JBL Tour One M3 (with Smart Tx Transmitter)

JBL's Tour One M3 arrive at £380 with an unusual pitch: rather than chase the Bose QuietComfort Ultra and Bowers & Wilkins Px7 S3 purely on sound, they ship with the Smart Tx, a matchbox-sized touchscreen transmitter that doubles as a remote control, a USB-C DAC and an Auracast broadcaster. Plug it into a laptop, a gym treadmill or an in-flight entertainment socket and you get wireless audio where you'd otherwise be stuck with a tangled cable — and you can share that stream with anyone else running Auracast gear.

That makes these easy to place: they're for frequent flyers, commuters and anyone who works across a messy pile of old and new sources. At 278g, foldable, with plush padding and a sensible clamping force, they're built for long-haul wear, and the quoted 40 hours with ANC on (70 with it off) means charging becomes something you think about weekly rather than nightly. The codec list — LDAC and LC3 alongside SBC and AAC, over Bluetooth 5.3 — is as complete as anyone offers, and the app is stuffed with a 10-band EQ, head-tracked spatial audio, hearing personalisation and even a personal sound amplification mode.

The catch, and it's the one that shapes the rest of this review, is that the fundamentals feel a step behind the price tag.

The Smart Tx is the reason to buy this bundle and it's a legitimately useful piece of kit — being able to control EQ, ANC and volume from a screen, and to pipe audio out of a socket that has no business being wireless, is the kind of feature you only appreciate once you've used it. The hard case with a dedicated transmitter pocket, carabiner and full cable set shows JBL has thought about travel properly.

Against that, the core headphone doesn't feel like £380. The chassis is largely plastic, with reports of audible creaking under twist and a thin headband, which is hard to swallow next to rivals that feel considerably more expensive in the hand. The touch panel on the right earcup is reportedly over-eager, triggering accidental pauses. And the analogue 3.5mm input that was on the M2 is gone — you get USB-C only on the headphones themselves, with adapters in the box, which is workable but a step backwards for anyone who just wants to plug into a socket without the transmitter.

On the two things that matter most, the picture is genuinely mixed rather than bad. Reviewer consensus on the noise cancelling splits down the middle — some found it excellent, others clearly behind the class leaders — which usually indicates 'good, not benchmark'. Sound draws similar comments: full-bodied, punchy and clean, but described as dry and reserved wirelessly and short on bass extension versus the best at this money. Call quality and wireless stability, by contrast, come in for consistent praise. One other note for the cautious: there's no IP rating, so treat these as indoor and travel headphones rather than gym gear.

The rating reflects a smart, feature-rich package that is nevertheless competing in the most brutal segment in audio. If the Smart Tx solves a problem you actually have — airline seats, old kit, shared listening — the M3 makes a strong case and the battery life seals it. If you simply want the best-sounding, best-isolating, best-built over-ears at this price, the obvious rivals still have the edge.

Note: sources disagree on the microphone count (four versus eight), so treat that specification with caution.