JBLLive Pro 2 - True Wireless Noise Cancelling Earbuds, up to 40 Hours of Playback with Wireless Charging, 6 mics for Perfect Calls, Touch & Voice Control, IPX5 Water Resistant (Silver)

I wanted to give these a score of 4.5, but that wasn't an option. I liked everything except the controls. I bought it at $100, but it is a good value even for $150I will compare this to Edifier TWS1 Pro and CA Melomania 1+ which I used with Google pixel 4a 5GSetup:Live 2 pro is the best. It supports Google fast pair unlike the other 2. Melomania supports 5.0 Bluetooth with a right earbud as main so you can initiate a connection with either both side or right, but not left alone. You can switch easily from right only connection to left only, but not left to right. Edifier TWS1 Pro had bt 5.2 with aptx adaptive so it was easy to switch and connect.App support: melomania as a decent app, but no as good as JBL's. Edifier TWS1 Pro had no app support.Connection quality: the JBL has a reliable connection with a few cuts that last 2 seconds( I did most of my testing on music mode). It didn't have aptx so I used AAC. AAC had a smoother sound with wider soundstage. SBC had harsher sound that felt compressed. Edifier TWS1 Pro had no cuts at at all thanks to aptx adaptive. Melomania had ACC and standard Aptx and BT 5.0 unlike BT 5.2 on the other two. It had many connections issues and cuts. It tends to restart when a connection is lost while playing music and you end up hearing a startup voice prompt and the volume resets to %50. Very irritating.Battery life: that all features about 10hr + 30hr battery life in theory, but only JBL can come close to these numbers. The TWS1 Pro doesn't always attach properly to the case to charge and remain connected draining battery when that happens. Melomania is even worse because on top of this it an earbuds can connect to your phone sometimes even while charging so it had the worst battery life. I didn't like the high performance mode of Melomania because it sounded worse and drained more battery. I used the regular mode.Wireless charging: only JBL has it but I don't have a charging pad to try itANC and Transparency modes: only JBL has it and the are both good but not the best in class.Case: TWS1 Pro has the thickest case. JBL's case is slightly smaller. Melomania had the smallest case. TWS1 Pro had only one LED light to indicate battery level of the case. Melomania had 5 LEDs for the case. Jbl had 3 leds for the case and 2 leds for ear earbud (7 leds in the case). That is so cool.Earbuds: TWS1 pro has bulky earbuds, but the touch area was not flat and it made touch controls easy to miss despite the responsive touch response. JBL has responsive touch controls, but the small surface area of the touch controls makes using touch controls a nightmare. Melomania had small earbuds that had responsive physical buttons.Comfort: all 3 were comfortable for me.Volume: Edifier TWS1 Pro had the lowest volume followed by Melomania. All of them were loud. JBL wasn't far behind Melomania.Sound quality: melomania had some weird magic. It sounded the best. It had great tuning and probably the best driver response time. It was warmer in a nice and natural way and it was the most detailed especially in bass. A V-shape tuning. However, it has the narrowist soundstage. JBL had a sound profile that is a bass boosted version of the Harman Target. It has a great bass. It was the smoothest sounding and it has the widest soundstage. TTWS1 lacked subbass and it had the harshest treble, but the least detailed. None of the 3 had an excellent mid but JBL had the mids of the 3 while Tws1 pro had the worst mids and weaks vocal details. In conclusion, the details of the driver carried the melomania, but JBL was the most balanced, smoothest and had the widest soundstage.Equalizer: TWS1 pro had no app. Melomania had a decent 5 band EQ but the frequencies were not properly labeled. JBL had the best EQ of all earbuds. It is a full featured EQ that labels the frequencies. I was able to make a custom EQ to make the sound even smoother even though JBL was already the most balanced of the 3.Autopause: only JBL has it.Sidetone: only JBL has that.Multipoint connection: only JBL has it. I could connect 2 devices at the same time (Android and windows), but I couldn't for some reason get both devices to seemlessly switch audio without completely disabling the other. That's weird and could be a bug.Earbuds controls: these is the area that made me want to deduct 0.5 star from my score for JBL. It has controls for everything, but you have to choose from 3 button presets that you can't manually edit for each earbud (playback, volume, ANC and Transparency). This is ridiculous. I can't have volume and playback on the same earbud in mono mode. Also I had to give up ANC preset completely because I set volume for left and playback on right. Tws1 had the best button preset for mono and stereo (despite not having ANC). Melomania had the same controls till they decided to remove volume control from mono mode in a firmware 😑Latency: tws1 pro had the lowest latency thanks to Aptx adaptive. Melomania had an average latency. JBL had the worst latency on music mode (default preset). On video mode it has a low latency that is comparable to Aptx adaptive in Tws1 pro. Normal mode didn't lower latency that much from music mode, but it made sound quality noticably worse than music mode.I had to return Melomania 1+ because of all the connection issues and it stopped working. I am still keeping the Edifier as a backup earbuds despite the not so great sound and charging issues. I love the JBl live pro 2 and it and I will update my review if anything change in it

I had the Bose noise-canceling earbuds, but had constant problems with the fit (they would not stay in place or fit snugly enough to block outside noise) and with connectivity (about 60% of the time they would NOT connect to my iPhone even if I re-booted the phone). A friend suggested that I try these JBL earbuds . . . and I now have three pair of them. Could not even tell you where my Bose are, and I don't care. I will never use them again.Perfect in-ear fit. Immediate connection to my iPhone as soon as the earbud is in my ear. Great sound quality for music, podcasts, and phone calls. Quick charging. The only niggling complaint is that the charging case has no indicator of charging level. But charging from dead to full takes only about two hours, so it is rarely an issue . . . especially with three pairs of them to work with (for basically the price of one pair of Bose!).

EDIT: I've been using these for about 2 weeks now, 2-5 hours every weekday at work, primarily for cell phone call, calls on the Microsoft Teams app on my phone, and Teams on my PC (with a couple of Zoom calls thrown in).- The multipoint is flawless. I have yet to actually need to force the earbuds to switch devices (I think you do this with a single tap followed immediately by a long press on the right earbud, but I'm not sure), they just do it automatically. I can actually be on a Teams call on my PC, transfer the call to the Teams app on my phone, and the earbuds just switch: perfect.- When I'm on a call (two-way communication through the earbuds, not just one-way music) they use about 40% of the battery in 2 hours. This disappoints me a little, but reality is I'm never on the earbuds more than 3 hours straight, and they charge up so quickly when I put them in the case that it's just not an issue.ORIGINAL: I bought these specifically for office work: I wanted a pair of earbuds with multipoint (Teams and Zoom on a Windows PC and an Android phone, as well as phone calls), long battery life, good microphones, and comfortable. These fit the bill.- Clear and understandable microphone- Very good battery life: I've seen about 10% battery usage from 1hr of music playback at about 40% volume with ANC on, and about 15% from about 1hr on a phone call. They are also supposed to get 4 hours of playback from just 15 minutes of charging (pretty tough to test this), so if I run the earbud batteries low I can power them up again fast enough to be useful.- So far pretty seamless switching between my phone and laptop, but I've mostly left them in the case until I need them, so I haven't done enough testing of this feature- Very light and comfortable with minimal protrusion into my ear canal. At this point, I've worn them for up to about 3 hours straight with no issues.- The case is pretty small, very portable and pocketable.If you're primary usage is multiple hours of calls per day from 2 devices, just get these, you'll be pretty happy.For more general use:- Crystal clear sound, but little bass out-of-the-box. However, the equalizer in the JBL app is excellent: it starts with 10 bands (+/-6db) and lets you add, subtract and move bands around in frequency seeming however you want. And again, crystal clear: you can pump the bass significantly and it sounds very good. This is the best equalizer (both impact on sound quality and flexibility) of any bluetooth earbud app I have used.- The ANC is very good, if you get a very good seal with the eartips.- Ambient mode is good, but I never feel like ambient mode is good enough to carry on a normal conversation while I'm wearing both earbuds.- "Hear-through" mode drops the volume as well as turning on some version of the ambient mode; doesn't do much for me.- Auto-play/pause of the music when you remove an earbud from your ear and replace it in your ear is not so robust, it works maybe 75% of the time: sometimes it doesn't pause the music when I pull an earbud out of my ear, sometimes it doesn't restart the music when I reinsert the earbud.- These earbuds don't quite go deep enough in my ear canals to provide the very good ANC, or a very secure fit, and if I listen to music I will need to adjust them periodically (multiple times per hour) to keep the tips really "aimed" into my ear canals and preserve the audio quality. For my particular ears, I need 1-2mm deeper protrusion; if a little shallower works well for you, you might fall in love with the audio quality and ANC.Why these aren't 5 star for me:- Fundamentally, the not-quite deep enough fit, so they don't seal well enough and not move for extended periods. This is the big thing for me, but there are a few other nits.- In the app, you need to add ANC to the touch controls (so you can cycle through ANC, Ambient mode, and Hear-Through mode). The earbuds or the app sometimes seem to forget this has been enabled and then I don't have ANC, until I go back into the app and re-enable it. I haven't seen any consistency on this yet.- Touch controls are limited: three groups of controls are available (volume control, playback control, or ANC/Ambient control) and you can choose in the app to put one group of controls on each earbud, so you have to choose which group of controls you will not have.If these fit my ears just a little better, they would be my #1 pair of earbuds, period; without that, they are #1 for calls. My Sony WF-C500s are still #1 for extended music sessions, and these JBLs are kind of tied with my Wyze Buds Pros for #1 for music with ANC.