If you work from home and find earphones uncomfortable for long periods of wear, you might want to consider an over-ear Bluetooth headset. The $79.99 JLab JBuds Work is an affordable headset-headphone hybrid that you can use to listen to music in stereo and communicate on video calls thanks to a retractable boom mic, and we particularly like its convenient mono and passive wired modes. You won’t find any frills here like you will with the costlier Jabra Evolve2 65 ($249) or Plantronics Voyager 4220 UC ($219.95), but for less than half the price, the JBuds Work is an effective lower-cost alternative.
A Convertible Design and Long Battery Life
Available in black with an eggshell finish, the headset looks like your average pair of over-ear headphones—except for the pull-down boom mic. The earpads feature generous cushioning, as does the underside of the headband—both use a memory foam material with a black cloth covering. The inside of the cups sports a blue cloth material with large left and right demarcations. The earcups fit comfortably and are easy to adjust; you can slide each one up or down the headband to your preference.
Internally, 40mm dynamic drivers deliver a frequency range of 20Hz to 20kHz. The headset is compatible with Bluetooth 5.0 and supports the AAC and SBC codecs, but not AptX. One neat feature is that the headset can pair with up to two devices simultaneously. That means you can take calls on your phone and join video meetings on your computer without having to disconnect and pair again each time.
On the side panel of the right earcup, you get plus and minus buttons that handle both the volume and track navigation; we’re not fans of combining these functions, as it’s too easy to accidentally skip a track when you intend to adjust the volume. You can also press the up and down buttons simultaneously to switch between the two EQ modes—Voice and Music. These modes make a notable difference, so we recommend you change them based on your activity.
A multifunction button handles power, playback, call management, Bluetooth pairing, and a Hear Yourself feature. In testing, the Hear Yourself feature, which supposedly activates with a triple-press of the multifunction button, didn’t seem to do anything. All of the other functions worked fine though. Elsewhere, the JLab logo on the right ear doubles as a mute button—when you press it, an LED at the end of the boom mic turns red and you hear a voice prompt.
A USB-C port for the included USB-C charging cable sits beside these controls. The package also includes a USB-C-to-3.5mm headphone jack cable, a useful extra that allows you to use the headset passively with devices that offer a headphone jack. JLab estimates that it can last roughly 60 hours on battery, but your experience may differ based on your volume levels.
Another neat feature of the headset is that you can use it in mono mode by detaching the left earcup—simply unplug the cable and snap it off. In its place, a foam piece snaps in to press against the area just above your ear to provide stability. Then, when you want to use the headset as headphones, just snap the earcup back on. This is a convenient option if you prefer to keep an open ear.
The JLab app (available for Android and iOS) is lackluster. You can buy items from the JLab website and run an unnecessary (but harmless) audio burn-in tool, but that’s about it. We didn’t find any compelling reason to download it.
Excellent Mic Clarity, Decent Audio
The dual-condenser mic array offers excellent performance. When we tested it with the Voice Memos app on an iPhone, we could understand every word we recorded clearly. And because of the boom arm, you get a stronger signal and better low-frequency response than with typical Bluetooth headphones. As a result, voices (even deep ones) sound natural and you don’t have to worry about Bluetooth audio artifacts affecting the sound. You shouldn’t have any issues with mobile or video calls on a strong connection.
For music, the headset delivers an adequate listening experience in the Music EQ mode. The drivers sound good enough for the price, but we would judge them much more harshly if they were in a standalone pair of headphones.
On tracks with intense sub-bass content, like The Knife’s “Silent Shout,” the drivers deliver impressive thump, and at unwise listening levels (the drivers can get loud), the deep bass doesn’t distort.
Bill Callahan’s “Drover,” a track with far less deep bass in the mix, gives us a better sense of the sound signature. The drums benefit from extra bass heft, but never extend into unnaturally thunderous territory. Callahan’s baritone vocals get some extra low-mid richness but could use a bit more high-mid presence. Although the track never sounds muddy and the highs are relatively bright, the high-mids sound slightly dull.
On Jay-Z and Kanye West’s “No Church in the Wild,” the kick drum loop receives less high-mid presence than is ideal, so its punchy attack sounds a little subdued. The highs are in full force, though—we hear the vinyl crackle and hiss in the background a little more than usual. The sub-bass synth hits that punctuate the beat come across with decent bass depth, too.
That said, we noticed an audible hiss whenever we played music on our iPhone in testing. The hiss disappears a second or two after you pause the music and the tone doesn’t overwhelm the audio, but this it’s there.
An Effective and Versatile Headset
Think of the JLab JBuds Work as a Bluetooth headset that also happens to do a decent job with stereo music playback. The boom mic sounds clear, and we like the option to use the headset in mono mode by removing an earcup. As for listening to music, performance is fine for the price, but it doesn’t beat a dedicated pair of similarly priced headphones. If you can stretch your budget, the Jabra Evolve2 65 or Plantronics Voyager 4220 UC both deliver stronger stereo audio performance and offer more features, but they also cost a lot more. That makes the JBuds Work a perfectly fine alternative for the price.
