Jabra Evolve2 65 vs Plantronics Voyager 5200

The three-mic array offers superb intelligibility. Using the Voice Memos app on an iPhone 8, we could understand every word perfectly clearly, with zero hint of Bluetooth distortion. The recording was crisp and clear, with a little bit of low-frequency depth to it. Not only is the mic of solid quality, but the boom placement also helps tremendously here

My mic sounds nice, check, one. Alright, let's talk about the Patronix Voyager 5200. It's the same as the best biased version, the 5220. The only diff...

Between this and the "mic noise cancelling being terrible" issue, I am having no luck with this head set and am looking to replace it.

If there's a lot of chatter, employees, your kids, dogs barking, it's going to help eliminate that. We're going to test that here in just a second. Th...

The problem is they only support terrible encodings, and the dongle they ship with the headset is, I'm pretty sure, a class 2 Bluetooth antenna (though I've never gotten them to admit this, support always hides behind the bullshit excuse of "max ranges are not guaranteed" despite the fact that their product demonstrably underperforms relative to other products which advertise much shorter ranges). Moral of this story is don't buy Jabra unless you like monster cable levels of markup for Comcast levels of support and avoid them like the plague of you care at all about performance, particularly range.

Sounds simple, right? WRONG! It *usually* connects correctly, but about 1/3 of the time, you have to move the stupid headset on and off the charger multiple times to get the charger to recognize it and flash those little blue lights, and sometimes you have to blow hard onto the contacts to remove dust particles which apparently impede the connection. But the worst is, sometimes the little blue lights come on and you think it’s charging, but you wake up the next morning to find that, not only did the headset NOT charge, the charger actually *drained* the battery, leaving you with a completely dead headset. This happens so frequently, I have to remember to check the Plantronics Android app (which is almost as flaky as the charging system) every time I put the headset on the charger to make sure it says “charging.” Sometimes it saying “charging” and and sometimes it doesn’t, requiring you to jiggle the headset around some more until it actually starts to charge

The Jabra Evolve2 65 Bluetooth headset gets the important things right, like a comfortable fit and good mic clarity, and really knocks it out of the park with excellent stereo audio performance.

** The Plantronics 3200 used to be a good option but it's been discontinued and now only the Plantronics 5200 remains, which is massive and with which I can't get a good fit. (These are all mono BT headsets).

My work gave me a pair of Jabra Evolve 75 which I've been using for almost a month now. And while they are fine I'm having a huge issue with comfort, they clamp my ears a bit, but much worse that I hate how it feels on my head, the headband is sharp and digs into the small point it contacts with my head causing great annoyance. So I have the option of turning them in and getting $150 to find a different pair (however, price isn't a factor).

I just put it on my ear and turn it on and I can walk around and carry on with my day and not have to rush and find my phone and then my headset and plug it all in. I'd constantly say to people "Just a second while I plug in my headset" and hear them continuing to jabber on. Its light, comfortable and doesn't irritate my ears at all and normal earbuds drive me crazy in a very short time. So really the only caveat is I haven't had it long enough to see how good the battery life is but its filling exactly the need I purchased it for

* Feedback from our Direct Routing carrier on AirPods for "all day calling" advised on lack lustre battery life;

I find i have to positon my fingers over the headset and use my palm to reduce noise texture that i ended up cutting a paper straw to “cover” the mic to mildly reduce environmental noise and slightly boost my voice. The battery, when on and in average talking use, lasts about 6 hours. I typically charge it during my lunch to guarantee it will last the rest of the day. Charging doesn't take too long usually about an hour or two max, even charging for 10-15 minutes could give you an hour or so of time if needed

I want to like this so bad, but I might have to return/exchange if this doesn't get better. UPDATE: I was able to get in touch with Jabra customer support. The rep was very helpful and informative, but ultimately we still could not do any firmware update via the mac version of Jabra Direct. I ended up finding a Windows computer to borrow and was able to update it that way

As mentioned the PLT 5200 normally fail after about 1 year of daily use which is OK to me (I do keep them in by pocket sometimes). These are the failures I seen so far - Mic stop working or sound like there is a lose connection. - On off switch stop working. - Rubber start pealing of and cables in flexible part of headset wear out