The best wireless earbuds: Top Bluetooth earbuds for phones & gaming consoles

A pair of wireless earbuds is one of the essential tech accessories. They can offer good sound quality, noise cancellation and many more killer features. Here are some of the best true wireless earbuds you can buy now.

You’ll be spoilt for choices if you’re in the market for a pair of wireless earbuds for your Steam Deck, Switch, phone or even your laptop. You can get a decent pair of Bluetooth earbuds at as low as $50 and upwards of $1000 for a higher-end pair. However, it’s the audio quality and additional features that make the difference.

These true wireless earbuds have many features that can help you enjoy content, take calls, and even become your most trusted gaming partner. Other extra’s that you can look for are good battery life, fast charging, noise cancellation and fast pairing. If you’re looking for wireless gaming earbuds, look out for low latency mode- often branded as a gaming mode.

We’ve listed some of the best wireless earbuds on the market that offer unmatched audio quality, battery life, excellent gaming modes, and more. Since not every pricey gadget is good, and not every cheap product provides good value for money, we’ve listed products from across the range of different price points.

Contents

• Dexerto’s recommended: JBL Quantum TWS
• EPOS GTW 270 Hybrid earbuds
• Best budget earbuds
  • ASUS ROG Cetra
  • Cambridge Audio Melomania 1+ Earbuds
  • Google Pixel Buds A-Series
• Best under $250
• Best premium earbuds

The best wireless earbuds we’ve tested: JBL Quantum TWS

Key specs:

• Connectivity: Bluetooth 5.2
• Driver diameter : 10mm
• Frequency response : 20Hz – 20Khz
• Battery life: 20 Hours
• Price: $149

Our top recommended wireless earbuds are the JBL Quantum TWS, which not only come in as one of the better deals you can get on the market right now but provide a great feature set, alongside its excellent audio.

The JBL Quantum TWS are marketed as gaming earbuds, but don’t let that deter you from jumping in with them. They’re perfect for music, with a fantastic suite of noise canceling features, including ‘talk through’. This dims your audio so you can talk with someone without having to take them out.

JBL has crafted an excellent all-around piece of kit, that also comes with a 2.4GHz USB-C dongle, eliminating Bluetooth from devices like the Steam Deck, Switch or PC.

Alternatively, you can get the JBL Tune 230NC ($99.95) or Live FreeNC+ ($134.99) for a similar overall experience, just without the dongle.

The most versatile earbuds: EPOS GTW 270 Hybrid earbuds

EPOS

Key specs:

• Connectivity: Bluetooth 5.1
• Driver diameter: 10mm
• Frequency response: 20Hz – 20Khz
• Battery life: 20 hours       
• Price: $159.98

The EPOS GTW 270 earbuds are the most recommended gaming earbuds by critics. These premium true wireless earbuds are suitable for pairing with your phone and work equally well with most gaming consoles, especially Switch.

It offers premium and rich audio quality, good battery life for uninterrupted gaming, and a comfortable in-ear fit. It supports Dolby 7.1 virtual surround sound offering an immersive gaming audio experience.

For wireless connectivity, the SPOS GTW 270 comes with Bluetooth, and it also ships with a 2.4GHz USB-C dongle that can help you connect with your Nintendo Switch, PS5, PS4, and PC. On the downside of it, the earbuds don’t come with Active Noise cancellation, and a few users have reported that the audio quality isn’t up to the mark after the software update.

Best budget wireless earbuds:

ASUS ROG Cetra

Dexerto

Key specs:

• Connectivity: Bluetooth
• Driver diameter: 10mm
• Frequency response: 20Hz – 20Khz
• Battery life: (ANC on): 21.8 hours, (ANC off): 27 hours
• Price: $99.99

When we reviewed the ASUS ROG Cetra, we loved how they fit in our ears and the excellent experience while listening to music and gaming. There’s an app to adjust your settings to your liking, which is easy enough to use.

For the relatively low asking price, in a sea of low asking priced earbuds, these are premium on the budget. We couldn’t in good conscience recommend something dirt cheap, as it’d just be a detriment to your enjoyment.

The battery life is where these come into their own, with an extraordinarily long shelf life with a fully charged case, which charges in about 10 minutes for an hour of listening. It even comes with excellent noise canceling to mute the broader world from your music.

Cambridge Audio Melomania 1+ Earbuds

Cambridge Audio

Key specs:

• Connectivity: Bluetooth 5.0
• Driver diameter: 5.8 mm Graphene
• Frequency response: 20Hz – 20Khz
• Battery life: 50 hours       
• Price: $59.95

If you’re looking for one of the best-sounding wireless earbuds, then the Cambridge Audio Melomania 1+ earbuds should be at the tip of your list. Priced just under $60, these budget wireless earbuds punch way above their weight.

The impressive audio performance gets a boost with the High-performance audio mode. These tiny buds offer a 9-hour long battery life, and with the 41 hours backup available with the charging case, you will only be looking for the charging socket occasionally.

The earbuds can easily play high-res audio content as they support audio codecs like – SBC, AAC, and aptX. While the Melomania 1+ comes with an IPX5 rating, they miss out on noise-canceling tech – which is a bit of a bummer.

Google Pixel Buds (A-Series)

Google

Key specs:

• Connectivity: Bluetooth 5.0
• Driver diameter: 12mm driver
• Frequency response: 20Hz – 20Khz
• Battery life: 29 hours      
• Price: $99

Google does this thing regularly, where they’ll try to undercut everyone in price and produce an incredibly decent device. Then, they’ll kill it off in favor of something more expensive or never refresh them.

While we don’t understand Google, we understand a lot when we see one. Despite being over a year old, the Pixel Buds A-Series is still getting rave reviews, and with good reason. The low price doesn’t deter Google from producing some great-sounding earbuds, which are excellent entry points, or rival Apple and Samsung’s buds priced way above its price range.

These budget earbuds can easily pair with Android phones, PCs, laptops, and other gadgets. Apart from excellent audio quality, you have Google Assistant inbuilt, which can read out texts and other alerts from the paired device.  While there’s no volume control, you can always ask the virtual assistant to lower the volume, which will oblige. Missing noise cancellation is a significant compromise, but the Google Pixel Buds are bang for your buck if you prefer everything else.

Best wireless earbuds under $250: Apple AirPods Pro 2

Apple

Key specs:

• Connectivity: Bluetooth
• Driver diameter 11mm driver
• Battery life: 36 hours     
• Price: $249.99

In our review of the second-generation AirPods Pro, we found that Apple had improved on nearly everything since the release of the first.

There’s a reason these things are in everyone’s ears, and even on Android, they’re still being used. An excellent quality sound, combined with a genuinely comfortable fit, these are our recommendations over the non-pro AirPods.

Apple keeps improving its headphone technology, giving you an expected, good sound across the board. Perfect for those on iOS, the AirPods Pro 2’s come with many features, including microphones to detect noise and assist with noise cancellation.

Apple touts its strong battery life, and in most cases, we’ve experienced that the battery can last for up to 30-hours.

Best premium wireless earbuds: Sony WF-1000XM4 earbuds

Sony

Key specs:

• Connectivity: Bluetooth 5.2
• Driver diameter: 6mm
• Frequency response: 20Hz – 20kHz/40kHz
• Battery life: 35 hours      
• Price: $198

Regardless of where you stand on Sony’s console output, their headphones and sound devices are phenomenal. They’re unparalleled in delivering on the price they charge for things, with everything from their sound department pretty much on our hypothetical recommendation list.

Succeeding the excellent XM3 earbuds, these premium earbuds provide a near-perfect sound and a bevy of features that add to the prize.

Sony claims the battery life is around 8 hours off a single charge from the case, with an additional 16, with noise canceling not included in those figures. You could expect to knock off about an hour or so from that battery life.

While we doubt that Windows will play nice with Bluetooth, there’s ‘Swift Pair’ to counteract its fussiness about Bluetooth devices and access to your phone’s voice assistant.

Like on the AirPod Pros, a microphone is positioned on each bud, allowing the XM4s to work better on noise cancellation by listening to the world around you.

The main selling point, although often overlooked, is the inclusion of LDAC. It allows earbuds and headphones to transfer far more data over the airwaves, allowing higher-quality audio to be heard. While this doesn’t mean you’ll be able to listen to lossless audio, higher-quality audio files will still come out better.

What to look for when buying wireless earbuds

With the plethora of options in each price range, your usage, the design, features, and battery life are a few things that help zero in on the best product – however, it’s not always easy to pick one, especially when there are so many options.

Some of the key features you need to keep in mind are – the devices that these buds can be used with, audio codecs that they support, battery life, on-device control for ease of usage, battery life, in-ear fit, and features like noise cancellation.

Once you shortlist the products that fit these requirements, you can always check the physical wireless earbuds at a store nearby. Be sure to check out how the charging cases fell in your hands and check out the earbuds for yourself. 

Also, make sure to check out our other guides:

The best PS5 controllers | The best mobile games to play in 2023 | Best gaming keyboards | Best CPU for gaming | Best PC controller | Best budget gaming desk | Best power bank for steam deck | Best 1440p Monitor for PS5 | Best gamecube controller for Switch and PC

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