Review on 🎧 JBL Free X - True Wireless in-Ear Headphone - White: Premium Sound, Ultimate Freedom by Corey Burgess

The JBL Free X headphones are a pretty good set of truly wireless Bluetooth headsets with a few obvious flaws that stop them from the best to be. Purely in terms of sound reproduction, they are outstanding for their price and design. Tests by RTings.com show that they offer a very balanced profile and I can confirm this from my own experience. Lab tests show a slight lack of highs and a slight overemphasis on the bass, but I personally can't claim to have noticed this, although I'm not exactly a true audiophile. From my layman's perspective they sound great and don't seem to be overdone or underdone in anything I've given them (my tastes span metal, industrial, electronic, folk, orchestral etc so they've seen a lot). . Serious audiophiles will likely find many faults with them, but serious audiophiles will never deign to use a $150 pair of headphones either. Worse than the sound quality is the earbuds' battery life, although that's not the worst. The headphones claim to hold a charge for around 4 hours of continuous listening and while I've never drained them to zero I think that's a reasonable estimate. The battery case claims to last an extra 20 hours of charging, although I can't say I've ever used it on myself. A maximum of 24 hours of listening time on a single (combined) charge isn't bad and I probably won't use them for the 4 hours in a row it takes to drain the headphones, but if you're looking for headphones for 8 hours in the office or using it this way is not suitable for your needs. The worst thing about these headphones is their latency and recording quality, but that shouldn't come as a surprise considering they come with Bluetooth 4.2. However, even by the standards of truly wireless Bluetooth headphones (again link to RTings.com), they still seem to underperform. The mic on them is really terrible; Voices sound incredibly compressed, worse than my smartphone's microphone (Samsung Galaxy S9+, I'm sure someone will be surprised), which isn't exactly brilliant. However, if you just want to use them for listening, which most people probably do, it doesn't matter. However, what is important is the delay. I can't give numbers from personal experience, but the lag is definitely noticeable and causes a strong spooky valley effect when watching videos. That's certainly good for listening to music, podcasts, radio shows, etc., but for anything to do with the visual aspect, it's definitely detrimental to perception. Overall, the JBL Free X headphones offer a great listening experience at a very affordable price. . However, they're limited to the type of content they're good for due to latency issues, and they're poor at creating audio that others can hear. The 4-star rating is due to the fact that my primary use case (intermittent listening to music or conversational background audio when I don't have full-size headphones) is what they're good at. They do have noticeable downsides, however, and while they're fine for my purposes, others might consider these issues as deal breakers.