Awesome audio at a painful price

The JBL Tour Pro 3 dare to ask a question few have ever thought of asking: what if earbuds had touchscreens? But at the same time, why would you want a touchscreen display on your earbud case, and does having one justify the extra cost (including the touchscreen and the necessary processing hardware)?

Questionable party tricks aside, we must determine if the earbuds inside that charging case are any good and worth buying. On paper, their dual driver design looks quite appealing, but at $300 they need to really hit it out of the park.

Price, availability, and specs

The JBL Tour Pro 3 are available from the JBL online store and Best Buy for an MSRP of $300.

What’s good about the JBL Tour Pro 3?

Amazing audio quality

There’s a lot to love about the Tour Pro 3, and audio quality is chief among them. Put simply, they sound awesome and have a great range of features to enhance your listening experience. These features can be enabled/disabled through the app and on the smart charging case. The equalizer has some excellent presets, as well as the option to create your own custom EQ profile. However, the earbuds are very well tuned, so I ended up listening mostly without an EQ most of the time, though I did occasionally turn on the bass preset when I wanted a little more oomph.

Thanks to a hybrid dual-driver, the JBL Tour Pro 3 performed admirably when playing 2Cellos’ cover of Thunderstruck, and excelled across a wide range of genres. The sharp punk tones and deep bass of Sick Puppies’ Going Places really hit home with spatial sound and the bass preset enabled, while the screaming vocals and harsh mash of guitar and drums in Trash Boat’s Are You Ready Now? were well-defined. And I enjoyed the clarity of the Tour Pro 3 when listening to Dead, Rich or In Jail by Dune Rats and Fidlar.

The growling and pounding drums of Alexisonfire’s Young Cardinals balanced well with the more melodic chorus, while the chainsaw rattle of the guitar in Incoming Storm by Zach Lopez & The Cartel didn’t drown out the vocals. Good audio separation is a notable aspect of these earbuds, and the dreamy tones of The Forest Is The Path by Snow Patrol benefited from this, as did the over-the-top super-dramatic MAD by TX2 and Ice Nine Kills.

The touchscreen-controlled smart charging case works all right for adjusting various settings, but its best tricks are wireless charging and a USB input, so that audio from wired sources can be listened to, such as media while on a flight. Both USB-C and USB-C to AUX cables are included in the box. Auracast integration offers a further audio-sharing option. The case’s build quality is quite good and didn’t show any obvious signs of wear after dozens of hours of use. And the earbuds themselves are rated to IP55 for water and dust resistance, which is OK but not terribly impressive.

Active noise cancellation is very good and highly customizable. Hear-through is similarly high quality, with ambient aware and talk-through modes offering smart options. The balance of played audio with external ambient noise provides a very natural effect that provides a convincing illusion that you’re not listening to the outside world through a microphone array. Passive noise cancellation can also be enhanced by using the included foam ear tips.

Battery life is also excellent with up to 40 hours of maximum listening if ANC is turned off or 32 hours with it on. And Smart Ambient mode is a great feature, as it raises and lowers the volume of sound in real-time based on your surroundings, while also recognizing your voice and automatically pausing your music when you start talking.

Call quality is perhaps the best of any earbuds I’ve tested this year. The earbuds each have two beamforming outer mics to pick up your voice, as well as an inner mic that isolates noise. This, combined with a customizable call equalizer and sound level optimizer, makes these some of the most advanced and high-performance earbuds for making calls.

What’s bad about the JBL Tour Pro 3?

Top dollar when others do it better

That $300 price tag is a bitter pill to swallow when, for $50 less, you could have the Samsung Galaxy Buds 3 Pro, or for about half the price, you could pick up the Jabra Elite 8 Active or OnePlus Buds Pro 3, and for a third of the cost, you could have the Nothing Ear (a), any of which deliver a similar audio quality level. The Jabra, OnePlus, and Samsung buds even go head-to-head on most features with the JBL Tour Pro 3, so really its only advantage is the smart charging case, which is what you’re shelling out extra for here.

Read our review

Review: The OnePlus Buds Pro 3 get everything right

Great earbuds at an attractive price

That smart changing case also costs you in terms of size, which is awkwardly portly in stature so it doesn’t easily fit in your pocket as most other earbud charging cases. This wasn’t a problem for me and my favorite cargo shorts’ cavernous pockets, but if your clothing isn’t so accommodating, the Jabra Tour Pro 3 might be a problem. Despite its rotund dimensions, it can only rest with any stability on its front or back, which can be mildly annoying.

I also have durability concerns regarding the case and the extra level of complexity added by its smart features and display; it’s a surface you really don’t want to scratch. In my experience, three things are certain in life: death, taxes, and scratches on earbud charging cases.

More importantly, the utility of the touchscreen controls is hindered by slow navigation. Each screen must be individually swiped, and there are no shortcuts to speed this process up. Even just powering it on by tapping the one button on the charging case, or double tapping the display, and then sliding your finger across the screen to unlock is a hassle to access play/pause/skip compared to doing the same thing on a phone or just using the touch controls on the buds. Swiping through to more advanced settings such as noise cancellation and other options is no faster at best than doing the same thing through the companion app on your phone, or again, just using the on-bud controls.

The settings order in the on-case menu can be adjusted through the phone app, and you can trim out the ones you don’t want, which alleviates these issues to some degree, but the implementation of this novel concept is still unfortunately lacking. Another example of this is that while the Tour Pro 3 includes a find-my-case feature, which emits a high-pitched beeping from the case (something I’d like to see in more earbuds), it only works if the earbuds are outside the case and connected to your phone. This means it’s only helpful if you’re wearing your earbuds, but have lost your case.

I would suggest to JBL that they work on the touchscreen’s software interface, so a jump to a multi-app quick menu by swiping up or down with icons is possible for quickly reaching the setting you need without swiping linearly through the settings library. Additionally, it should be possible to swipe through multiple settings screens simultaneously with a flick of a finger.

For future models, I would also like to see tactile controls on the charging case for manipulating settings menus instead of a touchscreen. A four-way directional pad, enter button, scroll wheel, and control lock switch would likely be far nicer to use than the touchscreen. Also, it seems like a missed opportunity to have an onboard screen and processor, but no way to load songs onto the charging case so that it could be truly independent of your phone. If the JBL Tour Pro 3 could operate as phone-connected Bluetooth earbuds and as an independent MP3 player, having that expensive integrated screen would be much more exciting and useful.

Should you buy them?

The JBL Tour Pro 3 are really good earbuds, don’t get me wrong. They’re comfortable, sound great, and have all the modern features you’d expect from high-end true wireless earbuds. They’re absolutely up there with the Samsung Galaxy Buds 3 Pro, the Jabra Elite 8 Active Gen 2, and the OnePlus Buds Pro 3 in terms of quality, though their on-bud controls weren’t to my preference. Call quality turned out to be my favorite thing about them, and the JBL Tour Pro 3 are perhaps the best earbuds on the market in this regard.

However, at around $300, they’re just too expensive to be on par with competing headphones, which can be had for as little as half the cost of the Tour Pro 3. The smart charging case is the gimmick that is supposed to sell you on the high price point, but unfortunately, it’s just not as useful as it could be. While it could be improved with a software upgrade, and hardware alterations in future models could potentially make it a game-changer in the wireless earbuds space, it’s not what you’ll receive with the JBL Tour Pro 3. They’re great earbuds but are difficult to recommend, which is sad to say as I enjoyed using them.

JBL Tour Pro 3

The JBL Tour Pro 3 offer excellent audio playback with adjustable noise-cancellation and adaptive ambient noise awareness capability. Stellar call quality, a smart charging case with a built-in touchscreen, and a 40-hour battery life make these appealing earbuds, albeit at a steep price point.

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