This is the review of the comparison between the Sony WH-XB900N and the JBL Live 650BTNC. Both the headphones are good at their price but still, there are some features that make them vary from each other. To know which one has better features than the other, go to the detailed review.

Sony WH-XB900N	JBL Live 650BTNC
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.	Impressive sound. Supports Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa with a button press. Powerful bass depth. Adjustable EQ. Excellent mic clarity. Great value for money.
CONS	CONS
Touch controls are still frustrating. Noise cancellation isn’t as powerful as the 1000XM3. Too much bass for some people.	The noise cancelation isn’t as good as Sony’s or Bose’s. Voice commands require press of a button. Headband can become uncomfortable after long hours of use. Wish these had USB Type-C charging.

SPECIFICATIONS:

Detail Review:

INTRODUCTION:

Sony WH-XB900N

The Sony WH-XB900N look great, their sound quality was amazing, they had really good noise cancellation, etc. These headphones are retailing for $170 currently and they do worth this price.

JBL Live 650BTNC

The JBL Live 650BTNC are pretty inexpensive noise cancellation Bluetooth headphones available in the market. They can be found for around 200 Dollars.

DESIGN:

Sony WH-XB900N

The way that the plastic feels here on both the WH-1000XM3 and the new WH-XB900N is made out of hard plastic material but for some reason, the XB900N just feels a little less premium. It’s not a big deal, they still feel nice but compared to the others you’d notice some difference.

There are also two physical buttons on the headphones, one for power and Bluetooth pairing and another one is a customizable button. All the other controls are done by swiping on the ear cup on the right side. Unlike the 1000XM3, there is no slick zipper case just a simple drawstring bag to help further bring the costs down.

JBL Live 650BTNC

The headphones themselves look really good in comparison to other headphones that you can find at this price range. It’s actually quite refreshing to see a headphone that actually has some sort of fabric on it on the top and it comes in different colors too. The headphone that I have is the blue variant, there’s black and white as well, so it completely depends on your choice. There’s JBL logo is embossed on the side of the headphones. These headphones can be folded inwards as well so that it doesn’t occupy more space.

You have the micro USB port on the left-hand side, the left and right indicators are inside the pads. Then you have the controls on the right side, you’ve play-pause, you’ve got on and off, the 2.5-millimeter jack toggle if you want Bluetooth or noise cancellation as well that can be directly accessed from the headphones, so you can access them quickly and it works very well in that respect.

COMFORT:

Sony WH-XB900N

These do have the same soft-touch ear cups that are comfortable to wear through, as well as the same shape which was upgraded starting with the WH-1000XM3 to be more comfortable and also less awkward-looking by minimizing the gap between your head and the frame of the headphones.

JBL Live 650BTNC

In terms of comfort, these are worth bearing that these headphones have got a pretty small ear pad diameter. In my case, I did find that over time it did cause a little bit of discomfort because of the size of the overall diameter of the pads. At the top, there is very little padding as well. It’s very much useful for if you’re going to be using for short periods of time like around one hour or two hours at most, but anything more than that you’ll find yourself a little bit uncomfortable with the headband kind of pressing at the top of your head that what I felt with these.

The clamping force is pretty strong, which is good if you’re going to be using them on the run and you’re going to be using them for sports of any sort. However when it comes to actually use them with for example reading glasses or even sunglasses, then you might find yourself a little bit uncomfortable because the clamping force is pretty strong. It also has adjustments, which are pretty large, so these headphones will fit most people.

FEATURES:

Sony WH-XB900N

The Touchpad in the ear cups performs the functions like swiping up to increase volume, swiping down to decrease volume, swing forward to go to the next track, swiping backward to go to the previous track, and double-tap to pause and play. The new Sony XB900N and the 1000XM3 headphones have similar support for high-end audio codecs over Bluetooth like LDAC, and AptX HD, etc.

In the app there are settings for things like the level of noise cancellation you want, how much sound you’d like to let in from the outside world, surround sound features, sound quality versus connection stability, using the custom button located next to the power button to trigger Google Assistant, Alexa, or toggling noise cancellation on and off, and more. Something that is missing here compared to the 1000XM3 though is the ability to adjust the sound based on your atmospheric pressure, that is a feature that you could use when flying to adjust the sound based on a barometer that was built into those headphones.

The big deal with these headphones is that they have almost similar noise cancellation features to the 1000XM3 that were highly praised for such features. 

JBL Live 650BTNC

Inside the box, you gonna get the headphones themselves, a 3.5 millimeter to 2.5-millimeters interconnect so the 2.5 millimeter goes into the headphones, you’ve got a USB to micro USB cable and it’s orange in color because I bought the Blue color Headphones, a soft carrying pouch, and a set of manuals.

In the JBL headphones app, you’ve got the battery percentage, you can enable or disable ANC remotely as in via the app itself and you can see a little light over there on the headphone indicating whether ANC is on or off, in terms of the settings you can update the firmware enable or disable, voice assistance if you want which does have google assistant to Amazon Alexa, so that’s great to see if you do use them, and then, more importantly, is the EQ function.

With EQ functionality, you’ve got full control over all the different frequency range and also up to nine decibels you can add or detract from a certain frequency. So, this is good because you can change it to yourself and furthermore it just really does positively impact the sound.

The active noise cancellation here is worth bearing. These have pretty good passive noise isolation due to their pretty good strong clamp force. But in terms of noise cancellation, I compare them directly to the Bose NC700. Those headphones are more than double than this one price so those headphones do perform a lot better. It’s to be expected at around 200 Dollars, these headphones won’t compete with flagship set headphones like the Bose, the Sony 1000XM3 or even other headphones from JBL. But for 200 Dollars these did a really good job. The Philips ph 905 does a slightly better job at canceling mid-range tone. The whole difference is very minimal between these both and the price difference is again very minimal.

I want to mention the Bluetooth codec on this only supports the SPC codec. It’s slightly disappointing, even some of its cheaper competitors support the AptX codec or even AAC codec. However, in this case, there are no issues when it comes to video delay or lip-syncs issues. When I was watching youtube videos which is notoriously bad on android with certain codecs, in this case, the SPC codec was flawless, it had no lip sync issues, and no video delay.

MICROPHONE:

Sony WH-XB900N

The Sony XB900N has the same ability to cover your hand over the right cup to temporarily use the microphone to let in sound that is to hear your ambient sound without having to take off the headphones. Actually the microphone works well in letting in the ambient sound. Sony claims that the mic here works well enough to have a phone call without having to take them off. I tested out the call quality with the mic here and the person on the other side said it sounds good.

JBL Live 650BTNC

The call quality of these headphones wasn’t that impressive. I found that the microphone here in these headphones really suffered from the environmental sound. When I was on the road and called my friend, I found that my friend was able to hear a lot of the background noise. But when I was in a quiet environment, these headphones did pretty well at picking up my voice and picking out pretty accurately. Truthfully in comparison to other headphones out there which are far more expensive, these are not bad at their price.

BATTERY:

Sony WH-XB900N

Sony claims that the headphones have about 30 hours of playback and I have to admit that in the amount of time I’ve used them that seems like an accurate claim. They also have fast charged over USB-C, so you can get an hour’s worth of power in just 10 minutes of charge comparing this to the 1000XM3 there we get five hours of charge in ten minutes of charging.

JBL Live 650BTNC

These headphones have got 30 hours of battery life and take around two hours to charge. The full violent micro USB ports also support somewhat fast charging, so you can give them a quick 15-minute blast as well to get that little bit of extra charge before you head out on your travels. In this respect, it’s pretty impressive to see these headphones actually perform well.

SOUND:

Sony WH-XB900N

The sound quality is very similar to my very average headphones. The one difference you’ll notice though is that the XB900N as inferred by their full product name the Sony XB900N Extra Bass headphones have a bit lower-end than the 1000XM3 do. Just like with other Sony headphones, you can use the headphones app to adjust the levels of bass, treble, etc.

JBL Live 650BTNC

For around 200 Dollars I was pretty pleasantly surprised with these. On the EQ app that I keep the EQ in the mid-range and that’s because these headphones are pretty recessed. They have a pretty push back and recessed mids. When you do push them up, it might sound a little bit artificial if you go too much and I did find that music will sound a little bit weird when I was pushing them a little bit higher. So in terms of the mid-range, they’re still weak even after being set the EQ, so they still do have a v-shaped sound signature and are still gonna be sounding recessed. But again for 200 Dollars headphones, they do a pretty good job.

In terms of the bass, the sub-bass is somewhat non-existent, the mid-bass however is pretty present has got a good sort of slam to it. The mid-bass is very consistent and also very precise, in terms of the highs they extend very well. I didn’t find them to be sibilant. In terms of sound stage, they did sound a little bit close, and they did sound a little bit kind of claustrophobic. The instrument separation was pretty good, so you had a good sort of instrument coming from the left and right channels. These headphones really struggled in terms of providing an open wide and airy type of sound for close back headphones.

WHICH ONE HAS BETTER FEATURES?

In this case, it became pretty hard to decide which one has better features because both the headphones have almost the same features. But in my point of view, the JBL Live 650BTNC is better than the Sony WH-XB900N in terms of sound and looks.

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 JBL Live 650BTNC:

By pocket-line
The JBL Live 650BTNC delivers noise-canceling at a price no other can match – not at this level of capability anyway. No, you won’t get the high-end build quality or noise-canceling adjustability of its competitors, but then JBL is asking for half…

By goodhousekeeping.co.uk
These are a great pair of on-ear wireless headphones. With plenty of extra features and great sound quality, we think these are worth considering. Key SpecificationsType: on-battery life: Up to 30 hours (noise-canceling switched off)Noise-cancelling:…

By phandroid.com
The JBL Live 650 BTNC headphones may not be among the best in the category, but they’re phenomenal when you take into account their $200 price point. The minor issues I’ve pointed out will only be obvious to those who have used noise-canceling…

By TheStreamingBlog
If you want above-average noise-canceling features that cost less, then the JBL Live 650BTNC is the solution to your problems. This model is portable, comfortable, and it also effectively clears out environmental noise with ANC toggled on. Also, the integration of Alexa and Google Voice Assistant became highly convenient for us since we were able to read texts aloud and reply immediately without having to do anything with your mobile device.

By cnet
While its noise-canceling feature and comfort level aren’t quite on par with competing models from Bose and Sony, its sound measures up well and it’s worth considering if you don’t want to spend $300 or more on a noise-canceling…