Jabra Elite Sport True Wireless Fitness Earbuds review
The Jabra Elite Sport Fitness earbuds have no wires running behind your head, fit most ears perfectly with several hook and canal options and sound amazing. They also monitor your heart rate and there’s a fitness app we’ll touch on lightly.
My experiences with “truly wireless” earbuds have been mixed but generally with one consistent issue – the non-controlling earbud will at some point lose audio for a second causing you to wonder if you suddenly went deaf in your left ear. I haven’t managed to lose non-dominant audio on the Elite Sport without cheating.
As this is set to be an extremely positive review I’m going to lead with the negatives.
-Jabra Elite Sport
The price tag reflects the amazing audio coming in at either $199 or $249 for the two options this comes in. You’re going to want to use these to exercise with, and maybe this will be a motivator for you, who knows?
The controls take a little too much pressure to be comfortable when you’re wearing the ear foam pieces. As such changing the volume from the earbud, or selecting the listen-through mode can end up with ear-itation.
Charging coffin doesn’t have battery indicator I find useful.
+Jabra Elite Sport
The sound is amazing. This is I believe because the fit is perfect and the equalizer allowed me to go from the default Washington to the more subdued Woodward tones. I also never have been shocked out of my music by losing an ear’s audio or getting blippy sounds as the earbuds attempt to compensate for some data loss either incoming or side to side.
They sounded great out of the box, but it was nice to be able to explore different parts of the music with either a knob or a standard spectrum slider.
I’ll keep coming back to the fit. I can’t get them to wiggle or fall out, even my headbanging test tends to not feel like they’re likely to budge which makes them quite possible the only earbuds I haven’t been able to dislodge. Extremely comfortable as well.
Heart rate monitoring appears to track with anything else I’m using to test it.
There’s the usual Jabra Sport app that will help you to your goals if that sort of thing works for you. I’m not going to do much more than mention this app as it’s not currently something I’m using particularly much. I want to listen to my music, work out, and seeing my heart rate is cool and all but I’m trying to just do my thing.
The Jabra Elite Sport has a Hearthrough mode which allows you to double-tap your right earbud and listen to the world around you using the microphones in the earbuds. This allows you to have a conversation with one of those humans that might come up and talk to you without having to remove the earbud.
While that may sound a bit silly for an earbud, it takes a little longer to get these in your ears as the fit is snug.
13.5 hours playtime?
No. One version has four and a half hours and one has three. The recharging coffin will allow 13.5 hours to playtime (9 more hours,) however that will require taking them off, placing them in the box for duration of the charging time. I did not test charging times as of this writing as every time I finished with them I just slapped them in the box.
Jabra Elite Sport Warranty
These are covered for three years against sweat intrusion by the warranty. They’re verified as IP67 and can be in the water for up to 30 minutes per the back of the box.
Notable problems by other reviewers
I usually check reviews and pricing after I’ve written my own review – I try and keep myself honest. This was the case here as well.
Several people mentioned that on airplanes there are issues with the sound getting muffled. I’m betting this is an air pressure issue involved with the fit. I have not been on an airplane with these during testing, would be interesting if anyone can pin down what the cause is.
When you need to replace the ear foams a reviewer claims you’ll need to purchase a whole new set as opposed to just what you need throwing away the chunk that do not work for you.
Evidently does not fit all ears. If you’ve got ears like mine you should be golden though.
Where can I get one?
Where can I get one?The Jabra Elite Sport True Wireless Waterproof Fitness & Running Earbuds are available in two flavors from Amazon. The three hour battery version is $199, and the four and a half hour version comes in at $249.
