Plantronics BackBeat Pro 5100

To the moon and back — Plantronics’ buds excel at calls as well as music.

Plantronics also has quite the history — how’s producing the headset used by the first astronauts on the moon for heritage! Fifty years on, you can have their more Earthly true wireless offering hanging out of your own ears. The BackBeat Pro 5100 buds are incredibly compact and lightweight, as is their charging case, still packing 6.5 plus 13 hours of battery life respectively, though sadly it’s microUSB not USB-C. The audio quality belies their size, offering excellent clarity and a well-rounded frequency response out of the box. Upon connecting them with the BackBeat app, you gain a wealth of features, including Find My Headset and the ability to configure its (rather finicky) touch and click controls to launch playlists, start a stopwatch, read out the time, and more. When making calls, they use four noise-cancelling microphones and WindSmart technology to cut out background noise — nothing we’ve heard in the true wireless space has come close to the call clarity here, so if that’s important it’s likely worth the investment. The ability to move your call to your handset automatically when the buds sense you’ve taken them out is genius. Our only issue was finding their fit a little awkward; we would occasionally struggle to create a seal with the eartips.

These are another pair up at $299, but the call quality will attract some buyers, especially iPhone users, as they support Bluetooth’s AAC codec, but not the more Androidfriendly aptX. HD