Thank you JLab for sending us this product to review!

My first JLab product was quite a long time ago, as I was looking for an inexpensive pair of wired earbuds that sounded good, and they certainly did the job well. They were a bit bassy compared to what I wanted, but were better than the Sony earbuds I used at the time. This was before I really dove into higher-quality headphones (and higher budgets), but my experience with those old Jbuds J2 left a positive impression about the company, their designs, and especially durability and value. From what I've seen with these new Work Buds, it appears that JLab has continued to focus on durability and value in their modern designs.

As the name suggests, the JLab Work Buds are primarily focused on workers. It just so happens that I have a day job (outside of Christ Centered Gamer) where I work remotely almost all of the time, and I need a good headset to communicate with my other remote team members. And why not test its gaming chops while I'm at it?

First, let's touch on the sound quality. These Work Buds have a decent sound profile out of the box, and the 6mm driver does a good (but not exceptional) job of resolving details. Any Bluetooth headset is going to be hampered at least somewhat by being Bluetooth, unless they support LDAC or another advanced codec. These do not, but they do support SBC (the bare minimum required by the specification) and AAC, which is what Apple devices prefer. AAC generally sounds better than SBC, but not as good as AptX or LDAC, so it's a decent middle ground and sounds pretty good.

Where these really shine is with the Equalization (EQ) profile support. There are three standard profiles, and one that you can customize through the JLab app. The default is JLab Signature, which is what you might consider a 'V'-shaped frequency response. It does sound quite nice for certain kinds of music, but I prefer the second EQ profile, Balanced, which is a flatter, more natural presentation, but not so flat as to sound lifeless. The third profile is Bass Boost, which is not to my preference. The final setting is a fully-customizable drag and drop EQ slider with a ten-band graphical equalizer. I felt that Balanced was close enough to my preferences, but having this available allows you to have these buds mirror almost any sound profile you want; it's great! You make these changes in the mobile Android (or presumably iOS; I don't have one) app.

As for the rest of the Android app, it works pretty well; my only major complaint is requiring Location permissions. It has a nice feature set. These include:

* controlling the level of Environmental Noise Canceling (ENC) of the microphone (called Clear Voice here)
* adjusting the EQ
* controlling the transparency mode level (called Be Aware here)
* adjusting the touch controls (changes what taps and how many do what)
* choosing normal or low-latency mode (called Music vs. Movie Mode)
* adjusting the maximum volume level for safety (called Safe Hearing)
* updating the firmware of your earbuds

The app is simple but reasonably feature-filled. Many settings, like Be Aware, Clear Voice, and Safe Hearing have a slider bar which you can slide to set the strength of the feature. This is quite useful, as transparency and noise canceling both can really benefit from adjustments. Noise canceling on the microphone works decently at the defaults, but some may prefer how it sounds with it lowered; if I was in a noisy area, some people I talked with prefer how I sound with a lower setting, even if some background noise is let in, rather than having me sound a bit tinny with full microphone noise cancellation enabled, which is the default.

The Touch Controls adjustment allows you to set what one, two, or three taps does, and long press is the last setting. There are quite a few options to choose from, and the left and right earbuds can do different things, giving you eight possible controls at your fingertips. I find triple taps too annoying to be reliable, so I just disabled those options from the menu, leaving single, double, and long presses for all of the functions I need. I like having play/pause, next and previous track, Be Aware toggle, and EQ mode selection just a touch (or three) away.

I find the Work Buds to be reasonably comfortable; with the default medium-sized 'Cush Fin', they stay in alright but can fall out sometimes. The large fin stays in crazy well, but it kind of hurts my ears after a while. With the smallest Cush Fin, they fall out easily. The default fin works best for me, or I'd be afraid I would drop them too easily, not that it's stopped me from trying.

You see, I have a problem: I haven't figured out how to get Bluetooth earbuds to last very long once permanently in my possession. I was fortunate enough to review several pairs of really nice ones... but they all broke eventually, probably from one or more of the drops they took. While I can't predict how these will last long term, what I can say is that they seem really tough, and have taken a few drops onto concrete and keep ticking like nothing happened.

Fairly recently, we got into ebiking. I’ve always enjoyed cycling, but we live in an area with lots of hills – fun going down, but up is quite brutal. This has led us to ebikes, and now we ride much farther than just around the neighborhood; we’ve ridden to the store, church, and more. It’s a blast, but having a means to communicate can be tough. Enter the Work Buds. They fit under my full-face helmet, the microphone extends near my mouth, and I can be on a phone call with my riding buddy and we can hear each other talk. These Work Buds also feature a transparency mode if you want to hear the environment better than their passive noise isolation allows. The Work Buds do not offer Active Noise Canceling. The only challenge is that with them in my ears, my helmet is more difficult to remove, but that's the fault of the tight fit of my helmet, not the earbuds. That has led to more drops than I'd prefer, but again, they continue to work well.