This is the review of the comparison between the Sony WH-XB900N and the Jabra Elite 85H. Both these headphones are retailing for around two hundred dollars currently. These headphones do have the same features but their performances vary a lot. To know which one is worth buying for you, go to the detailed review.

Sony WH-XB900N	Jabra Elite 85H
BUY NOW	BUY NOW
PROS	PROS
Great sound quality for the price. Option for dedicated Google Assistant/Alexa button. USB-C charging. Good battery life. More affordable than the 1000XM3. Clean, simple looks.	Class-leading battery life. Feature-packed app. One-button access to Google Assistant, Alexa and Siri voice assistants. Custom EQ and ANC modes. Better design than some of the competition. Great sound reproduction.
CONS	CONS
Touch controls are still frustrating. Noise cancellation isn’t as powerful as the 1000XM3. Too much bass for some people.	No power button. May not fit large heads. Cloth surfaces collect dust and debris.

SPECIFICATIONS:

Detail Review:

INTRODUCTION:

Sony WH-XB900N

These ones step down from the M3s’ in terms of not only the build quality but also a couple of features that are packed into the box. These are a budget option for someone who’s looking for over-the-ear headphones but still wants that noise-canceling functionality without having to pay over four hundred dollars for slightly better build quality very similar sound and a couple more features.

Jabra Elite 85H

The Jabra Elite 85H is a good headphone with a stylish look. These do have pretty good features. These are currently retailing for around two hundred dollars.

DESIGN:

Sony WH-XB900N

If you’ve ever played with the M3s that have a higher quality finish on it but for our intents and purposes and for the price that we paid you to expect this to feel and look the way that it does. It still doesn’t feel like these are cheap or that they’re gonna really break on you. It feels like they are pretty durable and will be able to stand up to a little bit of abuse over the course of a couple of years.

Instead of having a hard carrying case, you get a soft carrying pouch. So, the pouch isn’t going to really protect the device from anything other than maybe scratches. The headphone came folded in the box, you are able to also fold and store them if you prefer when you are putting it in your travel bag and then again they can also fold down flat and fit relatively easily into the pouch. Moreover, we have the hands-free calling option, so Sony did put some effort into having a pretty decent mic this time around for phone calls.

Jabra Elite 85H

These come in four different colors you got titanium black, copper black, gold beige, and Navy. The case has a Jabra branding on the front, and there is also a little carrying strap. Inside the case, you gonna get your airplane adapter, 3.5-millimeter inline cable, USB type-c charging port, and your headphones. The case has a soft felt material inside the outer part that is like leather.

As far as the headphones they have nice weight on these, they do fold up and they swivel, you get a cloth pattern which is our rain resistant. As far as in the stretch test on these with maximum stretch, it’s gonna fit anybody. There are nice clicky buttons. On the bottom, there’s your 3.5 input, then USB type-c charging slot got a little LED and you got two buttons. Overall, it’s not too heavy.

COMFORT:

Sony WH-XB900N

This fits perfectly they’re not even fully extended when I used it. Overall a great fit. The pressure that these put on your ears doesn’t seem to be too fatigue-inducing. The fabric of the cups themselves made started to feel some moisture building up and my ears became very hot. So, these headphones are not ideal for the gym. Overall comfort for a short time, and in a nice cool environment listening period then you should be fine.

I wouldn’t really recommend wearing these to the gym because this material is definitely going to hold sweat and probably wear down over time. So, this might be a set of headphones that you’d use mostly for your commute, probably not on very hot days again to reduce the amount of sweat that you are putting on to these cups. But they do have a very nice feel to them. These would be very comfortable on the ears. The headband portion at the top is also made of that same soft-touch fabric and then the top has a nice faux-leather finish and feels to it.

Jabra Elite 85H

As far as the fit and the level of comfort, I would rank these at number three number 1st the Sony’s, 2nd the Bose and 3rd this. They’re just a little bit too heavy and it makes ears extra hot and sweaty. So, I can’t recommend those for long trips. I will say this though, if you’re looking for the tightest fit in pair you gotta go with the Jabra. These fit the tightest not tight in an uncomfortable way but in a snug way. So, if you need headphones for sports activities or you just don’t like headphones that flop around when you’re wearing them, then you look this out. These are the tightest fit in ones.

FEATURES:

Sony WH-XB900N

The box claims that they are rated for thirty hours of battery life and they give you both Google Assistant and Alexa capabilities built-in. One thing about the Bluetooth there’s a common misconception, these are not Bluetooth 5.0 compatible headphones, these are actually Bluetooth 4.2. If you don’t know the difference between Bluetooth 4.2 and Bluetooth 5.0, essentially 5.0 has two times the distance and is able to package more data into each of his packets. Having 4.2 for this device here shouldn’t be a problem, very few times you will be so far away from your device that you’re gonna see any problems with that.

Once you have the headphones powered on and the apps downloaded, you’ll see there are three options, one to register through Bluetooth settings, second register with OneTouch connection NFC, and when you register a wired headphone from the list.

For Bluetooth connection, press the power button on the headphones for about seven seconds, and next in Bluetooth settings hit the WH-XB900N. If we go back into the app we can see the headphones there have been registered. In the actual app itself, once you’ve done all of these setups you have your headphones up there, you have the battery life just there, and then it gives you the option to turn on and off the ambient sound control and noise cancelation.

You can also play with the sound position if you wanted to simulate having the music playing behind you or to your left, right or front you can play with that as well obviously the best method be just to leave it in the center. You also have the equalizer settings right.

These do have touch controls on the right in the form of swiping up for volume up, swiping down for volume down, forward to skip track, backward to rewind track or back to a previous track, and then double-tapping for play and pause. The volume out of the box doesn’t match the volume on your device in these.

The volume that was coming through the headphones seemed to be very low so for anyone that buys these and you’re kind of confused as to why it doesn’t sound as loud as you’d want. You just have to swipe up on these a couple of times, then it’ll give you that notification once you get to max volume, and from then on you could use your phone as the master volume and everything will be fine. Overall these do get extremely loud.

Jabra Elite 85H

You get eight microphones for enhanced call quality, voice assistant enabled, these are rain resistant, and to enjoy the smart sound you have to download the app it’s available on Android as well as iOS.

In order to turn these on and off all you have to do is swivel the cup to turn on and swivel to turn off. It’s pretty nice. In order to pair up your headphones, just swivel the cups that’ll turn them on, they’ll automatically be in pairing mode. Then go to your phone’s Bluetooth menu and select the Jabra Elite 85h. The next thing you need to do is download the smart sound app.

Once you open that up they’ll automatically connect to your headphones and this will give you full access to all of the features. Inside the app when you go to the surrounding there are three different levels, full active noise cancellation, hear through mode that’s your ambient sound where you also have a slider that’s gonna let you adjust how much ambient sound you want to hear, you can also have it continue playing your audio or mute the audio. It means if you have work and somebody starts talking to you, you might want to have it mute the audio so everything turns off and you hear the person’s voice without taking your headphones off.

When you go to the music equalizer, you get a bunch of different settings default, bass boost, smooth, speech, trouble boost, and energized. When you go to the audio experience, if you want to you can have these automatically turn off when you take the headphones off that’s a detection.

When we go to the call experience, we have a bunch of different settings you can use ear detection to answer any phone calls, you can also use it for your voice controls, once you take these off they’ll automatically mute your phone call you can set that up if you want, you have a mute reminder so, say you take them off and you’re still on a call you’ll keep playing a tone let you know you get the person on mute, sidetone this is how much of your own voice you want to hear when you’re on the phone call, and you get the call equalizers in which you have three different levels, default, more treble, and more bass.

You also have headset assistance if you want to save battery you can have these turn off automatically after 15 minutes all the way up to never sleep. You also get your headset prompts that’s your voice prompts. When we go back to moments, there on your first page there is the commute, so if you’re commuting somewhere you’re gonna want to have active noise cancellation on, block out all the sound. The next one is to hear through if you outside, riding your bike, you walking around, you want ambient sound mode on that’s in public. The third one is in private if you in your house, in your office, everything is quiet, turn it off enjoy the music.

You can also change the EQ settings and you have smart sound. Basically, what smart sound is it’s gonna automatically pick one of the three, so once you start walking around the headphones will detect that you move in if it has some noise why you moving it’s gonna turn on hearing through technology if you’re sitting in your office and it’s real quiet and somebody starts using a jackhammer right next to you it’s gonna detect that you’re not moving but it’s hearing a lot of noise and it automatically turns on active noise cancellation.

When we go to discover, we get a bunch of different cards, you get your full instructions, and you get about your firmware updates, your voice assistance setup, and you have the Find my Jabra. It means if you leave these somewhere, turns them on hit find my Jabbers that’ll let you know the last place you left them at and you can pull up on the map.

You are getting multifunctional buttons, so if you press the button up once that will increase the volume, press it twice to skip to the next song, press the button in the middle you got play-pause and answer your phone calls, press the button on the bottom once it will let your volume decrease, press it twice that’ll reverse tracks and everything does work well. Then you get your microphone button to activate your voice assistant.

Then you get another multi-functional button on the left if you press it once it will activate noise cancellation, press it a second time that will turn on ambient sound, and press it a third time that turns everything off. Also, if you press it and hold it down it will take you to your custom moments.

I checked out the lag latency and what I mean by that is when you’re watching a video is there any delay from the person’s lips to what you hear. This is perfect, no lag on this. The ambient sound mode works perfectly. Once you activate that, you can hear your own voice, and you can hear all your surroundings. As far as noise cancellation here is pretty good but they are not better than the Sony XM3.

BATTERY:

Sony WH-XB900N

In these, 10 minutes of charge will give you 60 minutes of playtime. The music playtime is a maximum of 30 hours. It is USB type-c charging, it includes a headphone 3.5 millimeter in the box, so if you run out of charge then you are able to use that to power the device and play it.

Jabra Elite 85H

The box claims that you gonna get smart active noise cancellation, custom music settings that auto-adjust, up to 36 hours battery with active noise cancellation on, these also feature fast charge so 15 minutes of charge will give you five hours worth of battery.

SOUND:

Sony WH-XB900N

I played with these headphones for a bunch of tracks and I feel like a high beat. I tried these out not only through Bluetooth but then I also plugged in the 3.5-millimeter jack into the iPhone to test that out too. They just sound amazing. It’s very difficult to want to go back to wearing any form of earbuds after hearing how good these sound.

Jabra Elite 85H

I tested the sound quality in these out with a bunch of different songs, from a bunch of different genres, played with all the EQ settings and the sound quality on these is pretty good. But the Sony XM3 sound way better, the Bose 700 sound way better and this is next-level. So, if you want that head pounding vibration bass go with the Jabra. These sound pretty good though.

As far as the sound quality they don’t sound bad but they don’t sound as good as a set of $200 headphones should sound. They do get loud, you got nice highs and mids, but the bass is borderline muddy. I’m not saying muddy it’s borderline muddy. You can play with the EQ settings for yourself if you put it on bass boost or you put the EQ on manual and put the bass all the way to the top but it sounds a little bit muffled out and like borderline muddy.

WHICH ONE IS WORTH BUYING?

In my opinion, the Sony WH-XB900N is worth buying than the Jabra Elite 85H because Sony do have better ANC performance, better sound quality than the Jabra. So, in my point of view, sony WH-XB900N is worth buying.

Expert Reviews of Sony WH-XB900N:

By T3
The Sony WH-XB900N delivers the right amount of bass and noise cancellation features to make it a less expensive alternative to the WH-1000XM3. For 899, casual users looking for a decent pair of everyday wireless headphones. can consider the…

By Digit
Essentially existing as a bridge between Sony’s Extra Bass series and the much-acclaimed Sony WH-1000XM3, the Sony WH-XB900N attempt to provide something of value to numerous kinds of users at a lower price point than the exorbitantly-priced WH-1000XM3…

By FirstPost
The Sony WH-XB900N is priced at Rs 16,990 with a one year warranty but can be purchased close to Rs 15,490 online. If you are looking for a set of wireless headphones with good sound clarity, active noise cancellation, loads of bass…

By stuff
People love bassy headphones. Sony’s Extra Bass range takes that to its logical conclusion, with so much of the stuff it dribbles out like sticky aloe vera gel. These headphones have categorically too much bass by any sane metric and they’re active…

By TechHive
Sony’s Extra Bass WH-XB900N noise-canceling Bluetooth headphones sound great, are low-latency, and do a good job at blocking out unwanted sound.

Expert Review of Jabra Elite 85H:

By AppleInsider
The Jabra Elite 85h ANC headphones are subtly designed and hide some seriously smart features, such as automatically pausing playback when removed, as well as having a dedicated button to call for a digital assistant. Jabra Elite 85h ANC headphonesJabra…

By Klgadgetguy.com
If you’ve read my review on the Jabra Elite Active 45e, then you already know that I’ve been using wired earphones for as long as I can remember. This time I tried out the Jabra Elite 85h — the wireless headphones that allegedly have great battery life, audio, and…

By Craving Tech
Jabra Elite 85h offers one of the best active noise-canceling features out there, especially with an understated feature, HearThrough, that lets you hear your surroundings AND your music at the same time as if you are not wearing any headphones. It is…

By VR-Zone
I’ve had the unbelievable fortune to have had the opportunity to trial the indomitable Sony WH-1000XM3 (SGD 549) and Jabra Elite 85h (SGD 428/USD300) in quick succession in the past months. Both sublime Active Noise Cancelling (ANC) headphones were put…

By Digit
The Jabra Elite 85H boasts exceptional battery life, great design and is a worthy contender in the category of wireless ANC headphones. Despite sometimes underwhelming bass and lack of support for high-end codecs, the Jabra Elite 85H is a great pair of…