No matter how cool a single feature is, it means nothing if the headphones themselves aren’t up to our standards. So my top priority was to test the M3’s performance.
Over the course of several weeks, I put the M3 pair through my normal arsenal of headphone tests. I wore them continuously throughout my workdays and took them on two cross-country flights. I watched movies, listened to music, and played some casual video games. I took phone calls and video chats, and I played with all of the bells and whistles this pair has to offer.
The first thing I noticed was how comfortable the headphones were. The M3’s earcups are lined with delightfully yielding memory foam, which conformed to my glasses painlessly. The headband is similarly cushioned, and the overall design is lightweight (I measured 277 grams, which is about on a par with the weight of our favorite noise-cancelling headphones, the Bose QuietComfort Ultra Headphones). I wore the M3 headphones for six- to eight-hour stretches without getting headaches or ear pain, which isn’t something I can say about most headphones.
I was surprised by how good the Tour One M3 headphones sound right out of the box, and they sounded even better after I did some mild tweaking of the EQ controls in the JBL app. Bass notes have oomph, while high-frequency sounds have clarity and detail — but neither of them overwhelms the midrange or veers into uncomfortable levels. The app also offers automatic EQ adjustment based on a hearing test, and the resulting sound wasn’t heavy-handed or lopsided in frequency response — which has generally been my experience when I’ve tested that function. If you aren’t in love with any of the EQ presets, it’s worth giving the auto EQ process a shot to see if it meets your needs.
Overall, I’d say the M3’s sonic performance is on a par with our favorite higher-end Bluetooth headphones, the Sony WH-1000XM5, but this pair doesn’t have the same sense of spatial depth as Edifier Stax Spriti S3, which uses planar magnetic drivers but lacks features like active noise cancellation.
This high-end headphones pair sounds great, is very comfortable, and comes with cutting-edge features like Auracast.
The JBL Tour One M3 uses a combination of physical and touch-based controls. Track and volume controls are touch-based, but you get buttons for on, off, and Bluetooth pairing and to switch between noise cancellation and a hear-through mode. While it’s a somewhat unconventional setup, the buttons and controls are all easy to access by feel, and they’re mostly nuisance-free. The touch controls emit an audible beep to indicate that your tap has registered, and as long as I didn’t lean my headphones into my hand, I didn’t have any misfires.
To test call clarity, I wore the M3 headphones near traffic, in a stiff breeze, and while making a general racket in the kitchen. The microphone software did an admirable job of reducing background noise. My callers said that I sounded intelligible regardless of the situation. In particularly windy conditions, my voice sounded thinner, but the words weren’t lost. Callers could tell there were some sounds in the background, but the noises they detected sounded distant and far quieter than they were in real life. At one point, while standing at a crosswalk, a bus pulled up next to me and activated the kneeling suspension, with that signature airy blast and hiss underlined by the chugging of the LA Metro fleet’s natural-gas engine. “That had to be loud,” I said to my caller. “What had to be? I didn’t notice anything,” was the reply.
The JBL app allows you to increase or decrease sidetone (how much of your own voice you hear during a call), adjust your (or your caller’s) vocal tone, and trigger a “sound level optimizer,” which automatically adjusts the volume of your caller’s voice to a comfortable level — even if the incoming call is too loud or too quiet.
Overall, I found the JBL app easy to navigate and packed with helpful customizations. Although some features are more consequential than others, none of them felt superfluously added just to pad a spec sheet.
