Review Jabra Elite 85h – Offers Incredible Battery Life And Great Noise Cancellation

With models like the Jabra Elite Sport and Jabra Elite 65t, the Danish audio company’s credentials in the field of wireless in-ear headphones have been regularly demonstrated over the past couple of years.

With its Jabra Elite 85h active noise-cancelling headphones, which provide outstanding battery life and a number of AI smart features that can be customized through the company’s Sound+ app, Jabra now intends to upend the premium over-ear headphone market. Everything you would anticipate from some of the top noise-cancelling headphones.

Design

Jabra’s Elite 85h headsets include a strong fake leather casing with a plush fabric inside that immediately exudes luxury. You’ll also discover a 3.5mm Aux cable, an airline audio adaptor, and a USB Type-C charging cable tucked away behind the case’s fabric divider.

Jabra’s first try at a set of premium wireless ANC headphones is an unqualified success in the aesthetics and comfort categories, but we know you aren’t here to read about the Elite 85h’s carry case and other accessories.

Jabra’s Elite 85h employs a sense of minimalistic chic in its design. It is available in Titanium Black, Gold Beige, and Navy (which is what we’ve reviewed), with each pair of headphones choosing a one-color approach that only slightly changes shade for its extendable arms and subtle logos on each side of the headband.

Although titanium was stated before, the headphones themselves are primarily made of plastic (that includes the aforementioned extendable arms, which have a brushed-metal appearance). The plastic is fortunately fairly strong and provides a little more flexibility to cater for smaller and larger heads.

The Elite 85h boasts an aesthetically pleasant meshed-fabric material around the top of the headband and on the outside edge of each ear cup, which immediately lends the headphones a feeling of individuality.

The Elite 85h’s ear cups and underside of the headband are both covered in faux leather once more, and both are very soft and foam-cushioned for enhanced comfort. It’s also important to note that the headband has been pre-tensioned, enabling prolonged use without experiencing uncomfortable strain on your head.

A series of extremely modest control buttons may be seen on the right ear cup if you look attentively. The bigger fingertip-sized indentation allows you to stop or play music as well as take calls, while the little dots above and below that indentation let you to skip songs and adjust the volume of your music with a lengthy press.

Together with the 3.5mm Aux port and a button for voice muting during conversations, the Elite 85h’s USB-C charging connector is situated on the bottom of the right ear cup. Contrarily, the left ear cup keeps things straightforward with just a single button that allows you to cycle through the ANC settings when you don’t feel like taking out your phone to alter them on the Jabra Sound+ app.

The Elite 85h headphones don’t have a power button, which you may have noticed because we didn’t mention it. Instead, when the cups are twisted inward toward one another, the cans will automatically come on. They will then switch off after you have flattened the cups. Every time you remove the headphones from your head, the music will likewise automatically halt.

Jabra also provides a 2-year warranty against rain, perspiration, and dust, which should help assuage any concerns about the longevity of the Elite 85h.

Features

The Jabra Elite 85h headphones have a number of ANC modes known as “Moments,” which allow the user to select from four various degrees of noise cancelation, including commute, in-home, in-public, and, of course, no noise cancelation at all.

As an alternative, you may develop your own ANC profile called “My Moment,” which enables you to manually modify music EQ settings, presets, and if you want to enable “HearThrough,” which allows outside sounds in.

In its SmartSound mode, Jabra has gone a step further by utilizing advanced “intelligent adaptive technology” to modify the amount of ANC based on the environment.

When turned on, SmartSound will utilize artificial intelligence to analyze noises originating from your surroundings in real-time. In essence, this tells the app the ANC mode to use when switching on automatically.

To block out undesirable noise, SmartSound, for instance, will recognize whether you’re using public transportation and turn the ANC all the way up. In order to save battery life, the “In private” mode will activate if you’re by yourself in a quiet area. It will turn off ANC and HearThrough automatically.

However, ‘In public’ is arguably the most helpful option since it allows in just enough noise for the user to hear announcements, sirens, and other things they should be paying attention to.

The Elite 85h will verbally announce mode changes as they occur, which can be a bit irritating. This is especially true on trains, when SmartSound often switches between the “Commute” and “In public” modes. Luckily, the Sound+ app’s settings allow you to disable these headset prompts.

Also included into the headphones is voice assistant capability, enabling users to fully utilize Siri, Google Assistant, and Amazon Alexa.

Performance

The Jabra Elite 85h headphones are among the best noise-cancelling models we’ve tested. Audio is immediately sucked out of your ears when the cans turn on. While noise-cancellation will always seem a bit unsettling for first-time users, Jabra’s headset does a fantastic job of placing you in almost perfect stillness without making you feel like you’re underwater. Unlike many other ANC cans, we didn’t immediately feel vacuum-like pressure on our eardrums.

Naturally, there will be some background noise when music isn’t playing, but it will be much diminished to the point that you probably won’t notice it again once the music starts. Also, we haven’t heard any of the whistling or hissing noises that can occur when using ANC headphones in windy conditions.

Although though Jabra’s AI-based ANC capabilities are fantastic, sound quality should always come first when choosing a pair of high-end headphones. Fortunately, the Elite 85h’s audio performance is most comparable to Bose’s outstanding QuietComfort 35 II headphones.

Jabra’s headphones, when used with the default sound profile, provide wonderfully balanced music that favors warmth and clarity, letting instrumentals stand out without any of the muddiness seen in the mids of bass-heavy headphones like Apple’s Beats Studio 3 Wireless cans.

EDM and hip-hop aficionados will like the “bass boost” EQ setting, while the “treble boost” option will provide enhanced loudness and dynamics in the high end for guitar-based compositions. Of course, you can fine-tune the Elite 85h’s audio performance via the Jabra Sound+ app.

While the Elite 85h’s lower end performance is generally very good, occasionally distortion can occur when some bass-heavy songs are played at full volume. You will find deeper, punchier bass in other similarly-priced ANC headphones, such as the aforementioned Beats Studio 3 Wireless and Sony WH-1000XM3 cans.

The fact that the Elite 85h headphones do not now support more advanced audio codec compression methods like AAC, aptX, or LDAC, which enable to transmit music at nearly CD-like quality via Bluetooth, may worry audio purists. While listening to FLAC files or lossless music, quality will be considerably diminished without these codes. A firmware update might be able to fix this, but there’s no way of knowing if one is currently planned at this time.

Jazz and live music aficionados will like Jabra’s “smooth” and “energize” equalization settings, while a “speech” option enhances the quality of voices and spoken word audio, such as podcasts and audiobooks.

Speaking of speech, Jabra deserves praise for the call quality it has attained in this instance. The 85h headphones include eight microphones in total, six of which are utilized to improve call quality, so calls come through loud and clear. We particularly like how “HearThrough” will automatically turn on when a call is answered, enabling you to hear yourself throughout a discussion (surprisingly, this is not a standard feature on many over-ear headphones).

The Jabra Elite 85h is the clear winner in the wireless ANC category when it comes to battery life, with a full charge giving 36 hours of listening with noise-cancelling turned on and an astounding 41 hours with it off. Also, it is said that 15 minutes of charging can provide five hours of battery life, which is rather astounding.

Verdict

The Elite 85h is simple to suggest since it offers class-leading battery life, fantastic aesthetics, and tons of sound profile customization. In spite of this, there are more powerful headphones available at this price point, and purists will lament the absence of high-end codec support. The Jabra Elite 85h headphones are the brand’s first try at high-end wireless ANC headphones, thus the outcome is rather impressive. The company’s next premium ANC headphones are highly anticipated.