ANC is top of your list: There's no active noise cancellation here, sadly, although the hear-through feature works beautifully to stay aware of your surroundings. We did enjoy the audio on offer from these buds, but you may want to do some tweaking when it comes to the audio profile. Out of the box, the sound is heavily scooped – at once overwhelming and sometimes boomy in the bass frequencies while being boosted and occasionally brittle in the upper treble range: all of this reduces the clarity of the mids. However, the five-band equalizer in the app means you can adjust the sound to your liking. Finally, the brand you choose will depend on what you're looking for – but we're careful with our lists. That means all of the earbuds and in-ear headphones above come from brands we trust. Still, if you're not sure where to start looking, respected brands like Sony, Apple, Cambridge Audio, Jabra, and Nura are good places to start. How we test the best earbuds You really want app support: Audio-Technica's earbuds do excellently well without a companion app, but if you want a visual cue of the features, you won't get it here.

You’re on a tight budget: It’s easy to argue that the ANC and sound performance of the QCE II are well worth every penny, but these are expensive earbuds. The Audio-Technica ATH-SQ1TW are a budget pair of buds that look very cool indeed. They offer exclusive 5.8mm drivers, plus an "IPX4-equivalent" splashproof design and user-friendly features. There’s dual connectivity onboard, so you can connect to your laptop and phone at the same time. Touch controls work well and you can use them to cancel low-latency mode or use the hear-through function. Battery gives you 6.5 hours of use with the headphones fully charged, plus an additional 13 hours of juice from the charging case, for a total of 19.5 hours. There’s no active noise cancellation or a companion app, but at this level (and thanks to the impressive levels of passive isolation provided by the buds), we don't miss these perks.If you do opt for wireless or true wireless earbuds, make sure the battery life is up to scratch, otherwise you may find yourself caught short without any music in the middle of your commute. Consider the brand. We’ll go into more detail in a moment about brand and whether Daewoo is your best option for Headphones. But the point here is just to make sure you’re factoring in brand when considering the quality of a product. Some brands will be better known for quality than others, and no doubt some of the much higher quality brands will attract a higher price for their products. You own an iPhone: For a seamless experience within Apple's ecosystem, you need to be looking to earbuds that offer a dedicated app for iOS. They’re not the cheapest buds, but because Sony has combined performance, ergonomics and build quality so effectively, we think they’re excellent value. Other true wireless earbuds may surpass the Sony WF-1000XM4s in particular areas – like noise cancellation – but they don’t offer excellent quality across the board. This is even the case after the release of the newer Sony WF-1000XM5 earbuds, which are fantastic, but we still rate the XM4s as the best all-rounders. You’d prefer high-definition wireless sound quality: With support for just low-definition wireless codecs, the QCE II may not be for everyone.

You really want app support: They do amazing things without a companion app (on-ear volume control, EQ, etc.) but if you want a visual cue of their battery life, no dice.

You want ANC: There's decent noise isolation here, but nothing like the levels of ANC and immersion you'd find from buds specifically designed with ANC in mind.