These buds are blooming brilliant

In a few short years, true wireless in-ear headphones have gone from sci-fi to practically genuine hi-fi

Just think back. Less than half a decade or so ago, the best you could hope for as far as wireless headphones go were relatively conventional Bluetooth over-ears or, if you were lucky, a pair of buds connected to each other by a cable of some sort around your neck.

That was the height of sophisticated technology, something early adopters were only too proud to show off on the street. And, of course, while it was impressive, the actual audio quality of many of these trail blazers wasn’t anywhere near what we had come to expect from the usual pair of headphones we plugged into the 3.5mm socket on our smartphones.

It doesn’t take long, though, for things to move on – and for our expectations as far as quality goes, both for build and performance, to rise exponentially.

A look at the next few pages will show, then, that now we can pretty much have it all, in one (well, two) dinky package. The true wireless buds we have here are impressive indeed – proper sonic performers, with all manner of techno tricks up their sleeves, from (clearly) a Bluetooth connection, to noise-cancelling capabilities and more.

As is the way with modern tech, you can now get many of these abilities at a far lower price, but these buds are the best at what they do, and of course you must pay to enjoy that privilege.

Here then we present seven pairs of true wireless in-ears; terrific tiny tech from the industry’s biggest hitters. The traditional Titans in this game – Apple, Bose, Sennheiser and Sony – are joined by Jabra and Technics; even Grado, best known for its truly old-school looking (definitely not sounding, though) on-ears, has now entered the fray.

The joy of these buds is partly in how fast the quality has improved. For not much more than £200 you can now buy headphones that sound almost as good as most of the kit we were happily using a decade ago – only now we can keep our phone in our pocket, out of harms way, and control everything with either our voice, or with a few short taps of our finger.

What on earth will we be saying in another decade’s time?