Recently I purchased a pair of JBL’s Live Pro+ TWS wireless headsets. To be honest, I did not really need it but I needed to get rid of some flying miles at Lufthansa’s Miles&More shop before these expire. Since everything else in their shop was not really appealing to me I finally settled on this pair.

I do not want to give a full review here, you can read a lot about them on various sites. I just wanted to briefly describe my few experiences with them so far.

Sound

First, sound. Sound, for a TWS (True WirelesS) set, is pretty good, as is the battery life (~7h). Sound has bit too much emphasis on the higher pitched sounds, but that can be tweaked using the JBL Android iOS or Android app and its built-in equalizer. With a bit of fiddling I got pretty decent sound with also surprisingly good bass sound (I like bass, I listen a lot to trance music while working). Also using them as a headset for phone calls etc. works pretty well, sound in both directions is good.

The headset is also advertised with ANC – Adaptive Noise Cancelling. Since the earplugs also use these now commonly used silicone ear plugs that pretty much tighten off your ear canal and since they advertise with 6 microphones per ear plug I thought, well, that could be pretty good! But well, meh, it is not. The difference between having ANC enabled and not is, at least to me, almost negligible. More importantly if any ANC mode is active it introduces some static white noise, which you will not recognize unless there is no audio playing. And ANC will reduce battery life. So to me a feature I will likely not use a lot, will also have to try it a bit more outside, like in public transportation or so.

Something I also noticed previously already with my (still alive and kickin‘ !) Parrot Zik 2 is that enabling ANC changes the overall sound. With the Zik and now also here with the JBL sound actually improves a bit when ANC is active, so you need less equalizer tweaking. On the other hand of course this is pretty annoying since this means whenever you toggle ANC you also need to fiddle with the equalizer again. Oh well.

Pairing – With two devices, also Linux

Pairing of the headset with my Android phone was pretty straight forward. With the JBL Headset app from Google’s Play store all features and be controlled – ANC, equalizer, touch button functions etc. A little annoying is that you can not disable triggering the „assistant“ when longer pushing on one of the touch buttons of the earplugs. This will always at least trigger the phone’s built-in assistant which in most cases will be Google’s. I hate that thing.

What the app and handbook do not really describe is how to pair the headset with multiple devices. After initial pairing with the phone whenever I take out the headset from its little charging box they will now automatically connect to my phone and never go into pairing mode again. But hey, I’d like to listen to music from my laptop too! The JBL website also mentions pairing to multiple devices but not how to actually do that.

Today I found at east one trick. Switch off Bluetooth on the phone and then open the earplug’s box. They will then try to connect to the phone and after that fails they will again fall back to pairing mode – voilà! Now you can also pair them with Linux. After that they will now try to reconnect to the second paired device when powering up again. But now you can disconnect them from, say, the laptop (via Bluetooth settings) and then manually connect to them again e.g. from the phone.

The Bluetooth Low Energy privacy hell

For some reason I do not know the earplugs also have some Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) interface. The problem with that is that this is always (!!!) visible as soon as the earplugs are switched on. So wherever you go with them active, you become trackable. This to me is a total misfeature of BLE, which I already have written about here. This is pretty annoying. Not only can you be tracked this also shows everyone in your proximity what type of headset your are wearing, which could also become a real life security risk since it could attract thieves and robbers (which has already been reported especially for Apple products).

I would strongly suggest to JBL to try hard to get rid of this permanently advertising BLE interface.

Final

So I am quite happy with them now. Of course there is this little nag that there is no app for Linux to control ANC and more importantly the equalizer. Maybe someone can reverse engineer the Bluetooth protocol for it? For the Zik there are a couple of projects to do that. The BLE advertising is a bit concerning to me since I do not at all like being trackable in public.