Jabra Elite 4 review: The good kind of cheap

It wasn’t that long ago that affordable true wireless headphones were rare, and good ones even rarer. But today, it’s not uncommon to see headphones that cost $150, $100, or even less sport desirable features like active noise cancellation and multi-point connectivity. Launched in March 2023, the Jabra Elite 4 earphones cost just $100 and offer sound quality and ANC that are better than they should be for the price. They may not have all the bells and whistles you want, but if all you really need is solid sound and ANC, the Jabra Elite 4 might be for you.

Price and availability

The Jabra Elite 4 comes in at an eminently reasonable $100 and is available in Dark Grey, Navy, Light Beige and Lilac. You can get them from the usual places like Amazon and Best Buy, or from Jabra.

Design and hardware

The Jabra Elite 4 look awfully familiar. Visually, they are very similar to a number of other Jabra earphones, including the entry-level Jabra Elite 3, the existing Jabra Elite 4 Active and the Jabra Elite 5. The earphones are relatively small, with a single triangular button. each bud and a small charging case with a flip top.

The earbuds come with several different sizes of silicone ear tips; the pre-installed medium size fits me very comfortably. The Elite 4s don’t have any stabilization hardware — no ridges, fins, or stems — but the headphones still felt secure enough even when running.

Audio and ANC

As a $100 headphone, the Jabra Elite 4 won’t challenge top-of-the-range headphones from Sony or Samsung for the best sound quality award. What we get from the Elite 4’s 6mm drivers is pretty good for a headphone in this price range, but with plenty of bass response. With the headphones default tuning, higher frequency sounds aren’t as distinct as they should be – vocals and percussion in particular can sound a bit dull.

But Jabra’s Sound+ app lets you customize the Elite 4’s sound with a five-band equalizer and Triple the sliders up help a bit. There’s support for SBC and aptX codecs, but no AAC – though that shouldn’t matter if you don’t have an iPhone.

Noise cancellation, the Elite 4’s claim to fame over the more affordable Elite 3, is also pretty good for the price. Switching back and forth between the Jabra Elite 4 and the more expensive Elite 5 in public, it wasn’t always easy to hear the difference in ANC quality. The more expensive Elite 5 seems to do a better job of silencing mid-frequency noise than the Elite 4, but the two aren’t in entirely separate leagues. Neither can match the best headphones from Bose or Apple here, but for $100, it’s hard to complain.

Call quality is also good enough, with recordings showing that the Elite 4 headphones do an admirable job of isolating my voice from background noise. Again, the Jabra Elite 4 aren’t as good for calls as in-ear headphones that cost twice as much, but they’re good enough that you probably won’t think too much about them.

Applications and features

The Jabra Elite 4’s feature set is a bit odd. While the headphones offer quick pairing and multi-point connectivity, conveniences not guaranteed even by more expensive headphones, they lack features that are seemingly more basic. There’s no in-ear detection, meaning the headphones won’t stop playing when you take them out. You also can’t change the earphones’ control scheme, and the earphones don’t report their case’s battery status – the only indication of how much juice is left in the charging case is a color-changing LED on the front.

The Jabra Sound+ app is required for headset firmware updates and allows you to change the headset’s equalizer settings. The app is straightforward and easy to use, but I wonder why the only option to control which ANC modes the headphones go through is when you press the left button on the headphones. The control scheme is otherwise unchanged, so if you’d prefer a single press of either bud to act as play/pause (rather than play/pause for the right bud and ANC modes for the left), you’re out of luck.

Battery and charging

The Jabra Elite 4’s battery life is on the lower end of average, with the headphones managing about five and a half hours of media playback with ANC on. This is a bit disappointing; I tend to complain about anything less than six hours on a single charge. But these headphones are remarkably small and remarkably cheap, so it’s hard to complain about the battery life. If you’re looking for headphones to drown out the noise of an international flight, affordable headphones probably aren’t on your list anyway.

The Elite 4 charging case provides about three more full charges, which is impressive considering how small it is. However, you can’t see the remaining charge of the case on the phone, even if the headphones are in it. Instead, there’s a color-changing LED on the case that you can use to park it. The case also lacks wireless charging, recharging exclusively via USB-C. This isn’t uncommon in more affordable headphones, but it’s worth considering.

Competition

With an MSRP of $100, the Jabra Elite 4 competes in the increasingly crowded budget true wireless space. If you’re considering the Jabra Elite 4, you might also be considering the $59 OnePlus Nord Buds 2. The latest OnePlus headphones offer similar battery life per charge with ANC and better sound quality than you’d expect given their ultra-budget price, but the quality of that ANC isn’t on par with what you get from the Jabra Elite 4.

The tried and tested Pixel Buds A-Series also come in at a bargain $99. Google’s affordable earphones offer better sound quality than the Jabra Elite 4, but have no ANC to speak of – in fact, their ‘spatial ventilation’ design deliberately lets ambient sound into your ears. The A-series Pixel Buds achieve a similar five hours of playback on a single charge, but without noise cancellation, it’s nothing to write home about.

Should you buy them?

The Elite 4 are another competent pair of affordable headphones from Jabra. While there’s nothing remarkable about the headphones per se—the sound, ANC, and battery life are pretty average here—the fact that there aren’t any major flaws in these $100 headphones is impressive. They sound pretty good and block ambient noise well enough, which is far from a given for cheap headphones.

There are plenty of reasons to spend more on headphones if you can afford it. Even the custom Jabra Elite 5, which comes in at a very reasonable $150, comes with features like wireless charging and in-ear detection, both of which make for a significantly better overall experience. But if you’re only looking for decent sound and acceptable noise isolation from your headphones, and your budget is around a hundred bucks, you could do a lot worse than the Jabra Elite 4.

Source: Jabra

Jabra Elite 4

The Jabra Elite 4 are the company’s latest mid-range headphones. At an MSRP of $99, the headphones offer convenient features like quick pairing, multipoint Bluetooth, and active noise cancellation.