The JBL Live 650BTNC offers good noise-cancellation, battery life, comfort, and features for a great price. We came away impressed at the well-rounded package JBL put together here and highly recommend it those who don’t want to splurge on the flagship Bose.
For the money, the JBL Live 650BTNC punch above its weight in terms of sound quality, build, and features. The cons we have listed above – like mapping the assistant to the touchpad and its use of microUSB are simply nitpicks with none of them being outright deal-breakers. That said, we came away very impressed at the well-rounded package JBL created for the market and would certainly recommend them to anyone in the market for a cheap pair of noise-cancelling headphones.
For the same price, the Plantronics BackBeat Pro 2 have long been our go-to recommendation but they’re getting long in the tooth at this point. They have niceties like auto play-pause when you take off the headphone but the JBL has support for voice assistants, is built better and sound better.
If you don’t want to spend on the Bose QC35 II, you’ll be satisfied with the JBL Live 650BTNC knowing that you’re not sacrificing too much in the way of performance or features.
Good
Dynamic, punchy sound
Supports Google Assistant + Alexa
Extremely comfortable
Bad
MicroUSB charging
Good, but not class-leading ANC
Non-adjustable ANC
