LIVE music

JBL’s wireless noise-cancelling LIVE 650BTNC headphones have just picked up an award from EISA’s Mobile Devices Expert Group, a particularly impressive achievement given that the price here of $249.95 is significantly below the sweet-spot of $399/$499 around which so many wireless noise-cancellers group themselves. Yet these seem to have the full gamut of abilities — Bluetooth, active noise-cancelling, an app which allows customisation, even a direct connection to the voice assistant of your choice (well, Alexa or Google). So do they suffer on sound quality or build to balance the books?

We’ll cut to the chase, and tell you that the answer is ‘no’. Indeed we warmed quickly to the JBLs, as these proved a pair of headphones which just got on with the job. There was no fumbling with a quick-start guide, since the on-headphone buttons are clear and self-explanatory, with