sennheiser HD 560S Review: Accuracy Is Not Enjoyment
Nearly everything else on this site is a consumer product: sealed, wireless, tuned to sound impressive in a shop and forgiving of a bad recording. The HD 560S is none of those things, deliberately. It is open at the back, so it leaks your music to the room and lets the room in. It is wired, so there is no battery, no app and no cancellation. And it is tuned to be accurate rather than pleasing, which means a badly mastered track sounds badly mastered. Every one of those is a reason most people should not buy it, and together they are why some people will not use anything else.
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Shokz OpenFit 2 Review: Same Price, Opposite Design
Shokz makes two flagship open-ear headphones and charges exactly the same for both. One is a bone conduction headband that vibrates your cheekbones. The other is a pair of air conduction earhooks that plays sound at your ears without covering them. Same money, opposite engineering, and no obvious signal about which is meant for you. The choice comes down to a single question, and it is not the one the marketing asks.
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Shokz OpenRun Pro 2 Review: Not Purely Bone Anymore
Every bone conduction headphone has the same weakness, and it is not a flaw anyone can engineer away: low frequencies need a sealed ear canal to build pressure, and the entire point of the format is leaving that canal open. Shokz has spent three generations narrowing the gap. With the OpenRun Pro 2 it stopped narrowing and changed the architecture instead, adding a conventional air conduction driver alongside the bone transducers. That works. It also means the thing you are buying is no longer quite what the category name says.
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beyerdynamic DT 770 PRO Review: 80 Ohms
The DT 770 is the headphone people mean when they say a studio bought one pair and still has it. It is closed, which makes it usable around other people, and it is sold at three different impedances under almost the same name, which is how a lot of buyers end up with the wrong one. This page is about the 80-ohm version, and about why that number is on the box.
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beyerdynamic DT 990 PRO Review: 250 Ohms
Two facts about the DT 990 PRO decide whether you should own it, and neither is about sound quality. It is open-backed, so everyone near you hears what you are listening to. And it is 250 ohms, so plugged into a phone or a laptop it will sound quiet and thin. Get past both and it is one of the finest things you can put on your head for the money. Ignore either and you will be disappointed for reasons you may never diagnose.
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Beats Studio Pro Review (2026): Worth $170?
Beats is owned by Apple, which leads most people to assume these are AirPods in a different shape — an iPhone accessory that tolerates Android. They are not. The Studio Pro pairs with one touch on both platforms, and that even-handedness, together with a lossless USB-C connection, is the actual reason to consider them over the cheaper and better-cancelling Sony.
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Soundcore Q20i vs JLab JBuds Lux ANC
Both of these do the thing that used to cost three hundred dollars: they make a train carriage quiet. Neither does it as well as a flagship, and at these prices neither needs to. The twenty dollars between them buys specific, nameable things rather than a general step up in quality, which makes this an unusually clean decision once you know what those things are.
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Bose QuietComfort Ultra Review (2026): Worth It?
Bose has spent decades being the answer to one question: what do I buy if I want to stop hearing things and be comfortable while it happens. The QuietComfort Ultra still answers it. What it adds on top is spatial audio, which is the only genuinely new idea here and the one people disagree about most. Everything else you already know about Bose is still true.
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Sennheiser Momentum 4 Review (2026): 60 Hours
The flagships this competes with now cost anywhere from a little more to nearly $175 more, and last half as long. That is the whole argument for the Momentum 4, and it is a stronger one than the specification sheet makes it look. What you give up in return is the one thing most people buy premium headphones for, which is why this is not a straightforward recommendation.
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Sony WH-1000XM6 vs Bose QuietComfort Ultra
These are the two headphones most people end up choosing between at the top of the market, and the honest answer is that neither is better. They are built around different ideas of what expensive headphones are for. Sony has built the more capable machine. Bose has built the one you forget you are wearing. The $70 between them is the least interesting part of the decision.
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Sony WH-1000XM6 Review (2026): Worth the $458?
The XM6 is the most capable pair Sony has made, and for most people it is still not the one to buy. Both statements hold at once, because the headphones it replaces are now $160 cheaper and do the same job to a standard almost nobody can distinguish. This review is mostly about where that $160 actually goes.
Read fullHeadphones for Beginners: What Actually Matters
Buying a first pair is mostly an exercise in filtering. Specification sheets are written to sound impressive, and a beginner has no way to tell which numbers change anything. Four decisions actually matter, and once you have made them the choice narrows to a handful of products — five of which are below.
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Sony WH-1000XM5 vs Sennheiser Momentum 4
These two sit close enough in price that the usual value argument does not apply. What separates them is a straight trade: Sony cancels more, Sennheiser lasts roughly twice as long between charges. Which matters more depends on whether your problem is noise or remembering to plug things in.
Read fullSony WH-1000XM5 vs Bose QuietComfort Ultra
These are the two headphones most people end up choosing between at the top of the market, and the decision is not really about sound. Both cancel superbly and both sound very good. What separates them is comfort against battery, plus one codec that matters on Android and nowhere else.
Read fullBest Bluetooth Headphones (2026): 5 Picks
Every headphone worth buying has Bluetooth, so the word tells you almost nothing. What actually separates the five below is how long they last, whether they hold two devices at once, and which codecs they support — and on the first of those the spread here is enormous, from twenty-four hours to more than a hundred.
Read fullBest Noise Cancelling Headphones (2026): 5 Picks
Noise cancelling has stopped being a premium feature. A fifty-dollar pair now removes most of what a three-hundred-dollar pair removes, and the money above that buys comfort, materials and refinement rather than silence. This page covers the whole range and is honest about where the gains stop.
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Best On-Ear Headphones Under $50 (2026): 4 Picks
On-ear headphones sit on the ear rather than around it, which makes them lighter, more portable and less isolating than over-ear designs. Under fifty dollars they are also almost entirely wired — and understanding why that is a deliberate trade rather than a shortfall is most of what you need to choose well here.
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