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PCMag Australia

Why You Should Buy Jabra's New Elite 85h Headphones

Danish audio specialists Jabra entered the premium noise-cancelling headphone market with a bang this year, launching the wireless Jabra Elite 85h line.

PCMag Australia 

Sponsored by Jabra

With an insanely good battery life, and a number of unique features (notably, it’s adaptive AI technology SmartSound) the headphones are giving traditional active noise-cancelling leaders Bose and Sony a run for their money. They fall in the high-end range of wireless ANC headphones with a sticker price of AUD $499 (although you can often snag them for much cheaper at JB Hi-Fi or on Amazon), but this is great value given their quality and innovative technology.

If you’re in the market for a set of premium, noise-cancelling headphones, this is why you should choose Jabra’s Elite 85h.

Killer Battery Life

The 36-hour battery life on the Jabra’s Elite 85h (with ANC on) is unmatched, and will easily get you through any long-haul flight. The headphones also automatically stop playing when you take them off, and turn off when you fold the ear-cups in, making it easy to save power without thinking.
Even if you do forget to charge them, the headphones feature fast charging, and you can get five hours of battery life in just 15 minutes.

Intelligent Sound Technology

As mentioned earlier, the Elite 85h features Jabra’s innovative AI technology SmartSound, complete with an app that lets you customise your own sound settings.

Their ANC capabilities are top-notch, and the integrated smart tech means you can do as little (or as much) work as you like to achieve the best sound. SmartSound analyzes the environment around you with the headphones’ eight microphones, and changes the sound accordingly. It has three main noise-cancelling presets: “In Private”, “In Public” and “Commute”, which you can also manually select and customise. You can also customise and save the EQ settings.

Slick Design

The Jabra Elite 85h headphones have a good-looking minimalist design, which is also very practical. There are no touch controls – only three buttons built into the right ear-cup (which are covered by the outside cloth as not to be visible), a small button on the bottom of the right cup to activate your phone’s voice assistant, and a small button on the bottom of the left cup to change audio modes.

The headphones come in four colours. The first three – Titanium Black, Navy and Gold Beige – are available in Australia on Amazon, at JB Hi-Fi, and at WH Smith’s airport stores. The Copper Black-coloured headphones (the best-looking ones in this humble writer’s opinion) are exclusive to Amazon, and are available here.

Durability

Durability is important on such a big-ticket investment, something Jabra really considered when designing the Elite 85h. The headphones are rain resistant, and all of the internal components are nano-coated to protect against water and dust. Jabra is so confident about this that the headphones come with a combined two-year warranty against water and dust.

And for those of us where the biggest threat to our headphones is an absent mind, the accompanying app has a “Find My Jabra” location service (however this only works to find the last place you disconnected your headphones).

As premium-quality headphones become more and more accessible, never has there been a better time to check out the alternatives to Bose and Sony. Jabra has a demonstrated history of making top-quality noise-cancelling earphones (with the Elite 65t and Elite Sport), and their first foray into the wireless ANC over-ear market won’t have you disappointed.
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