JBL Tour Pro 2: two-minute review
JBL is famous for its rock-solid audio products, the kind of shiny yet affordable gems that more often than not turn out like diamonds in the rough and almost always sound great for the money. So what happens when the company deviates from its low-cost path to launch a flagship set of full-cylinder, active noise-canceling, single-screen headphones? Is our best noise canceling headphones guide about to welcome a newcomer? Well, it's a game of two halves.
The JBL Tour Pro 2 ranks above (far above) the brand's other headphones, including the superb JBL Live Pro 2, which offers probably the best level of active noise cancellation you've ever experienced. But big improvements are easy to see early on; For starters, there's an impressive color touchscreen on the front of the case. And this, dear reader, is a beautiful thing. It's delicious. It's fun, lets you easily take calls (how many times have we tried our best to tap the right earbud the right way, only to hang up on our friendly caller?), and offers simple, scrollable access to ANC profiles, alarms, and more. , spatialized audio and other benefits. During everyday use, we found ourselves fiddling with EQ profiles and useful extras that might have seemed unworthy of the bother had they been hidden away in an app, requiring our phone.
Due to said screen, we were concerned that battery life would be a bit anemic. It's not - the total claim of up to 50 hours of playback (or 30 hours with ANC on) and a very good 10 just for the buds before they need to be recharged have passed the test. Fast charging means that 10 minutes plugged in will also get you five hours of playback, which is a clever trick.
So head over to our best guide to true wireless earbuds? It is not so simple. We wish that were the case. We love the design; we love all the sound tests and special customizations, including Personi-fi, which is one of the most comprehensive sound tests among a set of headphones we've done to date.
But no matter what we do on the JBL Tour Pro 2 and no matter how hard we try, there's a meanness, sweetness, and boldness to the sound profile that we can't alter. Turn up the bass and we find that it invades and muddies the mids. The highs are usually hard; dynamically, we strive to make them sound anything but thin. Select a different EQ profile, try again, or play around with the ANC options (there are several), and it changes the recipe, but rarely in a good way. We always find ourselves wanting less of something and more of another.
ANC annoys us at first, too, due to an audible hiss, but it rolls out both "leakage compensation" and "ear canal compensation" and fades into relative neutrality. And active noise cancellation works reasonably well, though it's a shame the slider provided for Ambient Aware (which lets you choose from seven increments of noise filtering) disappears when you select ANC, which instead gets an "Adaptive ANC" switch. " instead of any slider .
In 2023, the success of a premium set of headphones must lie in their sonic capabilities. Let's face it, the market is full of cheaper options that will do the basic job for cheap. Unfortunately, it's here, in its most fundamental work, that the JBL Tour Pro 2 fails as a viable proposition. It's the only thing that corrupts them: the screen is a stroke of genius, the app is brilliant, the design is exciting, but we refer to the sentence at the beginning of this paragraph: a deficit in terms of sound quality is not a minor problem . .
JBL Tour Pro 2: price and release date
- Available from January 2023
- It costs $220 / AU$350 (about $267, but not available in the US)
The JBL Tour Pro 2 will launch in January 2023 and will cost €220 / AU$350 in a champagne or black finish. As of this writing, JBL says it has no plans to release them in the US.
That price puts them in competition with Apple's AirPods Pro 2 (£249 / £249 / AU$399) and Bose QuietComfort 2 (£299 / £279 / AU$429), some of the best true wireless earbuds we've ever had. viewed. today, a category in which the Sony WF-1000XM4 wireless headphones are also among the best, at €279,99 / €250 / AU$449,95, although this particular pair of headphones is now available for a slightly less than the original MSRP.
In case it needs mentioning, that price tag leaves the JBL Tour Pro 2 out of contention for our best budget headphone buying guide, where the Cambridge Audio Melomania 1 Plus, Beats Studio Buds, and Lypertek PurePlay Z3 2.0 rule the law (although they They are not that complete, of course).
For that money, and with the smart screen that no other audio equipment has offered to date, the JBL Tour Pro 2 are winners, as long as the sound is up to the mark.
JBL Tour Pro 2: Design
- The smart case is a game changer
- Battery life is surprisingly good
- Some will fight to get a stamp
As with Apple's AirPods range, Honor Earbuds 3 Pro, Huawei Freebuds Pro 2 and Nothing Ear (1) to name a few, the JBL Tour Pro 2 have small stems. Though they think the driver boxes seem a bit bulky at first glance, some team members with smaller ears size down once and find the earcups fit a small violin just fine. That said, those with larger ears may run into issues: only three ear tips are provided, and one team member couldn't get a good enough seal to pass one of the fit tests (more on that in a bit). even with the largest set, despite several minutes of adjustment. At this level, a few more ear cushion size options, and in different materials, are desirable.
However, JBL has added its own sharper, angular take on the AirPods' ice-white, no-sharp-edge design. Here, there are lips and notches in various materials and finishes, including rubberized driver housings, a matte top plate, and mirror-finished accents on the stems. There's even a little "TOUR" embellishment written around the circumference of each bud, as well as JBL branding on the tails. These are every inch of JBL's premium offering and the design choices reflect this.
Let's skip the touch screen for a second. The bottom of the box has not been forgotten. It has a rubber part that adds traction and means it won't inadvertently slide off your desk; It's a small detail, but the bodybuilders among us will love it.
The 10mm dynamic drivers are a significant step up from the 6,8mm drivers found in the JBL Tour Pro+, and are also listed as compatible with Bluetooth 5.3 LE audio. So it seems a shame that higher resolution codecs are not supported, nor LDAC, nor aptX (standard, HD, low latency or whatever).
With up to 50 hours of playtime (or 30 hours with ANC on) and a very good 10 hours just for the buds before they need to be charged, they crush most of the competition in endurance too. For comparison, the Sony XM4s get 8 hours on each button but only 16 on the case, and the latest Apple AirPods Pro 2 offer 6 hours on the buttons and an additional 30 hours in the case. Fast charging means that 10 minutes plugged in will also give you five hours of playtime, but the case can also be charged wirelessly.
What we can't find is an IP rating for water and dust ingress. Many level headphones offer at least an IPX4 certification (meaning they'll survive a sweaty gym session), but some options go much further. The Jabra Elite 7 Active has an IP57 rating, which means it's dustproof and can be submerged in water up to a meter deep, for up to 30 minutes, and survive.
There's a feature in the JBL Headphones app called 'Check My Best Fit', which plays a short snippet of music to make sure you get a good seal in each ear. It doesn't hold back either, telling us to tweak our weirdly shaped right earcup until we're ready to go. We pass this test, but some team members fail over and over again. To put it bluntly, that's why we took a star off the design rating: if they don't match, you can't get the best sound out of them. And that's not the end of the story when it comes to hearing tests! We'll cover other features below.
JBL Tour Pro 2: Features
- Excellent application adds the possibility of adapting the case
- Sound and fit tests add value
- The effectiveness of ANC is easily surpassed by AirPods Pro
You can customize the sound by telling the headphones which sound profile is best for you in the Personi-fi 2.0 software. It starts with an environmental noise check (you should be in a relatively quiet place) and then a wearing status check (you should have a good seal between the ear canal and the ear cup). It then plays nine chirps per ear and removes your finger when the sound is imperceptible. We took this test twice and received a different pictorial result each time. That said, the second time around, the increased sound felt more to our liking.
And still, we're not done. The ear canal test (which must be done in a noisy environment) plays another music clip. After that, you can kick back while True Adaptive ANC hybrid does the rest. We did notice a slight hiss after completion, but toggling 'Leakage Compensation' and 'Ear Canal Compensation' in the 'Customize ANC' tab largely eliminates it. We sat under a desk heater at work and found that the Tour Pro 2 ANC cancels it out, but some low-level sounds filter through (cars passing outside, not high heels on concrete). Upgrade to Apple AirPods Pro 2 and it's a different story: the bottom falls out of the room. With the Tour Pro 2, low-level sounds are attenuated, but we can still hear some extraneous background noise.
The six-pickup configuration promotes a clear sound during our...