JLab Rewind Wireless Retro Headphones | Bluetooth 4.2 | 12 Hours Playtime | Custom EQ3 Sound | Music Controls | Noise Isolation | With Microphone | Throwback 80s 90s Design | Black

The company seems to think this is just for those who remember the eighties, but I prefer over ear headphones. Buds fall out – especially when exercising. These are decent, functional headphones that never fall out. Slightly fiddly to recharge, but they work well and the sound quality is good.Edit: 12 mnths later. Still going strong. Battery lasts a week. Recharges in 2 hours. Bluetooth syncs easily with iphone. Excellent product.

Got these because they looked fairly comfy and are wireless. They are very convenient, the bluetooth connection is mostly fine over a distance of about 5 meters and have not encountered any issues with pairing.Build quality is decent, nothing special but nothing atrocious either. They do creak at times.Comfort wise they are good, but could have been better if the earcups swiveled horizontally, not just vertically. There’s also plenty of adjustment for larger head shapes.My main issue though is the quite horrible sound quality. They are by far some of the worse headphones I’ve had the displeasure of listening to. No matter what preset I use they sound muffled, muddy and lack a lot of clarity. Soundstage is poor, imaging is quite bad, low end lacks extension, mids are recessed, highs are ok, but also lacking in extension or any kind of finesse. These headphones are true to the ‘Retro’ branding because these do sound like a cheap walkman pair of headphones from the 90s.Compared to a pair of Koss KSC-75, which are similarly priced, these are exponentially worse, several leagues bellow the Koss. I have pairs of small, cheap earphones like the Qian 39 that sound quite a lot better.Another issue I’ve encountered is channel imbalanced, the drivers probably aren’t matched at all so there are several dB differences between the Left and Right drivers.The only impressive thing about the sound quality is that they managed to tune these drives so poorly, I’m impressed anyone at JLab listened to these headphones and thought the sound quality is adequate.Another negative is charging, you have to lift the earpad foam a little for the microUSB cable to fit, not really convenient.Battery life at least is close-ish to the 12 hour mark if used at around 50% volume.Don’t get me wrong, they are cheap and they do the trick if you listen to audiobooks or podcasts, but I find them very inadequate for music and movies. The wireless makes them very convenient and the comfort is adequate enough to wear then for a couple of hours at a time, but again… do you want to with the sound quality being so poor?These could be winners if Jlab resolves the sound quality issue via better tuning or using higher quality drivers and move the charging port to a more convenient location. Sadly as they are, these are more of a novelty buy if anything.

There aren’t many options for retro 80’s style headphones with bluetooth. In fact, I found only two, but they were really the exact same product, just with different branding. I picked the JLab brand purely because I didn’t like the look of the other brand’s logo.My use case: I wanted light-weight bluetooth headphones for watching TV in bed at night without disturbing my partner. I didn’t want to wear earbuds or big bulky headphones, so I decided to give these a try. I can tell you that they are far from perfect, but they work reasonably well for my intended purpose. They paired easily with my Samsung OLED TV, and the sound quality is decent enough for TV watching, although I’d choose something better for music listening.Again, these aren’t bad for what they are, and there really is no other option on the market today for retro 80’s style headphones with bluetooth, but they could certainly be better. Here are the cons:(1) The charging port and the LED are in a stupid location. They are recessed in the channel that holds the ear cushion, so you have to pull the cushion out of the way to access the port and see the LED. Repeatedly pulling the cushion is certainly going to stretch it out over time, so this is not a good design. An even bigger problem, is that the channel is not wide enough to accommodate many micro-USB plugs, including the one that came with the headphones*. When I tried to plug it in, it felt like it was going to break either the headphones or the plug, so I didn’t force it. I ended up using a different cable that I had at home with a thinner plug, but even that one barely fit the channel. I’m thinking I might try to resolve this problem by sanding the plastic with my Dremel tool, to make the channel a little wider around the port. It’s such a glaring design flaw, it’s hard to believe this product underwent any sort of testing before it was released to market.*Note that the cable that comes with the headphones is blue. Apparently they previously offered these headphones in blue, and although they are only available in black with orange cushions now, they must have a surplus of blue cables left over so that’s what comes in the box.(2) The max volume is not as loud as most other bluetooth headsets, so if you plan to use these in a noisy environment, this might be a consideration for you. For my use case, watching TV in a quiet room at night, they are more than sufficient.(3) The EQ options could use a little improvement. In my opinion, the “Balanced” setting does not have enough bass while the “Bass Boost” setting has too much bass. I’d really prefer something in-between these two settings. And the third option, which they are calling “Signature”, boosts the high frequencies too much for my taste.(4) No volume controls on the headphones. Volume can only be controlled by the source device. Not a big deal for me, but might be an issue for some. In my case, I’m happy to use the TV remote to adjust the volume, but it seemed worth mentioning, since bluetooth headsets typically include volume buttons. If I were using these for workouts, I’d probably be annoyed at having to pull my phone out of my pocket every time I wanted to adjust the volume.(5) The headphones only have one single multi-purpose button, so you have to remember whether to long-press, short-press, double-click, or even triple-click, depending on what function you want to do. And if you’re listening to music, you might be disappointed to find that the headphone button can only skip forward to the next track. If you want to repeat a track or go back to a previous track, you have to pull your phone out of your pocket.

First impressions aren’t so great.I wanted to fully charge it before I did anything else with it. And right off the bat, the charge cable has too much material, it’s really tight putting too much pressure on the swivel and I think regular use will likely lead to breakage. Thankfully I have an older cable that is slimmer, still pretty tight, but no so tight I’m worried about anything breaking.Once charged, pairing it was easy, as expected as with almost every other Bluetooth device I’ve used.I tried testing it with my podcast app, sound was fine, pausing worked, so test concluded, I tried shutting off the headset like I did with my old Treblab headphones, with the podcast app still open and playing. But while holding it for four seconds to shut it off, upon reaching two seconds, it skipped to the end of the download I was listening to, deleting that download, and started playing the next podcast before shutting off. Not cool. The software should realize I haven’t let go of the button before it starts skipping, that needs to be fixed by JLabs. I’ll have to test if pressing the button once to pause the audio, then trying to shut it off will avoid this issue. But for now I know unlocking my phone and closing the podcast app before I shut off the headphones will prevent this annoying happenstance.We’ll see if my opinion improves with regular usage, or worsens, when I return to work this week where I’ll be using it most often.Edit: Used it one night at work so far. Pretty happy with it. Tried tapping once to pause before shutting off, and that did not skip to the end, so that’s great. My only complaint now is the location of the charger which requires a slim cable to get into, and they include a thick cable, so you’ll either risk breakage trying to push that thing in, cut the cable down so it goes in easily risking cutting yourself and/or affecting the effectiveness of the cable, or have to buy a slim cable or use an older one if you have a slimmer cable already.