JBL Live Flex

Sound is subjective. What sounds good to my ears might sound bad to yours, and that has to do with a little bit of everything. Your ears are different from mine, your brain works differently, and your tastes may be completely unique. I like punchiness and bass. You might prefer more or less treble or perhaps acoustic tones. Of course, you always have to keep this in mind when reading reviews of headphones, for example, and in the case of the newly released JBL Live Flex, these personal tastes and personal references really come into play from the first minute. For this is in more ways than one a departure from JBL's classic formula. A slightly different line has been taken here, and I can see exactly why.

Live Flex are basically JBL's take on Airpods. The American audio giant has mimicked Apple's design outright, making an in-ear earpiece that doesn't have those typical silicone plugs that you insert into the ear canal. Live Flex, like Airpods, are hard plastic cups that you sort of put in your inner ear and whether you prefer that, or traditional rubber plugs, is of course a super-subjective thing. I've heard several people over the past five years tell me that they only want to use Apple Airpods (only!) because they don't like having things stuffed in the ear canal while others, like me, think just the opposite.

JBL Live Flex uses JBL's best drivers, measuring a whopping 12 millimetres, they come with the same superb noise cancellation as in the Live Pro 2 and the same ability to play spatial sound. They house six microphones for clean, noise-free call audio, and they offer awfully good battery life. You can run your Live Flex earphones for eight hours per charge and recharge them from zero to 100 percent battery four times in the included case, which has a magnetic cover. Spec-wise, these are top-of-the-line devices costing £159.99, just as JBL has made itself known for in recent years.

While this is all well and good, the problem for me is that they don't really fit in my inner ears. Or well, they don't fit at all. They just fall out. No matter how I place them, they fall out as soon as I move my head, which has forced me to review them by sitting and holding them in place in my ears. This is, of course, a bit unfair as we all know that in-ear headphones always sound their best when we push them tightly into the ear and hold them there, but given how poorly this type of design works for me, it was all that I could do to listen with the Live Flex.

The sound here is a bit thinner compared to the Live Pro 2 in particular, and part of that definitely has to do with the fact that they're just rattling around in my inner ear and not stuck in my ear canal. I miss some warmth, I miss some presence and I miss bass. If you find that JBL often makes in-ear headphones with too much of a bass focus, these may definitely suit you but for me, they lack a bit too much. Control is good though, and you can tell the drivers are big as the soundstage is wide with good separation. The call quality is also good as is the battery capacity but the noise cancellation suffers, as does the bass reproduction, because the Live Flex is not stuck in my ear canal.

If you like the design of the Airpods and thus prefer in-ear headphones that don't firmly sit in the ear canal, this is a brilliant choice because they have both less of a stalk, better battery life and better sound than the Apple Airpods. For me, however, this is not something I would ever choose over, say, the JBL Live Pro 2, which is cheaper and performs significantly better.