Sound brand JBL has released its take on true wireless, noise-cancelling earbuds for active users. The Tune 230NC comes with the now familiar pebble-sized charging case, which also works as a backup charger.
These Tune 230NC are quite comfortable earbuds with stalks that double as touch-sensitive control pads. Once inserted in your years you can adjust the position for a better fit, and I like it – I have mentioned before how some earbuds simply do not work for me at all but the Tune 230NC is in a category apart in terms of comfort (I can say the same for very few other models).
Using a mobile app you can configure the gestures – tap, double-tap, triple-tap and touch and hold to control volume, track playing, pause/play and answer/reject phone calls. You can change the functions around as you please, using the companion mobile app to manage settings.
The touch and hold gesture by default invokes the default assistant on your phone. If you prefer you can even link these earbuds to your Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant directly bypassing the default assistant, which is handy if your phone is locked into one ecosystem, but you prefer a different one (I tend to use Alexa everywhere).
The noise-cancelling works well and with the earbud's design you get good acoustic isolation. If you rather be aware of your surroundings, you can set the ambient sound control to get external sounds through, a good feature to have if you are exercising outdoor and need to hear what’s going on around you.
What is surprising is how all this tech is built into a pair of earbuds, each weighing at 10 g only.
The sound coming from the 8mm drivers is good, and it can give you some bass but you might want to use the companion mobile app to adjust the sound through its equaliser to get the most of it. The app comes with presets for jazz, vocals, bass, club, studio and the option to create your own.
In any case, we are talking about earbuds that will be used during exercise or commute so you can’t expect the same as you would from more expensive, studio-quality on-ear headphones.
Four microphones give you good quality voice capture for your voice calls, which sound clear for both ends of the call (under good call conditions).
Being designed for a more active person, the Tune 230NC is sweat and splash-proof (IPX4), so you don’t have to worry if you are caught in the rain while exercising.
The Tune 230NC supports Bluetooth 5.2 and supports SBC and AAC codes but you won’t find support for the higher-quality aptX codec. JBL works around this by giving you settings for different audio or video playback modes (the second one to try and reduce lag that is highly dependent on codecs).
You can get up to ten hours of playback with active noise cancellation turned off or down to eight hours if using active noise cancellation. Like other earphones in the market, the case doubles as a charger and backup battery so you can quickly recharge those without a power source other than the case. To charge the case (and earphones inside the case) you use the now more common USB-C standard cable.
Even with all these features, JBL managed to get the Tune 230NC in the market under the $ 200 threshold – and if you search you can find it around the $ 160 mark which seems to be a good price for the performance you get.
