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Tech · JBL · 2023

JBL Tour One M2

The folding, feature-dense middle option: most of the flagship checklist, none of the materials.

Below the ANC flagships, materials go first — #3

Overall

7.8

out of 10

Axis scores

Tech is scored on these 5 axes. The total is their plain average — nothing is weighted.

JBL Tour One M2 — axis scores out of 10Horizontal bar chart of editorial scores out of 10 across 5 axes. Bars run from a shared zero baseline; longer is better. JBL Tour One M2: Performance 8.0, Value 8.6, Durability 7.2, Ease of use 8.2, Design 6.8.PerformanceJBL Tour One M2 — Performance 8.0 out of 108.0ValueJBL Tour One M2 — Value 8.6 out of 108.6DurabilityJBL Tour One M2 — Durability 7.2 out of 107.2Ease of useJBL Tour One M2 — Ease of use 8.2 out of 108.2DesignJBL Tour One M2 — Design 6.8 out of 106.8Editorial score out of 10 — higher is better
  • Performance — How well it does the core job
  • Value — What the same money buys elsewhere
  • Durability — Failure and fade reports past the one-year mark
  • Ease of use — Setup, daily operation, cleaning, maintenance
  • Design — Build quality and how it sits in a room

Specs

Type
Over-ear, closed
Battery
Up to 30 hrs with ANC on, 50 hrs off
Folding
Folds inward, hard case included
Drivers
40 mm dynamic

As published by the manufacturer. We didn't measure these ourselves.

Is it for you

Buy it if

  • Packing small matters and you want a hard case in the box
  • Calls are a daily part of the job rather than an occasional thing
  • You will actually use an equalizer and a hearing-calibration routine

Skip it if

  • The stock tuning leans hard on bass and needs the app to settle down
  • You dislike headphones whose features live inside a phone app
  • Plastics where the flagships use metal will bother you in a year

JBL competes on feature count and this is the clearest expression of it. There is a hearing-calibration routine that builds a profile from tones played into your ears, adaptive cancellation that recalibrates itself to how the pads are sitting, a speech-detection mode that pauses playback when you start talking, and a full equalizer underneath all of it. The unusual part is that most of it works rather than existing to fill a box on the packaging.

The speech detection is the exception, and it fails the way every implementation of the idea fails. A cough, a laugh, someone else’s loud sentence nearby, and the music stops. Owners describe switching it off within the first week and leaving it off, which is the same story told about the equivalent feature on the category leader.

Almost everything here routes through the app, and that is a real cost rather than a footnote. Uninstall it and you lose the equalizer, the calibration profile, and the ability to change what the buttons do. JBL has redesigned that app more than once and settings move between versions, so a guide written a year ago will point you at a menu that no longer exists.

It folds inward and comes with a hard case, which is the practical answer to the biggest complaint about the current category leader. In a carry-on, a pair that folds packs about a third smaller than one that only rotates flat, and this pair does it without dropping to mid-tier cancellation to get there.

The compromise is where you would expect it. The frame is plastic, the finish looks its class rather than above it, and reviewers who handle the hinges flag them as the component to watch. Nothing here feels fragile in the hand; it simply does not feel like the machined objects further up this page.

The default tuning arrives heavy at the bottom, closer to consumer-store voicing than to neutral. That is fixable in about two minutes with the equalizer, and it is worth doing before forming an opinion, because the drivers are better than the preset makes them sound. JBL has since moved the top of this line on to a successor, so which colors are on the shelf shifts around more than it used to.

Last updated . The scoring method is on how we rank.