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- Eye-catching design and great build quality
- Loads of customisation options
- Excellent battery life
- Over-emphasised bass response
- ANC struggles with voices
- No hard-shell case included
JBL announced its new JBL Live 780NC over-ear headphones in camp, colourful and hastily choreographed fashion in Amsterdam a couple of months ago. I captured the moment on the Expert Reviews Instagram and have been intermittently using the headphones ever since to see whether they perform more convincingly than the models did that day.
I’m pleased to say they do, but they still need a bit of work. Not in design, build or personalisation terms. These are great-looking, well-made headphones that offer loads of ways to tweak your experience. However, they lack something in the ANC and audio quality departments.
What do you get for the money?
The JBL Live 780NC sit a step down from the flagship JBL Tour One M3 as the brand’s second-tier over-ear headphones. At £170, they’re quite a bit cheaper, even though the Tour One M3 can be had for £230 right now, a big reduction on their original price of £370.
The Live 780NC operate over a newer version of Bluetooth (Bluetooth 6.0 vs Bluetooth 5.3), but support the same codecs (SBC, AAC, LC3 and LDAC) as well as multipoint pairing and Auracast. Like the Tour One M3, they feature JBL’s True Adaptive Noise Cancelling 2.0 technology. However, the microphone setup is less advanced, with six microphones, three built into each earcup, compared with the eight of the more advanced headphones.
The headphones are also tuned differently. Both use 40mm drivers, but the Live 780NC have “JBL Signature Sound”, whereas the Tour One M3 have “JBL Pro Sound”, a tuning that seeks to deliver “deep bass, balanced mids and crystal-clear highs”.
The Live 780NC are the lighter of the two pairs. At 260g, they weigh 18g less than the Tour One M3, and are only marginally heavier than the best-in-class Sony WH-1000XM6, which come in at 254g. They’re also available in a brighter and more fun range of colours. We don’t quite get full rainbow representation, but purple, green, blue, sand and the orange I tested are eye-catching options, alongside your basic black and white finishes.
Features and customisation galore
Elsewhere, the Live 780NC offer wired audio over USB-C, and an extensive suite of features in the JBL Headphones app. Among these are: Personal Sound Amplification, which highlights “situational sounds” in your environment to aid conversation; video and audio modes to maximise sound quality or reduce latency; wear detection; three Spatial Sound modes; a “Relax” mode that plays ambient sounds; Personi-Fi audio personalisation; several preset EQs, including an adaptive one that automatically adjusts in real-time; and customisable button and touch controls.
Some of those features are quite power-hungry, but with all of them turned off and using the headphones over Bluetooth, you can expect around 80 hours of audio playback. That epic figure drops to 50 hours if you engage ANC, which tracks with my experience
I’ve averaged about an hour of listening time a day since receiving the headphones in late May, and had to charge the Live 780NC for the first time at the start of August. JBL doesn’t include a charging cable in the box, but does supply a USB-C-to-3.5mm cable for wired listening, along with a fabric carrying pouch.
How I tested the JBL Live 780NC
During a two-month period, I used the Live 780NC in a range of real-world scenarios, taking breaks to put lighter on-ear headphones on when the weather got too hot to test JBL’s latest over-ears comfortably.
I wore them on a flight home from JBL’s launch event in Amsterdam, during my commute to and from work, which involves an overground train and two Tubes, while walking around London, in our busy Old Street office, and at home in more serene surroundings.
Each noise cancellation level was tested in all these environments, both while listening to music and with no audio playing. I spent time on work calls on Google Meet and social calls on my phone to assess microphone quality, and used all of the features in the JBL Headphones app to judge their utility and effectiveness.
How comfortable are they?
The Live 780NC aren’t the most comfortable over-ear headphones I’ve ever worn, but they’re by no means the least comfortable, either. They’re relatively light, and there’s a sensible amount of cushioning on the inside of the earcups. I would have liked a bit more space inside the cups. My ears felt a little cramped at times, which was why I found the 780NC such a struggle to wear when temperatures soared in London.
The inside of the headband is lined with soft silicone and distributed weight effectively across the top of my head. There was little to no movement when I shook my head vigorously trying to disturb the headphones; the fit here is very stable and sturdy.
I’d describe the build quality in similar terms. The metal hinge joining the headband to the earcups feels reassuringly solid and lets you fold the cups inward for easy storage in the fabric pouch. This is a lightweight transportation solution, but I’d have preferred a more durable hard-shell case to protect the headphones.
How easy are they to control?
Like many headphones of their class, the JBL Live 780NC uses a mix of physical buttons and touch controls. On the left earcup, there’s a split volume up/down button, while on the right earcup there’s a power/pairing switch and the ANC button.
By default, a single press on the latter cycles between ANC and Ambient Aware mode. A double press toggles TalkThru on or off, and holding the button down hails your phone’s native voice assistant. However, you’re free to assign different commands to the double, triple and press-and-hold actions to cover play/pause, track skipping, EQ and Spatial Sound activation. I didn’t change much around, but assigned Spatial Sound to a triple tap to engage it without opening the app.
The reason I didn’t find myself tweaking too many things is that you’ve got touch controls available via the right earcup that work consistently well. It took me a while to learn exactly where to tap, but once I’d done so, using single, double and triple taps to govern audio playback was easy.
How effective is the noise cancellation?
The Live 780NC attenuate low frequencies well. The headphones successfully dampened both deep rumbles on my flight home from Amsterdam, and sub-200Hz ambient noises on public transport in London.
What the headphones don’t do so well is tackle mid-range and treble frequencies. The high-pitched screeches of a group of nursery school kids outside the office made it through to my ears clear as day, while Morty’s voice in Rick and Morty made it through to my eardrums with little resistance. This is less of an issue when pushing towards higher volumes, but I was very aware of it at 40% volume and below.
The Ambient Aware and TalkThru modes are great, though. Both pipe external sound into the ears clearly and naturally; with the latter emphasising vocal frequencies more strongly. I didn’t notice a huge difference in my ability to hold a conversation between the two modes, though, so typically just used the ANC button to cycle to Ambient Mode when I wanted to tune in to my surroundings.
How good are they for calls and online meetings?
I wouldn’t recommend using the JBL Live 780NC for calls in serious professional environments; the quality of their microphones is some way off that of a dedicated comms headset.
When I asked the newest member of the Expert Reviews team, Alex Manners, to describe the sound quality while we were on a video call together, he said they came across “quite light”, adding “if I didn’t know you had a pair of headphones on, I’d have said you were just speaking into your laptop”. That’s not a ringing endorsement.
Having listened to the results of the voice recording tests I run on all headphones, I have to agree. While the articulation of individual words was pretty clear for the most part, my ramblings sounded rather distant and distorted when I raised my voice. You can adjust how your voice sounds to others in the app, but this didn’t result in noticeable improvement.
What’s the sound quality like?
The sound quality of the JBL Live 780NC disappointed me a bit, largely due to a bass response that lacks refinement and can be over-assertive, leaving the overall sound unbalanced.
I love big bass, but it’s got to be clean, and sub-bass frequencies here were just too strongly emphasised. The earcups reverberated against my head on certain throbbing basslines, which detracted from the good work the Live 780NC were doing elsewhere. I was impressed by the way they handled the vocals on The Goo Goo Dolls’ Iris, and the headphones reproduced the drive and energy of the electric guitars on Foo Fighters’ Everlong really well.
However, that unruly low-end was always trying to take centre stage. If you want a unique sonic experience, give the Bass or Extreme Bass EQ presets a go when listening to anything other than dance music. It’s really something. And I don’t mean that in a good way, though it can be fun to feel like you’re standing by a subwoofer at a festival in the middle of a field in Sussex every once in a while.
Studio mode is the way forward
If you do buy the Live 780NC, I highly recommend switching to the Studio preset immediately. It dials back the bass, and the headphones sound far better for it. Vocal mode holds up well, too: Sam Smith’s voice sounded great on When He’s Gone, and the mode cleanly highlighted the backing vocals, which play a key role alongside the track’s instruments.
I’d also recommend going through the Personi-Fi hearing test and personalising your sound. The result of my test brought the mids up a touch and enhanced the treble, which improved things. But it did also slightly emphasise the bass, which wasn’t necessary.
I got decent use out of the Movie Spatial Sound mode when watching shows and films on Netflix; it positions audio cues relatively accurately within its expanded soundstage, and dialogue remains clear. The Music mode didn’t grab me, though, sounding artificial and forced more often than not.
Should you buy the JBL Live 780NC?
Unless you can’t resist the colourful finishes the JBL Live 780NC are available in, I recommend buying the Nothing Headphone (a) or Soundcore Space 2 instead.
The trio share similar weaknesses, but for me, the Soundcore are more comfortable, and the Nothing sound better, while both pairs are cheaper than the JBL. The Live 780NC are right up there in terms of features and looks, but they’re not special enough to convince me they’re worth the extra cash.
