JBL Live 780NC review

In a sea of monochrome black and greige dominating the market, JBL’s Gen Z-friendly wireless headphones stand out by a mile.

Available in a variety of stylish colours – including the bright orange of our review sample – the JBL Live 780NC over-ears offer a playful and youthful contender that still ticks all the right boxes in this heaving market: good design, good sound, good price.

Price

Sandwiched between JBL’s premium Tour series and its more budget Tune range, the Live series of wireless headphones occupy a mid-range price bracket where there is a scarcity of five-star offerings.

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At £170 / $250 / AU$300, the Live 780NC are a little over half the price of popular premium wireless over-ear headphones from Sony, Bose, Bowers & Wilkins and Sennheiser, but sit above the stupendously talented and budget Sony WH-CH720N, which can now be found for as little as £75 / $100 / AU$148.

The five-star Austrian Audio Hi-X25BT are available for £129 (around $199 / AU$269), but lack any active noise cancelling, while other headphones at this price – from Philips and Soundcore – haven’t quite made their mark. Plenty of opportunity for JBL to stand out, then.

Build & design

Whereas many affordable headphones around this price can feel rather plasticky and cheap in hand – understandably so to keep costs down – the JBL Live 780NC feel anything but. The materials are light enough to ensure the headphones are comfortable to wear, but also feel pleasantly smooth and high quality to the touch.

There is a mixture of materials and finishes here that could easily have looked and felt garish in less capable hands, but the sheen of the outer earcups and hinges blend with the matte finish of the headband and earcup housings in a subtle, stylish way.

The mix of plastic, metal and silicone here is certainly more premium feeling than the cheaper Sonys and the JBLs look more svelte than the functional Austrian Audios. We particularly like the knurled finish encircling the outer earcups – it’s a nice detail you normally wouldn’t see at this price.

If the orange finish of our review sample is too extrovert for you, there are more subdued green and blue hues, along with sandy, lilac and the standard black and white colours.

The headband feels sturdy, the leatherette earcups are comfortable with ample padding, and the clamping pressure is nicely judged. We perhaps would have liked a little more padding in the headband, but they don’t cause any discernible fatigue over long listening periods.

The metal sliders are nice to use, and there’s enough flex in the earcups to get a comfortable and secure fit for most of our review team.

You can fold the 780NC up into a ball or lay them flat around your neck, and they come with a soft, if somewhat thin, carry pouch.

You get a mix of physical buttons on the earcups – for power, ANC modes and volume – that are within easy reach, while tapping on the shiny outer cups lets you control music playback, calls and voice assistant. We found them all responsive in use, and you can further customise the touch and button controls in the JBL Headphones App.

One small quirk to remember is that the headphones will go into standby mode after a certain period of inactivity (you can choose the time in the app) if you forget to slide the power button to the ‘off’ position. To reconnect the pairing to your phone or device, simply turn it off and back on.

Features

Don’t worry too much if you forget to power-off the cans, though, as their battery life is massive. With active noise cancelling turned on, you get 50 hours, which extends to a whopping 80 hours with ANC turned off. We didn’t even have to glance at the battery level in the app throughout our testing period, and only charged the headphones out of habit after a week or so. A five-minute charge gives you four hours of juice, which meant we were always topped up.

Even more premium headphones such as the Sony and Bose models can only manage 30 hours with ANC activated, with Sennheiser’s Momentum 5 Wireless the only model to beat the JBL at 57 hours, while the HDB 630 goes further at 60 hours. The cheaper Sony 720N can only muster 35 hours with ANC on.

For wireless connections, the JBL headphones run on Bluetooth 6.0 and feature Auracast sharing and LE Audio, as well as the higher-quality LDAC codec when used with a compatible source device. If you prefer a wired connection, JBL provides a USB-C to 3.5mm audio cable in the box, so you can connect them to a 3.5mm-toting laptop or music player and enjoy a lossless performance. Just remember to power the JBLs on when listening in wired mode.

The headphones feature Multipoint Bluetooth, which allows you to easily switch between two connected devices, and they have proximity sensors to automatically stop playing audio when you take the headphones off your ears.

Head into the JBL Headphone app, and you’ll find a bunch of features and customisation options that you can tweak to your heart’s desire. Along with adjusting the various ANC modes, you can prioritise audio quality or video (the latter to reduce lip-sync issues), enable spatial audio modes, and there’s even a nifty ‘relax mode’ with nature sounds you can mix to create an ambient background for when you need to focus on writing, for example.

There are preset EQ modes as well as a 10-band equaliser to save your own tuning, and there’s a separate Personi-Fi portal that personalises the sound to your tastes further.

A neat party trick is that if you have one of JBL’s latest Bluetooth speakers, such as the Flip 7 or Go 5, you can use the Auracast button to beam music from the speaker to the Live 780NC headphones, with both playing in tandem.

There are plenty of more useful features to explore in the app, and you can also turn most settings off if you don’t want them.

ANC & call quality

The main settings you should explore are for noise cancelling. There are sliders available for the noise cancelling and ‘ambient aware’ modes, allowing you to choose the intensity of the noise cancelling or how much of the outside world you want to let in. You can also let JBL’s six microphones and real-time adjustment take over with the Adaptive ANC mode, which automatically adjusts the noise-cancelling levels to your surrounding environment.

The Live 780NC’s ANC quality is decent, cutting out much of the low-level deep rumbles of passing cars, train engines and exhaust fans. The noise-cancelling effect tends to focus more on those low-frequency noises, as we can still hear a fair bit of higher engine whines, train announcements and the chatter of people around us. These noises that sit in the mid and high frequency ranges are gently softened, but we’re still aware of them in full ANC mode.

It’s not the end of the world, and there is enough damping of the rumbly surrounding noises that the JBLs’ effect feels adequate at this level.

Call quality is decent for this level, too, with voices coming through with enough clarity, detail and solidity to be heard, although there is a slight hard, mechanical edge to the caller’s voice. Dual beamforming mics and an intelligent noise-cancelling algorithm mean voices should be distinctly heard even in windy, busy surroundings, and we found that surrounding noises didn’t intrude much upon our calls.

One neat thing about the JBL headphones is that, in the app, you can tweak the tone of your and the callers’ voices, as well as choose how much of your own voice you can hear in a call. We prefer keeping the voice settings on ‘natural’, but it’s worth exploring these settings if you’re in particularly noisy environments.

Sound

If we could use one word to describe the Live 780NC’s sound, it would be ‘comfortable’. The headphones’ character is easy to listen to, with a smoothness across the frequency range that is appealing from the moment you slip them on. There are no bright or hard edges at the top; the midrange is focused and detailed; the bass is plump.

Any spikiness at the top being smoothed off means you can listen to many hours of shredding guitars and heavy metal screaming without your ears getting fatigued, as we found by spending a long weekend getting reacquainted with Avenged Sevenfold’s back catalogue on Tidal.

This trade-off does mean that some of the crystal-clear high notes of the delicate piano in Birdy’s Shelter or the ferociously brash and dynamic upheavals of Fontaines DC’s Starburster are a little subdued.

There is enough detail on the bones and satisfying solidity underpinning each note to ensure the music doesn’t get neutered, though. Music flows well through them, with the personality and intent of each track – from A7X to Doechii to Hozier – coming through with plenty of expression in the mix.

Voices come through with ample personality when listening to podcasts and are easy to follow in the soundstage without ever sounding muddled.

There is a richness to the 780NC’s sound that feels as though it’s covered in a layer of thick syrup – but in a good way. It leaves us in a pleasant environment where you’re engulfed in the rich, layered textures, and that smoothness doesn’t work our sonic muscles too hard. The JBL cans have a more refined way with detail than the cheaper Sony 720N, but are less analytical than the Austrian Audios.

The headphones’ bass levels are overly enthusiastic, but you can tone them down a touch using the EQ settings. Basslines are not unsubtle or unwieldy though; they plunge deep and there’s enough bounce in their step as we play through our usual test tracks from Massive Attack's Paradise Circus to Dr Dre and Hans Zimmer soundtracks.

Overall, the 780NC have a good amount of rhythmic talent and dynamic expression to keep us listening throughout. The lower mids and bass frequencies simply could do with a leaner diet to give us cleaner, subtler layers with more satisfying punch.

Go wired and, while they retain the same rich, smooth character, everything sounds a little tidier around the edges, with subtler dynamics, greater solidity and more detail unearthed. The instruments in Khruangbin's Maria Tambien are etched more clearly and with crisper, sweeter highs, even if the bass notes are just as dominating.

Verdict

The JBL Live 780NC aren’t too expensive, aren’t too budget – they’re in that ‘Goldilocks zone’ that, while not perfect, comes very close to delivering everything in a good-sounding, well-designed, feature-packed package.

While not gaining the full five stars when it comes to sound, they’re an attractive pair we have no trouble recommending at this mid-price arena that is starved of exciting contenders. If you’re after a comfortable pair of headphones that you could spend hours with, these playful but capable JBL Live 780NC are worth your attention.

Review published: 16th June 2026

SCORES

• Sound 4
• Features 5
• Build 5

MORE:

Read our review of the Austrian Audio Hi-X25BT

Also consider the Sony WH-CH720N

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