Jabra has created great sounding wireless earbuds with fitness in mind. Find out more in our Jabra Elite Sport review.
Should I Buy The Jabra Elite Sport?
Our Verdict
- The Jabra Elite Sport are fairly pricey but you get a lot for your money thanks to additional fitness features. Accurate heart rate monitoring and clever tracking combine to make these great for running and working out. Sound quality is decent, too, but if you’re not going to use the sporty features then look elsewhere.
Price When Reviewed
- $249
As the demand for wireless headphones increases, so does the popularity of wireless earbuds. Some are made especially for fitness and this pair even has a heart rate monitor. Here’s our Jabra Elite Sport review.
The firm is claiming these headphones are ‘the most technically advanced true wireless sport earbuds’. That’s fairly specific and the word ‘true’ in the area of the market means there are no wires whatsoever.
Price
You’re not going to get technically advanced headphones for cheap and the Jabra Elite Sport are £229. However, you can get them a lot cheaper on Amazon.
It’s a lot considering rivals from the likes of Sony and Jaybird are cheaper, but you don’t get things like the heart rate monitoring and other features.
Design And Build
The Elite Sport earbuds are fairly chunky but not too heavy. The size is only really an issue if you have quite small ears.
Everyone has very different ears in terms of size and shape and wireless earbuds require a really good fit so they not only stay in place but also sound good.
At first we couldn’t get them to fit very well but Jabra supplies the Elite Sport earbuds with six different pairs of tips (half silicon and half foam) and three sets of wings. That’s plenty of combinations so you should be able to find the right formula.
Being built for sport, the headphones have an IP67 rating so they’re dust and waterproof up to one meter so you don’t need to worry about them too much. It also means you can give them a wipe or wash. If you register them, you get a three year warranty against sweat damage.
Each earbud has two buttons with the left for volume and skip track and the right for other things like play/pause and toggling the Hear Through mode we’ll explain below.
That’s a really good amount of control but pushing the buttons can easily ram the earbud into your ear canal which is painful. We’ve found it better to grip the earbud then push the button.
The Elite Sport earbuds are available in two colours: Black or Lime Green Grey with the wings being green.
Sound Quality And Features
As well as being wireless headphones, Jabra has added a bunch of sporty features so make the suitable for fitness and sporting activities. That’s partly why you’re paying the price for these headphones.
With a clinical grade heart rate monitor and TrackFit motion counting sensor (tri-axis accelerometer) there’s plenty you can do with these headphones. Via the Jabra Sport app you can track runs but also do other workouts such as cross-training. You can use other apps like Strava if you want to, though.
The Jabra Coach will talk to you in real-time (if you want) and you get tonnes of data and feedback so you can improve. You can track all kinds of things including speed, distance, pace, steps, cadence, calories, heart rate, heart rate zone and VO2 max estimation.
There’s plenty for fitness enthusiasts to get stuck into here and the heart rate monitor is very accurate.
Microphones on the outside of the earbud mean the Elite Sport can play you whatever you would be hearing if the headphones weren’t in. This means you’ll be more aware of dangers when out and about or have a conversation without any hassle. The microphones are also used for hands-free phone calls.
In terms of battery life, the Jabra Elite Sport will last up to four and half hours on a single charge. That’s with or without activity tracking and the compact charging case will charge the headphones twice giving you a total of 13 and a half hours.
Last but not least is sound quality. All of the above would be fairly pointless if these headphones sounded rubbish.
Gladly that’s not the case and we’re pretty impressed with the sound quality of the Jabra Elite Sport. There’s no driver size listed but the firm describes them as ‘bespoke bass-enriched speakers’ and they have a frequency response of 20-20,000Hz matching the human hearing range.
When you get a nice fit, the earbuds sound generally really good. The bass is rich but nicely controlled so doesn’t drown everything out. Mid-range is perfectly good but it’s the top-end that’s particularly impressive.
The headphones are very bright and detailed which overall sounds good. Some tracks can end up being more top-end than mid so lose vocals resulting is a slightly harsh sound but this doesn’t happen too often.
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