I listen to music >10 hrs per day, and I love the convenience of wireless earbuds. They are tiny and portable, and I can do all kinds of stuff — work on something with my hands, take on/off my jacket or my messenger bag, etc. — without getting tangled up in a cord.
So which wireless earbuds are the best? For this kind of thing I always turn first to The Wirecutter, which publishes detailed investigations of consumer products, like Consumer Reports but free and often more up-to-date.
I bought their recommended wireless earbuds a while back, when their recommendation was the Jaybird Bluebuds X. After several months I lost that pair and bought the new Wirecutter recommendation, the JLab Epic Bluetooth. Those were terrible so I returned them and bought the now-available Jaybird X2, which has been awesome so far.
So long as a pair of wireless earbuds have decent sound quality and >6 hrs battery life, the most important thing to me is low frequency of audio cutting.
See, Bluetooth is a very weak kind of signal. It can’t really pass through your body, for example. That’s why it uses so little battery power, which is important for tiny things like wireless earbuds. As a result, I got fairly frequent audio cutting when trying to play music from my phone in my pants pocket to my Jaybird Bluebuds X. After some experimentation, I learned that audio cutting was less frequent if my phone was in my rear pocket, on the same side of my body as the earbuds’ Bluetooth receiver. But it still cut out maybe an average of 200 times an hour (mostly concentrated in particularly frustrating 10-minute periods with lots of cutting).
When I lost that pair and got the JLab Epic Bluetooth, I hoped that with the newer pair they’d have figured out some extra tricks to reduce audio cutting. Instead, the audio cutting was terrible. Even with my phone in the optimal pants pocket, there was usually near-constant audio cutting, maybe about 2000 times an hour on average. Moreover, when I used them while reclining in bed, I would get lots of audio cutting whenever my neck was pressed up against my pillow! So, pretty useless. I returned them to Amazon for a refund.
I replaced this pair with The Wirecutter’s 2nd choice, the Jaybird X2. So far these have been fantastic. In my first ~15 hours of using them I’ve gotten exactly two split-second audio cuts.
So if you want to make the leap to wireless earbuds, I recommend the Jaybird X2. Though if you don’t mind waiting, the Jaybird X3 and Jaybird Freedom are both coming out this spring, and they might be even better.
One final note: I got my last two pairs of wireless earbuds in white so that others can see I’m wearing them. With my original black Bluebuds X, people would sometimes talk at me for >30 seconds without realizing I couldn’t hear them because I had music in my ears.