You wouldn’t believe that Jabra’s Elite 75t are not active noise-canceling headphones. The Elite 75t and the Elite Active 75t are among the best true wireless earbuds we’ve tried to date. They’re loaded with features and sound incredible. The only catch is that these premium buds come with a premium (but not unreasonable) price tag.
Design
The Jabra Elite 75t are a svelte pair of headphones that come inside a sleek little case. The charging case is small enough to palm and wrap your hand fully around. They’re very easy and comfortable to pocket. The buds are a little chunky and fill the inner contour of your ear comfortably. From the outside they don’t look like much and barely protrude out of your ear. For a pair of buds with no ear hook or ear wing, they do a fantastic job of staying in our ears. If you twist them a bit after inserting them they’ll lock into place. That said, there’s nothing other than fit keeping them from bouncing out of your ear and into the sewer… so make sure you’ve got a good fit! They come with small, medium, and large ear gel tips.
Battery
Woo for USB-C charging! The buds themselves last 7.5 hours while their charging case bumps that time up to a whopping 28 hours. These are very impressive stats. In practice, we went weeks without charging them and used them pretty much every day. With fast charge, you’ll get an hour of battery life with a 15-minute charge. There’s also a USB-C to standard USB-A cable included.
Features
Jabra headphones have some of the best usability out there; the included app makes a big difference here. At first, I was bummed with the button controls — there’s only one button on each bud. The taps, double taps, triple taps, and holds did not do what I expected, but I soon learned that’s customizable! Volume is always a long press on each bud, but everything else is configurable for each individual bud. You can control tracks, hear-through, voice assistant, and play/pause. There are built-in sensors that will pause your music when you take a bud off and play when you put it back in — also customizable! In addition to these features, the app also allows you to tune the headphones to your preference and there’s even a profile that will test your ears and create a custom signature for you.
Sound quality
Out of the box, these headphones sound incredible. The noise isolation is so good that we thought they were active noise canceling — they’re not. This is why the hear-through feature exists. The music is really well balanced with deep bass, rich mids, and detailed highs. There’s a lot of clarity and oomph which makes them a lot of fun to listen to. We love the default sound signature so much we didn’t even bother turning it in the app. They sound great regardless of the genre and there’s quick presets in the app for tuning to speech, extra bass, extra treble, and more. We can confidently say these don’t sound like your average gym headphones.
Call quality
Call quality is important and we’ve found this is one of the areas that wireless earbuds vary greatly. Out of the box, the call quality actually stinks…. but, it’s a quick setting away from being very good. To deliver a more natural phone call experience these buds turn on the hear-through microphone so you can hear your surroundings. I found it very unnatural and uncomfortable to hear my own voice amplified through this. You can adjust this or just shut it off. With “sidetone” disabled, the call quality is loud and crisp on both ends. The headphones pair quickly so it’s a three-second process to get these out of the case to answer a call.
Bottom line
Jabra’s Elite 75t comes in two varieties: regular and “active”. The difference just comes down to IP rating as far as we can tell. IP55 for regular and IP57 for active. There’s even a 2-year warranty against sweat and dust on both. They’re both resistant to dust, and the regular buds are rated to withstand water jets from any direction. The actives can withstand full immersion up to 1 meter. We’d opt to save the $20 as the regular Elite 75t will still survive some rain and our most sweaty workouts.
The Jabra Elite 75t is an incredible pair of buds for anyone looking for everyday headphones that get you through anything. The only kicker is the cost, which is still less expensive than most of the popular competitors. Pricing in at $149.99 for Elite 75t and $199.99 for Elite Active 75t, they’re somewhat pricey, but not unreasonably so. They’re high quality and packed with features. We can barely even criticize them. The app is great and can continue adding new features and improvements. Finally, they come in different color options: mint, copper black, navy, sienna, gold beige, and titanium black.
Updated September 23rd, 2020: The Elite 75t series and Elite Active 75t are getting a free ANC upgrade courtesy of a firmware update in the Sound+ app.