Headphone Reviews

Sound Quality
Generally speaking, the JBL Everest Elite is a fairly good sounding, neutral balanced headphone...for a noise canceler...at this price.

When wired and unpowered, I found it to be somewhat upper-mid forward and a bit hard sounding. Somewhat "cupped hands" and shouty right in the middle of the female vocal range. Also, mid-treble range is somewhat de-emphasized. This is good because this area can be quite annoying if over emphasized, but when missing leads to a lack of nuanced resolve. Cymbals are relatively normal sounding, they're just missing some of their natural shimmer. Bass is tight and well balanced, but a little overshadowed by the shouty mids.

Turning the power on while on the wire, the noise canceling and DSP kick in. Sound remains a bit hard sounding, but shouty mids go away to leave a more neutral signature. Mid-treble remains suppressed taking some of the natural shimmer from cymbals, but again, the sin of omission is better than the sin of too much energy in this range. (For example: The Sennheiser PXC550 had too much energy here making it the PXC550's Achilles heal.)

Bass appears slightly more emphatic here, partly due to less upper-midrange shout, and partly because it simply is more elevated. Bass quality is a little looser however. Fortunately it does not bleed into the mids and remains quite musical overall.

As with many noise cancelers, the treble range can be a bit artificial sounding, but I find the JBL Everest Elite 700 quite good against the noise canceling competition. When compared to QC35, I find the Bose has a smoother sounding response with vocals better in balance with bass and treble; the JBL seems more forward and hard in the mid- and upper-midrange and lacking in resolution. The Bose, however, does seem to have a bit of excess energy between 4kHz and 8kHz that provides a bit more shimmer than needed, but not to the point of an annoying flaw.

Compared with the Sennheiser Momentum Wireless I found the JBL surprisingly less hard and agressive sounding. The Momentum Wireless is clearly inferior with a very forward upper-midrange. Yeesh.

Summary
Though mostly plastic and not particularly stylish, I find the build quality and comfort of the JBL Everest Elite 700 very good. Ergonomic button placement give easy control of a rich set of features. TruNote calibration does seem to subtly improve tonality and smoothness. Two levels of Ambient Aware permit increased awareness of outside sound when not needing the very good isolation of full noise canceling on these headphones.

Sound quality is only fair when running on the wire and electronics off; sound is somewhat forward and hard. But many active headphones sound much worse in passive mode; the Elite 700 is listenable, which is better than most.

Sound quality in all active modes, both wired and wireless, are quite good. Only a modest forward/hardness in the upper-midrange, and a lack of nuanced resolve mid-treble modestly mar its performance.

All-in-all, I find this a surprisingly solid offering at this price point, with a solid balance of value in comfort, features, and sound quality rarely found in an active headphone.

The JBL Everest Elite 700 got near the performance of the Bose QC35 at about $100 less, and, to my ears, easily bested the Momentum Wireless in sound quality. It's going up on the "wall of Fame." Gonna be a lot of wireless headphones coming through here soon, the JBL did leave the door open in terms of its slightly hard sound quality. We'll see.

Resources
JBL home page and Everest Elite 700 product page.

Video
Watch on YouTube here.