JBL Quantum 800 (Measurements & Impressions)

TL;DR: Harman tuning but with gimped technicalities. What else did you expect?


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I might have earned a well-deserved rep for being a long-winded paragon of purple prose at this point but there isn't really very much to say about these so I'll hopefully be brief. I won't focus so much on the auxiliary features since I had limited time with them and don't give much of a bother about those, but in brief they actually have multiple inputs via wireless that'll let you adjust volume between game content and chat, and have effective ANC and talk-through modes.

Yes I missed focus on this shot but I'm too lazy to try and retake, hah.

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Disclosure: I borrowed a pair from my one sister for a couple days and did my best to just use em in place of my regular rig (Klipsch HP-3, Sennheiser HD600 out of a Modi 3+>Magni 3+/Massdrop CTH) for recreational listening and gaming. I wasn't expecting anything close to hi-fi with these but I was curious to see whether expensive gaming headsets were any sort of worth it at the ~$200 price point.


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LISTENING IMPRESSIONS:
*Measurements are single-channel with a custom SBAF Comp where flat = perceptive neutral.

JBL Quantum 800 FR (ANC OFF, five-placement average):

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All listening impressions were made using the included 2.4GHz USB dongle since I figured that was how most people would be running these. It doesn't help that my sister didn't have the 3.5mm cable on hand and I couldn't find any compatible spares lying around. I play with the ANC a bit but ended up using it primarily with the feature disabled.

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The pairing process was dead simple, no issues whatsoever though I've yet to test it with someone less tech inclined.

For a headset that markets itself as being great for gaming, I was expecting it to do something fancy with spatial cues to help with competitive FPS and the like, but nope it's mediocre at best. The headstage is a bit more out-of-head than the HD600 with rather larger sonic "images" vis-a-vis the Meze 99 Classics, but the localisation was a bit odd. It's simultaneously three-blob and indistinct so I rather doubt that people playing Valorant or whatever would gain very much from these. The Sennheiser HD600 gives more in the way of vertical cues even, and that's not a particularly high bar.

I will say that while greatly fatiguing, the voicing does lend itself well to resolving lyrics-- there are a few spots in Epica's Sancta Terra that I could not for the life of me make sense of just listening normally, but vocals are accentuated in a way as to increase intelligibility at the expense of enjoyability; spoken word and more vocal-centric pieces (think Eric Clapton Unplugged or Hozier's Hozier) just come off as exceptionally thin, twangy, and harsh. Don't even get me started on electric guitar e.g. Led Zeppelin's Tea For One-- these make the HD600s sound laid back by comparison. On the whole, more classically-presented voices e.g. towards the end of Nightwish's Shoemaker just come off as being played back through a long cardboard tube. That said, I profess a preference for warmer tunings, as in how the Sennheiser HD600 or HP-3 manage the transition from upper bass to lower mids; by contrast the typical Harman lower mid dip is scathing.

Depending on personal sensitivities in the upper-mid region though, this could fall right in line with what works for you.

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One thing I've noticed with the mass market JBL headphones is that for their adhering to the Harman Target Curve, the low end doesn't actually have all that much in the way of impact and oft just comes across as a bloomy, boomy, belligerent sluggish mess. The closest thing that really comes to mind is the kind of low end response you'd come to expect of a really seedy club where you'd almost be tempted to pay the escorts to put more clothes on.

With how elevated the low end response is even with ANC off, I was genuinely surprised at how inoffensive yet bleedingly obtrusive the bass could be (see: Francis Forever, Mitski). Nirvana's live performance of Milk It from From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah has some perceptible texture and definition to the bass, but this is Apple Ear Pods circa 2012 levels of bass resolution. Floor Jansen's growls on Yours Is an Empty Hope just get absolutely buried in the mix, and the busier segments devolve into mush.

As in how the headphones eke out a fair lot of intelligibility in the most unexpected of songs, there are odds and ends that the Quantum 800s bring to the forefront that actually escape my attention on the like of the HP-3 or HD600 out of my main rig. Gross resolution aside though, there's a pervasive lack of nuance to the sound of things that reminds me of the HE-4xx; it's a lack of texture to sonic objects while simultaneously lacking the good microdynamic nuance the HiFiMAN cans had.

What's curious to me is how stripped back arrangements e.g. solo acoustic guitar (Ottmar Liebert's Fireopal, or the back half of Tool's Sober) are inexplicably less defined. The blackground is just really mediocre in any wireless configuration, enough so that it impinges on music. Things improve noticeable with ANC off however, and not just for its having a more palatable voicing vs when ANC is enabled:

JBL Quantum 800 FR (ANC ON, five-placement average):

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I do notice that, other than bottom-octave bass tanking with a poor seal, the ANC mode seems to deliver more consistent results.

Unsurprisingly the top end has a fair bit of sizzle that is unflattering to harsher songs regardless of ANC being enabled or not, e.g. My Chemical Romance's Party Poison. There's a tizz and hollowness to hi-hats and crash cymbals that simultaneously make you want to raise the volume (to cut past the murk) and turn it down (cuz sheer pain). Not great balance overall, and I guess it goes without saying at this point that the definition isn't really there in the top end; I don't consider the classic Sennheisers (HD600, HD650) to be particularly grainy, but I can definitely call the Quantum 800s that.

The voicing helps accentuate tape hiss (Nine Inch Nails, Closer), but there are more affordable and more versatile headphones that can manage that much if you're looking to watch out for that. On the whole, as someone who prefers laid back upper mids and a more aggressive lower-treble, this voicing does absolutely nothing to me. I do like some thick bass, but not when the quality is this mud.

I did try listening to this off my phone using Bluetooth, but it's more or less the same albeit with a more smeared presentation and blubbier incisiveness. The user manual lists this as a "secondary" connectivity option for good reason.

The Active Noise Cancelling is pretty effective at blocking out fan and air conditioning noise, though more abrupt things like cat meows, dog barks, and raucous traffic noises do make it through a fair bit. I didn't bother playing with the ANC enabled much since besides being even more egregiously voiced, something about the ANC implementation gave me an irritating headache. I've little experience with ANC headphones in general other than brief store demos or loans from friends so I'm unsure whether this is particularly due to the implementation here or just a personal sensitivity to the technology in general.

It does a great job overall of isolating you from the outside world though, which I imagine is well in keeping with the target demographic for this sorta gamer-y escapist product.

JBL Quantum 800 FR, ANC ON vs ANC OFF (single channel, average of five placements):

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JBL Quantum 800 Spectrogram (ANC OFF):​

JBL Quantum 800 Spectrogram (ANC ON):

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No distortion measurements because the MiniDSP EARS are horrible for those anyway and the environment wasn't ideal at the time. I do think the spectrograms are representative of how the headset sounds with regard to trailing decays and control though.

CSDs are a bit scuffed with EARS which is why I opted for spectrogram but you can definitely see some ringing in the lower through mid treble in both ANC active and disabled-- this is again representative of how the treble sounds to me and could explain how irritating it comes off.


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ERGONOMICS and BUILD QUALITY:

These are on the heftier side at 410g, but with how plush and smooshy every contact point is, it doesn't feel all that heavy. By reason of those extremely smooshy bits, however, I'm pessimistic about their long-term viability especially with acidic-skinned folk living in tropical climates such as myself; the headband is marshmallow soft, as are the earpads, and both are covered in what feels like the same kind of eggshell protein the Fostex TH-X00/600/900 use, i.e. not the sort of thing that'll last for very long and ultimately end up contributing to waste.

The headphones also clack a bit when you rattle them which is disappointing as I imagine many people that'll end up with these headsets are the kind who'd find themselves yeeting this across a room after losing a game of Fortnite No-Build.

I love the adjustment mechanism on here; they have a lot of granularity and a very crisp aesthetic to the demarcations that are matched by good tactile feedback when adjusting the headband sliders. I also love the translucent smoky plastic that they used-- quite classy. The chunky orange-accented firehose cables that go through the headband are pretty to look at as well. Suffice to say that I'm quite fond of how these look, though the tyre track headband is a bit too much even for me.

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The boom microphone feels sturdy as houses (which isn't saying much in the current economy but hey). Feels like there's an extremely thick bit of memory wire in the arm that lets you get the position just right, and with the quality on this mic you really will want to put some effort into orienting it against your mouth for best results.

You can flip the microphone upwards to mute it, at which point a red LED will switch on. It's a nice visual cue, but understandably not everyone fancies having a camera capturing their visage so there's an audio cue as well; when you push the mic past a certain threshold into muting/unmuting itself there's a very prominent SNAP-ing sound that makes Cherry MX Blue switches sound pleasant. I like to think that whoever designed this figured that, given the use case, they had to make the audio cue as painful and obnoxious as possible just to have an inkling of a chance to be heard.

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Speaking of the microphone.

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MICROPHONE QUALITY:
> Please refer to the attachment. One of the samples there is from the built-in microphone on the Quantum 800 and the other was made using the Audio Technica ATR-2500, a budgetish USB microphone that was initially released quite a few years ago. Not sure exactly when but the previous owner had it for at least half a decade before I bought it off him. I'll let you guess which is which and decide which is your preference.