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How long do the Charge 6 and Flip 7 last at party volume?

The JBL Charge 6 and the Flip 7 are new for 2025.

Short answer: Not as long as you’d hope.

I tested the battery life of the Charge 6 and Flip 7 using a continuous music loop with the stock EQ at 80dB, measured from 1 metre away. The Charge 6 lasted for only 13 hours and 15 minutes, and the Flip 7 was even less impressive, lasting just 6 hours and 16 minutes.

That’s nearly half of what’s on the spec sheet for these two speakers, and a big deal if you plan to use these speakers at a party or outdoors. While 13 hours with the Charge 6 is still a decent run time for a lengthy beach day or a get-together with your pals, you may be reaching for your charging cable sooner than you think if you’re relying on your Flip 7 for your next camping trip.

Why do our battery results differ so much from JBL’s?

The JBL Charge 6 brings more bass while still being portable.

Whether headphones or speakers, manufacturers will test at quiet volumes to get ideal results. We test at 80dB from one meter because that’s closer to how people actually use portable speakers.

Testing at 80dB gives a much more realistic picture of battery life when you’re actually using the speaker the way it was meant to be used.

If you’re outside, in a group, or just trying to fill a room, 50% volume isn’t going to cut it when it comes to speakers like the Charge 6 or Flip 7. Most of us crank the volume higher to be heard over conversations or background noise.

How to make your speaker last longer

If you’re not getting the battery life you’d hoped for, there are a few simple ways to extend it, although they might not be ideal.

The first one is obvious: lowering the volume. Even turning down your speaker just a few clicks can add hours of playback. You’ll also want to avoid any bass-heavy EQ settings. Bummer, I know, but it can also help extend your speaker’s battery life. An example of this is JBL’s new “PlayTime Boost”, feature on the Charge 6 and Flip 7. It claims it can extend your battery life by several hours, but in reality, it’s just an EQ setting set that cuts your bass response.

The harder your speaker has to work, like pumping out bass-heavy EDM, for example, the faster the battery will drain.

For comparison, the Soundcore Boom 2 advertises 24 hours of playback off a single charge. But that’s at 50% volume without bass boost and without its party lights on. We replicated this test in our labs, and we were able to squeeze a whopping 27 hours and 8 minutes of playback out of the Boom 2. It looks impressive on paper, but listening to a speaker with no bass boost and no party lights at half volume doesn’t exactly sound like a fun party to me. Still, if you absolutely need your battery to last as long as possible, it can be done.

Should you still buy the JBL Charge 6 and Flip 7?

The Flip 7 now offers a 7-band custom EQ.

These are the best-sounding, most refined versions of JBL’s Charge and Flip lines yet. They’re durable, have excellent companion app support, with excellent app support and great sound for compact mono speakers. There is no doubt about that.

But in the end, don’t expect JBL’s battery claims to hold up if you’re blasting music at your next party. Consumers deserve realistic expectations. We test at loud volumes because that’s how most people use these speakers. If you plan to do the same, adjust your expectations and maybe your usage accordingly. Otherwise, be sure to keep a portable battery bank on hand to prevent a serious party foul!

That said, not everyone has an iPhone, nor does everyone want to spend hundreds of dollars on their earbuds. So, while the AirPods Pro 2 are good, they are not an ideal choice for everyone. For everyone who doesn’t want AirPods, I’ve compiled the list below of my best AirPods Pro 2 alternatives. I’ve personally tested each of the earbuds on this list, and we have also put them through our SoundGuys testing lab to get objective measurements on sound quality, noise canceling performance, and battery life.

Android alternative: Google Pixel Buds Pro 2

The Google Pixel Buds Pro 2 are very tiny earbuds.

If you are jealous of the seamless integration and plethora of features that iPhone users get with their AirPods, look to the Google Pixel Buds Pro 2 (Google Pixel Buds Pro 2). As the native earbud offering from the maker of Android, you get a very similar experience to that of AirPods with an iPhone, including instant pairing across devices and AI integration. Just like how the AirPods Pro 2 have a custom H2 chip, the Google Pixel Buds Pro 2 have a proprietary Tensor A1 chip to handle on-device processing for improved noise canceling and sound quality.

One of my favorite things about the Pixel Buds Pro 2 is how comfortable these earbuds are. I often turn to AirPods Pro 2 because of how well they fit my ears, but the Pixel Buds Pro 2 are right up there in terms of fit and comfort. Each earbud is small and lightweight, and the soft rubber fin on the back of the earbuds holds them in place while working out.

Based on our measurements, the Pixel Buds Pro 2 have very similar performance to the AirPods Pro 2. We found the Pixel Buds Pro 2 reduce the loudness of outside noise by an average of 80%, just a tad behind the 83% of the AirPods Pro 2. Our frequency response measurements show that the default sound of the Pixel Buds Pro 2 is very similar to the AirPods Pro 2. One plus of the Pixel Buds Pro 2 is that it comes with a 5-band custom equalizer within the Pixel Buds app, so you can actually customize the sound of the earbuds to your liking, something that is a challenge with AirPods.

Read our full Google Pixel Buds Pro 2 review

Samsung alternative: Galaxy Buds3 Pro

Similar design, similar price.

While the Pixel Buds are the all-around choice for Android users, the Galaxy Buds3 Pro () are the ideal choice if you happen to have a flagship Samsung phone. Samsung caught some flack for copying the AirPods design with their newest earbuds, but I’m not complaining. I find this earbud design comfortable, while the protruding stems make for intuitive pinch and swipe controls.

If you have a Samsung phone, the settings and features of the Galaxy Buds3 Pro integrate natively into the operating system. You can also take advantage of the suite of features that Samsung refers to as Galaxy AI, with the flagship feature being real-time translation to another language while wearing the earbuds. Another perk of using these earbuds with a Samsung device is access to the Samsung Seamless Codec, which provides high-res audio up to 24-bit/96kHz.

In our testing, we found the Samsung Galaxy Buds3 Pro reduce the loudness of external noise by an average of 76%. While this is a step back from the performance of the AirPods Pro 2, it’s still more than enough noise reduction for most use cases. These earbuds provide a bit more emphasis on bass and treble out of the box compared to AirPods, which some might consider a more exciting sound. If you don’t like how they sound out of the box, you can dive into the EQ and tweak to your preference.

Read our full Samsung Galaxy Buds3 Pro review

Budget alternative: SoundPEATS Capsule 3 Pro+

These budget earbuds have a premium design.

It’s 2025, and that means you don’t need to spend hundreds of dollars to get good wireless earbuds anymore. In fact, you can often find great wireless earbuds for less than $100, such as the SoundPEATS Capsule3 Pro+ ().

My favorite thing about these earbuds is their sound quality. The SoundPEATS Capsule3 Pro+ have xMEMS drivers inside each earbud, an innovative new headphone technology that delivers excellent treble clarity. In my opinion, these are among the best-sounding earbuds on the market, an impressive feat considering their price.

The SoundPEATS Capsule3 Pro+ are no slouch in other features either. The ANC reduces outside noise by an average of 81%, right in line with the performance of the flagship offerings. While these earbuds might not integrate into the operating system of your phone quite as seamlessly as the options from Apple, Google, and Samsung, they do still come with the PeatsAudio companion app. Within this app, you can customize the controls, enable the low-latency gaming mode, and adjust the sound in the 10-band equalizer.

Read our full SoundPEATS Capsule3 Pro+ review

Which of these AirPods Pro 2 alternatives would you buy? Let us know in the poll below.

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But don’t worry, I’ve got you.

How to get the best songs to test headphones

Despite the existence of tons of lists online, there isn’t an objective answer. No matter how many times people in HiFi swear by the Eagles’ hit Hotel California or Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car, the truth is that headphones have to satisfy the listener, and only you are going to be able to tell the world what songs are best to test headphones… for your head. Anyone professing that one song is better than others to test headphones is missing the point, and misleading you — so go ahead and close all those tabs of other articles if they give you specific songs. If you’ll allow me to be your guide, I’ll lead you to the answer.

Necessary background

Before I give up the big secret here, there’s a few things you need to know in order to understand what I’m about to tell you.

You do not need to have robot ears to tell if something sounds like garbage.

Consider what you’re actually doing when you yourself are testing headphones. What does that mean? If you’re looking for more granular points about the performance of a device, shouldn’t you be focusing on how to assess that? Even if you believe that measurements are silly, surely you recognize that all elements in your listening setup should get music to your ears as unchanged from the original as possible? In that light, the following should be a little more obvious:

1. Familiarity with a song and all of its little elements is the most important thing for anyone to test headphones.
2. Music you don’t listen to very often is a poor choice to test headphones because you might not catch anything that’s missing, altered, or affected in a negative way.

It’s extremely important to note that all the little tracks, elements, instruments, qualities and foibles combine to make up the piece of art. In this case, it’s a song. If an audio product’s job is to get the music to your ears as unchanged as possible, you first have to have a pretty good idea what that unchanged song sounds like, and be able to identify exactly what’s gone wrong when you hear it. This is why many reviewers tend to talk about popular songs that are a few decades old. By drawing upon experiences that could be shared with many others, writers can more effectively address sensory information that may be shared across the reviewer’s audience.

With that in mind, you’re ready for your journey.

Shut up already, tell me what to do

Yes, it’s really this easy.

Alright, fine. If you just want your answer, here’s a step-by-step guide.

1. Open your streaming service or library of choice. Bonus points if you have a lossless option available.
2. Navigate to your library’s “favorites” section.
3. Play your favorite music, and create a playlist of the songs you’re most familiar with. Try to get different songs from a wide array of genres, moods, and pacings. The more varied your playlist, the more situations you’ll be able to test.
4. Listen to the playlist with the headphones you want to test. Record your thoughts, impressions and notes.

The best songs to test headphones with for you, the individual testing headphones, will be included in the playlist after step 3. That’s it. There’s your answer. Those are the best songs to test your headphones with.

How to use a song to test headphones

Once you have your playlist of songs to test headphones, just start listening. Eliminate distractions, but let your mind wander when deciding to focus on parts of the songs you listen to. Your brain will notice when things sound “off” and try to figure out what it is exactly that’s amiss. Over time, you’ll learn to catalog these issues, and become adept at putting your proverbial finger on common pain points. It’s okay if you listen to something multiple times.

You won’t be able to test headphones without listening to them, so go listen to them.

If you want to go hyper-nerd about it, you can always compare your impressions to our measurements to see if the issue is something you don’t like about frequency response. You could also use a program to visualize your music with something called a spectrogram to see if you can hunt and find parts of your music that were hard to hear. If they show up on the spectrogram but you can’t hear them, there may be something going on worth investigating!

For those of you wanting to train your own ears to be as critical as they can be, you have a few options.

1. Cut your teeth with Erin’s demonstration using pink noise.
2. Complete the Harman How to Listen program.
3. Muck about SoundGym for a spell to increase your skills.
4. Practice making your own music, and train yourself to identify sounds you don’t like.

The sky’s the limit. Go get listening!

Except for the Dyson Zone headphones.

Without a doubt, the Zone headphones are the biggest stain on the legacy of a brand that has otherwise dominated every industry it enters. In our Dyson Zone headphones review, we tore into these headphones for their ridiculous design, hazard to public safety, and insanely high price tag. Seriously, these things made the Apple AirPods Max look affordable in comparison, and that is hard to do.

Now, in 2025, Dyson has officially discontinued the Zone headphones.

In an interview with Wired, Jake Dyson said that “Zone was completely ahead of its time”. We disagree.

If anything, it appears the Dyson Zone was too late for its time. If these air-purifying headphones had been released at the peak of the pandemic in 2020, perhaps people would have jumped all over these thousand-dollar headphones with a mask. Instead, as evidenced by the product being discontinued only two years after launch, there clearly was not a market for the Dyson Zone in 2023.

It’s not quite Bane’s mask, but it evokes the same sort of image.

To this day, when people walk into the SoundGuys office and see the Dyson Zone, it gets a strong reaction. Trying to explain this product and why it exists is a struggle. Nobody would wear it out in public, but a few laughs are shared when someone puts it on and inevitably does their best impression of Bane from the Dark Knight Rises.

Since the release of the Dyson Zone, the company has been trying to undo their mistake, mainly by launching the Dyson OnTrac headphones (). These new headphones from Dyson are just that – headphones. No Bane mask, no attempts at air purification. Just headphones.

The latest headphones from Dyson ditch the mask.

We always thought that the Dyson Zone headphones were pretty decent headphones once you took off the mask. Unlike Bane, it looks like the secret to success for Dyson was to remove the mask.

Remember before 2007 when mobile phones were just phones? It was only after the release of the iPhone that phones began to replace or substitute devices like computers, cameras, GPS, and MP3 players. Mobile phones had their big transitional phase into smartphones, the all-in-one devices we know them to be today. Now, the new models are mostly iterative updates. I think the same transformation is happening with wireless earbuds, except this time, they’re not replacing your existing gadgets—they’re creating entirely new categories of essentials.

The evolution of wireless earbuds

Like how Apple disrupted the smartphone market with the iPhone, AirPods popularized many features for wireless earbuds.

Love ’em or hate ’em, Apple has been a pioneer in popularizing wireless earbuds since the release of the first AirPods nine years ago, just as they did in the phone industry with the iPhone. Because Apple cut the cord, removed the headphone jack from their phones, and popularized a freedom from the tangled mess of earbuds stuffed in your pocket, battery life became a top concern for buyers. And with audio now transmitted over Bluetooth, sound quality and latency became new concerns with solutions like Hi-Res audio and new ways to personalize your music listening with companion apps, EQs, and spatial audio effects.

But perhaps the biggest, or at least most appreciated, feature of wearing earbuds out in the world was noise cancelation. While traditionally reserved for more premium, expensive products, this technology has trickled down to many sub-$100 models, serving a growing desire to block out more of the outside world. Conversely, people want to let the outside world in without removing their earbuds, achieved by transparency modes that are now expected and not just nice to have.

As we go about our days with our wireless earbuds, support for wireless charging has introduced quick and convenient ways to top up, and support for Bluetooth Multipoint now lets us pair with multiple devices and switch between them seamlessly. We wear earbuds at the office, on the beach, on the trails, and at the gym, and thus they also needed greater protection against the elements in the form of IP ratings. Accidentally drop your earbuds into a 10-foot pool? No problem. Some earbuds give you up to 30 minutes to retrieve them.

Open earbuds with over-ear hooks are a new and growing product category.

The size and shape of wireless earbuds have also changed to fit the way we want to wear them. In addition to the two classic variants (unsealed and fully sealed), we are seeing a new open-ear earbuds category explode on the market, giving people a totally transparent way to hear the world around them while enjoying their tunes. Open-ears come in ear hook and ear clip shapes to serve different styles and situations, whether it be athletics or working on a jobsite where you always need to be reachable.

In 2024, we saw health and fitness take new leaps in innovation with the first earbuds with built-in heart-rate tracking. Like the smartwatch on your wrist, earbuds can now track your pulse and feed the data to your phone. Apple also announced that the AirPods Pro 2 would soon meet the FDA’s criteria for over-the-counter (OTC) hearing aids for those with mild to moderate hearing loss, disrupting a long-established and expensive industry. You’ll soon no longer have to pay several thousand dollars for hearing aid functionality, only several hundred, thanks to wireless earbuds.

The Smart Charging Case can handle most of the app’s functions from the case itself, using a touchscreen.

Charging cases are also getting smarter with built-in touch screens and tactile controls. Some cases, such as the JBL Tour Pro 3‘s, can even act as wireless transmitters when you want to plug in to wired audio sources, like airplane seatback entertainment systems. Additionally, though its adoption is rolling out slower than I expected, Bluetooth Auracast, with its publicly available broadcasts, is making its way into new flagship wireless earbuds.

The exciting future of wireless earbuds

It’s not just during the day that people are wearing wireless earbuds either; it’s also overnight. Sleepbuds are a budding product category promising a better night’s sleep, designed with a flat surface and wingtips to fit securely inside one’s ears. From premium models like the Ozlo Sleepbuds to budget-friendly models like the Soundcore Sleep A30, the first to implement ANC to block out snoring, earbuds are becoming a full 24-hour companion, and I don’t think it will be long before sleepbuds merge with the ones we wear during the day to become a single solution.

Like nearly every other tech product at the moment, earbuds are not immune to the trend of AI. Unlike many of the AI-enabled pins, pendants, glasses, and gadgets out there, however, I believe earbuds are the most naturally suited to house AI companions. I’ve made the analogy to the 2013 film Her before, but it’s worth mentioning again that its premise is no longer science fiction. More than just issuing straightforward commands to a voice assistant, like ‘turn on the lights,’ you can now vent your drama to your earbuds, and they will lend a sympathetic ear.

The Galaxy Buds 3 Pro look futuristic.

Not only are wireless earbuds like the Galaxy Buds Pro3 utilizing AI for real-time translation like the devices from Star Trek, but products from Nothing and CMF let you activate and speak with ChatGPT at the tap of a finger. It’s only a matter of time before, say, an AI like Google Gemini in combination with the Google Pixel Buds Pro 2 can interact with the rest of the Google app ecosystem to add things to your calendar, send emails, or recommend nearby restaurants all hands-free.

And we haven’t even gotten to my most anticipated wireless earbuds feature. In the not-so-distant future, we’ll see wireless earbuds with built-in electroencephalogram (EEG) sensors — sensors that can detect brain activity in real-time. Neurable has already done this with wireless headphones, which can measure your mental focus levels to improve your work and study habits, and the company has told me that the technology is coming to in-ear products soon.

Headphones like the MW75 Neuro can already read your mind; it’s only a matter of time before wireless earbuds can too.

When you combine EEG, heart rate, hearing aid, and sleep aid features with an always-on voice connection to a leading-edge LLM AI, imagine how much more indispensable wireless earbuds will become than they are today. Your earbuds will detect elevated stress through heart rate and brain activity, and automatically switch to noise cancelation mode while your AI assistant suggests breathing exercises or schedules a break in your calendar. In a crowded restaurant, your earbuds use AI to filter and amplify the voice of the person you’re talking to while suppressing background noise, then seamlessly translate if they’re speaking another language. Maybe your earbuds even detect early signs of illness through subtle changes in your voice patterns, temperature, heart rate variability, mental focus, and sleep quality, alerting you days before symptoms appear. All these scenarios, and more, are on the horizon, and I couldn’t be more excited.

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While AirPods do provide a lot of value for those in the Apple ecosystem, they aren’t perfect. Apple may have finally added active noise canceling to the AirPods 4, but they still lack swappable ear tips. If the AirPods 4 don’t fit your ears right, they’ll be uncomfortable, won’t block out noise, and sound quality will suffer. On the other hand, the AirPods Pro 2 are downright expensive (). So, what should you buy instead of AirPods?

Budget alternative: CMF Buds 2 Plus

The CMF Buds 2 Plus have all the features most people need.

The CMF Buds 2 Plus have all the features and performance that most people need in their wireless earbuds, for about half the price of the latest AirPods (). You get the latest and greatest Bluetooth 5.4 with support for LDAC, and the sound quality actually holds up to our expectations. We tested the CMF Buds 2 Plus here in our SoundGuys lab, and the earbuds scored a 4.8 on a scale from 1-5 according to MDAQS sound quality testing. That’s higher than the AirPods 4, and the same score as the AirPods Pro 2!

Despite their budget price, the CMF Buds 2 Plus also have active noise canceling (ANC). According to our testing, the CMF Buds 2 Plus block out an average of 83% of external noise with ANC enabled, which is on par with the performance of the AirPods Pro 2. These buds don’t skimp on features either – the included Nothing X app offers spatial audio and an equalizer to tweak the sound of the earbuds to your exact preference. For the price, it’s hard to say the CMF Buds 2 Plus don’t offer more value than any of the current AirPods options.

Read our full CMF Buds 2 Plus review

Sound quality alternative: Creative Aurvana Ace Mimi

These earbuds share a similar design to the AirPods Pro 2.

Let’s say you want wireless earbuds with the best sound quality. Should you get AirPods? Not necessarily. According to my testing, the Creative Aurvana Ace Mimi currently offer the best sound quality of any wireless earbuds on the market, thanks to their innovative xMEMS drivers. This new MEMS driver technology offers excellent detail and clarity across the highest reaches of the audible spectrum. Thanks to the partnership with Mimi, the Creative earbuds also adjust the sound of the earbuds to your ears, after doing a hearing test within the Creative app.

With a similar design and shape to the AirPods Pro, I find the Creative Aurvana Ace Mimi very comfortable to wear for long listening sessions. These earbuds also offer active noise canceling that we found blocks out an average of 76% of external noise. Battery life falls a bit short at only 4 hours and 41 minutes according to our tests, but these wireless earbuds really are the gold standard for audiophiles.

Read our full Creative Aurvana Ace Mimi review

Android alternative: Samsung Galaxy Buds3

Can you tell which is Apple and which is Samsung?

Let’s say you really like the design of AirPods. You don’t like shoving silicone ear tips down your ear canal, and you prefer the unsealed design to stay aware of your surroundings. But what if you don’t have an iPhone?

If that sounds like you, you should check out the Samsung Galaxy Buds3. Samsung copied Apple’s homework and just changed it slightly by adding an Android twist, with a few features exclusive to Samsung Galaxy phones. You get the same unsealed earbud design, with a stem to access onboard controls.

With the Galaxy Buds3, Samsung copied Apple's homework

Just like AirPods, the Galaxy Buds3 come with a ton of features. If you have a Samsung Galaxy phone, the Galaxy Buds3 work seamlessly within the operating system, without the need to mess around with Bluetooth connections or downloading an external app. Using the earbuds with a Samsung phone provides access to the Galaxy AI suite of features, which includes live translation functionality to have a conversation with someone in another language using the earbuds.

The Galaxy Buds3 suffers from the same major drawback as the AirPods 4 – if they don’t fit your ears properly, you’re pretty much screwed. On the other hand, if the earbuds do fit your ears, you can get good sound quality. The Samsung Seamless Codec provides 24bit/96kHz audio when streaming from a Samsung phone, and just like with AirPods, the Galaxy Buds have Adaptive EQ to adjust the sound of the earbuds to your ears.

Read our full Samsung Galaxy Buds3 review

Would you buy one of these AirPods alternatives, or are you sticking with the big Apple? Let us know in the poll below.

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How good is the Anker Soundcore Liberty 5 mic? You told us

45% of people rate the microphone quality as at least “Good”.

On a scale of 1-5, the Mean Opinion Score (MOS) returned by our readers is 3.36. This means users generally found the microphone quality slightly above “Okay”, leaning toward “Good”. While 10% of respondents think the microphone sounds “Perfect”, 13% think it sounds “Bad” or “Awful”. Overall, this is a pretty average response for true wireless earbuds, slightly below what we see from the best wireless earbuds on the market.

For comparison, here are the current MOS scores of the microphones from other popular wireless earbuds:

Apple AirPods 4 (n=369): 3.51

• Awful – 5%
• Bad – 8%
• Okay – 30%
• Good – 45%
• Perfect – 12%

Sony WF-1000XM5 (n=8908): 3.46

• Awful – 4%
• Bad – 9%
• Okay – 36%
• Good – 39%
• Perfect – 12%

Listen for yourself

If you haven’t had a chance to hear our microphone samples of the Soundcore Liberty 5, take a listen below. Then, answer the poll to see the most up-to-date poll response figures.

Soundcore Liberty 5 microphone demo (Ideal conditions):

Soundcore Liberty 5 microphone demo (Office conditions):

Soundcore Liberty 5 microphone demo (Street conditions):

Soundcore Liberty 5 microphone demo (Windy conditions):

Soundcore Liberty 5 microphone demo (Reverberant space):

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What we discovered about sound quality

We’ve been testing audio products for many years now, and after all that time: we’ve got a lot of data to comb through. While it’s tempting to take a look at every measurement at once to see if there’s any strong correlation to features, past studies have already confirmed there’s no relationship between frequency response and price. Sure, there’s more to sound quality than just frequency response alone, and sure, not everyone likes the same tunings. But not testing assumptions for a long time is poor practice — does adding a new way to quantify timbre, distortion, and immersiveness change anything?

We have all this fancy measurement equipment, what does the data say?

Enter Multi-Dimensional Audio Quality Scores. The brief story is this: HEAD acoustics, using data from hundreds of people, was able to create a set of machine learning algorithms to predict how that group of people would rate sound quality by several different metrics. Over the past year and a half, we’ve been collecting sample data to generate these scores, and we now have over 150 models in our database published, and more in the hopper. Because these scores take far more data into account than just frequency response, if there is a relationship between price and sound quality, this should tell us. So what happens when we compare overall scores with price?

Overall scores

What this means

Inexpensive IEMs may not compete in features, but they sure as heck compete with expensive headphones in sound quality.

If you’re wondering what all this means for you, it’s simple: Don’t worry too much about what price means for a product’s sound quality. Do these four things instead.

1. Get headphones that are comfortable to you.
2. Learn more about equalizers, how they work, and what your preferences are.
3. Research your next purchase through sites with measurements like SoundGuys.
4. Remember that the headphones are a vehicle for music: relax and enjoy.

I find it quite telling that by any means we find to quantify perceived sound quality: there doesn’t seem to be much of a relationship with price, nor has there been for about a decade now. There are tons of low-cost options out there that sound really great, and you don’t need to take out a loan to get good audio. It seems that really expensive headphones aren’t always made for the sole purpose of performance for the masses, and most enthusiast options fetch a high price due to higher-quality materials, niche appeal, or smaller-scale manufacturing.

But if anything changes, we’ll let you know.

The Sony WH-1000XM6 sounds very good compared to the Apple AirPods Max

While taste is in the ear of the beholder, there are some ways in which the Sony WH-1000XM6 has a clear advantage over the Apple AirPods Max. Even when you limit the discussion to what the masses might say, the consistent story we get via HEAD acoustics’ Multi-Dimensional Audio Quality Scores (MDAQS) is that the Sony WH-1000XM6 will be better received by more people than the Apple AirPods Max will be… but not by a huge amount.

The Sony WH-1000XM6 sounds better than the Apple AirPods Max… mostly

For the above reasons and more, we think that most people buying the Sony WH-1000XM6 and Apple AirPods Max will tend to prefer the sound of the former over the latter. However, the confounding factor of the USB lossless audio exists, as well as the user’s smartphone. Android users will undoubtedly want to use the Sony WH-1000XM6, and iPhone users might prefer the OS integrations of the Apple AirPods Max. But on a pure sound quality standpoint? The Sony WH-1000XM6 wins here.