Bang & Olufsen’s headphones tend to stand out from the crowd, and their new fully wireless mode, the Beoplay E8[1], is no exception. The E8 is easily the best totally wire-free headphone I’ve used thus far, with comfortable earbuds that should fit your regardless of your ear shape, good battery life of around four hours per charge, and the best sound quality of any true wireless buds I’ve tested – and I’ve tested a lot.
The Beoplay E8 are diminutive and understated, making for a far better in-ear look than Apple’s somewhat ridiculous looking AirPods, and they come with a charging case with a full recharge for the buds built in, making for total unplugged play time of 8 hours before you have to find an outlet. The case itself is head and tails above the competition, too, with a sleek, pebbled leather outer and no fiddling required to get the buds inserted within for a good connection to their charging contacts.
B&O has also done a great job with the companion app for the Beoplay E8, offering easy presets and manually configurable equalizer settings so you can tune the sound based on your preferences or the type of content you’re using them to listen to. The app also uses Bluetooth LE for a super easy out of the box pairing experience, which is only marginally more challenging than Apple’s W1-enabled near-field pairing for the AirPods.
In the box, B&O also crucially includes Comply isolating foam earbud tips for the headsets themselves, which really up the game in terms of audio quality. I generally recommend using Comply tips if you want to be able to focus in on sound quality with any pair of earbuds, but often they’re only...