In a crowded market of true wireless earbuds, the Jabra Elite 10 stands out as one of the best all-around pairs you can purchase.
While they’re noise-canceling headphones, we wouldn’t buy them for that alone. We’d choose them because they offer a winning combination of comfort, sound quality, and features, all at a competitive price. The lightweight buds even feature Dolby Atmos with Spatial Audio and head tracking for a truly immersive listening experience.
Stick around as we delve into all of this at length in our comprehensive Jabra Elite 10 review.
Jabra Elite 10: Design
Jabra Elite 10: Battery life and charging
The Elite 10 offers up to 6 hours of battery life on a single charge when using ANC and an additional 21 hours from the charging case. 6 hours is on the lighter side for today’s standards, but it’s still plenty for most people, and use cases.
Turn off noise canceling to get 8 hours, or with a quick charge, you can get an hour of battery with just 5 minutes of charging. The headphones come with a short USB-A to USB-C cable and also support wireless Qi charging.
Jabra Elite 10: Noise canceling
The active noise cancellation on the Elite 10 is good. Though the ANC strength doesn’t compete with Sony, it cancels out a very noticeable amount of ambient background noise and makes listening enjoyable at lower volumes.
As we write this review, we’re listening to music at a low volume with ANC. We can hear the keys clacking as we type while the robot vacuum mostly silences its noise.
Despite not being the strongest, the ANC sounds very clean and natural while still maintaining some connection to your surroundings. The ear tips you choose and your preferred music volume can also make a notable difference in noise cancellation.
Jabra Elite 10: Features and app
The Jabra Elite 10 packs in features that make it ideal for all occasions. Their IP ratings and secure fit mean they keep up at the gym or through any weather. The powerful noise cancellation, or the hear-through feature with wind neutralization, gives you complete control of your surroundings.
There are six microphones for phone calls, Dolby Atmos with Dolby Head Tracking, Google fast pair, Spotify tap, Bluetooth multipoint for dual connections, mono earbud use, and even more with the app. The buds also have wear sensors that will play and pause your music automatically.
The Jabra Sound+ app is as good as headphone apps come. It’s easy enough to use and has all the features and personalization to make the Elite 10 earbuds your own. Most importantly, it offers a custom equalizer with sound presets so you can find the sound profile you enjoy most.
As you may expect, you can see the battery levels of the buds and case, upgrade firmware, toggle ANC, and adjust the intensity of HearThrough. You can also turn Dolby Spatial Sound on with or without head tracking. The control buttons are completely customizable, and you also get a lot of customization options for the call experience as well.
Jabra Elite 10: Sound and microphone
The Elite 10 has a well-balanced sound profile, clear vocals, and powerful bass. The 10mm speakers produce a rich, detailed sound perfect for listening to music, watching movies, or playing games.
The included equalizer and presets help make the audio quality truly perfect. These headphones support Dolby Atmos and Spatial Audio. You can enable Spatial Audio with or without head tracking in the Jabra app.
Spatial Audio is a hit or miss and will be primarily a personal preference; it makes music sound immersive, open, and airy — a cool effect. Some music won’t sound right as a result, and podcasts sound too weird for our liking.
Spatial Audio with head tracking works very well but is gimmicky. We are overall impressed with the audio quality. They sound as good as buds that are typically more expensive and physically larger.
The microphone quality is also above average but not quite perfect. The 6-microphone technology does a solid job of reducing background noise and focusing on your voice. Voices even sound natural and loud. There is some distortion in the voice, but this is the case for most Bluetooth headphones.
Jabra Elite 10 review: Final thoughts
Finding a pair of headphones that excel in many categories is tough, yet Jabra nailed it with these perfectly balanced best-of-all-worlds Jabra Elite 10 true wireless headphones. To that effect, the Elite 10 are light and comfortable, their controls and personalization are perfect, they sound incredible, they are tech-heavy with solid features, offer IP57 waterproof protection with an IP54 case, and the active noise cancellation works well too.
While there are headphones out there with better battery, ANC, and native Spatial Audio support on iOS, those come with their share of tradeoffs. That said, the Jabra Elite 10 aren’t cheap but they offer excellent value given the competition. They retail for $249.99 on Amazon.
Jabra’s so confident in its build and IP rating that a 2-year warranty protects the buds and cases against dust and water.
Update March 2024:
Jabra has released a big update for their Elite 10 earbuds which brings enhanced call quality with new AI-based distractor suppression algorithms that specifically improve noise reduction in the human voice frequency range. They’ve also added ANC via the update which provides 2X better background voice blocking.
The Jabra Elite 10 are perfectly balanced, best-of-all-worlds true wireless headphones.