For this guide we’ve tested well over 200 headphones, which is a lot to digest, so we’re sticking with sharing our thoughts on the most notable competitors here. However, if there is a specific model you’re curious about, reach out to our team via Twitter (@wirecutter) or email (notes@wirecutter.com), and we’ll be happy to help.

Wireless

Anker SoundBuds Curve: Although the shape of the earbuds was rather comfortable, the cable that connected them was far too long and quickly became annoying. The sound quality didn’t add to the appeal, producing a blurry, muddy bass that sounded as if we were sitting on a subwoofer. Male vocals were buried in rock, hip-hop, and electronic music, and kick drums had a “puh puh” sound.

Anker SoundBuds Slim and SoundBuds Slim+: The Slim pair lacked bass, and the highs in the strings range had a harsh edge. The Slim+ pair offers aptX capabilities, but digital decoding doesn’t overcome poor tuning and drivers.

Aukey T21: Sadly, this pair didn’t impress us. The sound was rather tinny, the controls were too easy to accidentally activate when we were adjusting the earbuds, they lacked volume controls, and the microphone sounded notably compressed over phone calls. Overall, despite this pair’s very affordable price, we liked our picks better.

Aukey EP-B58: These neckband-style earbuds are comfortable and affordable. They mainly fall behind our picks in the tuning (super bass heavy) and the call quality (extremely quiet and not very clear to callers.)

Aukey EP-B60: Because this pair has tips that are attached to the wings, you can’t mix and match. Plus, the tip sizes run small, so half of our panelists couldn’t get a seal in their ear canals.

Bluedio Particle: These wireless earbuds are very inexpensive, but the included tips didn’t fit any of our panelists with medium or large ear canals. The Particle comes with two sizes of tips, but both are suited to smaller ears. Additionally, the tap-based controls are prone to accidental triggering when you adjust the earbuds in your ears.

EarFun Free: Brent Butterworth really liked this pair’s sound and fit. And the rest of us did, too. For the price, the audio quality is pretty fantastic, with clear highs and slightly boosted lows that don’t blur the mids, giving a nice sense of space to music. The fit is comfortable, as well. The control buttons are quiet, but when you press them, they can cause the earbuds to push into your ears in a mildly uncomfortable way. Additionally, phone calls can sound choppy and compressed. Overall, they’re decent, but not quite good enough to be a pick.

House of MarleySmile Jamaica Wireless 2: These earbuds are so close to being fantastic, especially for the $30 original asking price. The fabric-wrapped cable is very soft, we like the environmentally conscious approach of the company, and the sound quality—while a little dull in the lows and slightly coarse in the highs—is quite balanced and really respectable for the price. However, the two sizes of included eartips were too small for two of our panelists, and the remote is absolutely massive. If you sit still, it’s not a big deal, but the minute you start to walk around, the swinging remote has a pendulum effect and starts to tug on the left earbud. Drat.

iFrogz Impulse Duo: Despite our attempts to use various tips, the odd shape of these earbuds created an unstable fit for our panelists. The problem may have affected the sound quality, as we thought this pair sounded cheap, with tinny highs and dull lows.

iFrogz Plugz Wireless: The fit on the Plugz can alter the sound profile—one panelist thought these earbuds had a lot of bass, while another found them tinny. We’d prefer a better than fifty-fifty chance of you liking how your earbuds sound.

JLab Go Air: These are especially inexpensive for true wireless earbuds, and they provide sound reliably to your ears. For our panelists, they stayed in place reasonably securely, but we probably wouldn’t use them for high-impact workouts. If you listen only to podcasts, you might love these earbuds. For music, however, our panel found that all three EQ presets were less than stellar, basically adjusting the blurry bass volume from too loud to nonexistent.

JVC Gumy HA-FX9BT: These earbuds come with only medium and small tips, so anyone who has larger ear canals is out of luck. Add the fact that they lacked bass in our tests and didn’t get very loud (so quieter classical recordings could be too soft for us to hear properly), and you can understand why we recommend passing on this pair.

Monoprice 15273: Everyone on our panel found this pair uncomfortable, and the bass sounded as if it were coming from inside a wet cardboard box. A total miss.

Monoprice 15274: The design of the earbuds is ridiculously huge, and that affected the fit. As a result, panelists’ opinions of the sound varied from “not bad” to “boxy and tinny at the same time.”

Skullcandy Ink’d Wireless: This former top pick has lots of bass—some might say a little too much—but clear vocals. The Ink’d earbuds fit our panelists with medium to small ears comfortably, but Skullcandy doesn’t include large tip sizes, so people with larger ear canals may have difficulty getting a good seal. These earbuds are water resistant (although Skullcandy hasn’t received an official IP rating for this pair), and the eight-hour battery life will get you through a full workday. However, our current top pick, the 1More Piston Fit BT, sounds better and feels more substantially built, and the collar of the Ink’d is more likely to get in the way of workouts. So the 1More bumped this pair out of our top spot.

Soul S-Gear: This pair is cheap but really missed the mark. The hinge on the charging case is made of flimsy plastic and feels as though it will easily snap. When the large eartips are used on the earbuds, the case won’t close fully. The audio quality is dull and muffled, and the microphones cause your voice to sound compressed and distant to your callers.

TaoTronics SoundLiberty 79: This pair leans to the bass-heavy side, which can make male vocals sound recessed when listening to hip-hop. The touch controls, like those of other true wireless earbuds, are a tad finicky, though usable. Unfortunately, the shape is such that folks with smaller ear canals may have a tough time getting these earbuds to stay in place, even with the included stabilizing winglets. While they aren’t our favorite earbuds, if you encounter a deal, the SoundLiberty 79 is perfectly acceptable for folks with medium- to large-size ear canals.

TaoTronics SoundLiberty 92: These have long stems like the first-generation AirPods, and as a result, this pair didn’t feel very stable in our panelists’ ears. The touch controls are prone to accidental triggering if you reposition the earbuds. While the microphones will pick up your voice well in a quiet room, they also capture a good deal of background noise, so these aren’t ideal for taking calls in a busy environment. Sadly the audio quality isn’t great either: The highs have some weird ups and downs in various frequencies that cause grand pianos to sound like they belong in a honky tonk, and drum hits have a clicking quality.

Tranya T10: These are listed as $80 on the Tranya website. But within months of their release, the T10 consistently dropped to prices under $50, so we’re including them in this guide. This pair is IP78-rated for water and dirt resistance and comes with an egg-sized Qi-compatible charging case. The earbuds themselves are rather large, so it’s highly unlikely that they will stay in place for those with smaller ear canals or petite outer ears. The tap controls are a bit frustrating to use—you must be very deliberate in your taps to get them to register properly. The sound quality is a bit of a mixed bag. The high frequencies are actually quite nice, with clarity and detail that represent strings or acoustic guitar well. The problem is that the bass is loud and booming, which makes it difficult to hear male vocals on bass-heavy songs and overshadows any positives that the upper frequencies offer.

Tribit FlyBuds: Folks on Amazon commented about connection difficulties, which we also experienced. Despite manually resetting the FlyBuds and making several attempts to resolve the issue using the manual and troubleshooting tips, we were unable to get these to function properly. If the problem weren’t so seemingly common on Amazon, we might have given them the benefit of the doubt and gotten a second pair to test, but ultimately we’d advise you to steer clear of this pair for now.

Tribit FlyBuds 1: This is such an inexpensive pair of true wireless earbuds that it isn’t surprising that there are some flaws. There are no track-reverse or volume controls, and while the buttons aren’t difficult to depress, they still push into your ears somewhat. The lower mids are so forward that male voices are overwhelmed by bass guitar, and even podcasts end up sounding like a speaker in the back of a cardboard box. Any one of the downsides alone wouldn’t be a dealbreaker, but it’s the overall meh experience that would make us want to spend the extra $20 for the Skullcandy Sesh Evo. But if you want to spend the absolute minimum, these are an acceptable choice.

Tribit FlyBuds 3: These earbuds are also very inexpensive, but the sound quality is pretty poor, with coarse highs and a dull “puh puh” aspect to bass notes. The microphone quality isn’t the best either, with our callers saying that our words often got clipped. The charge case is rather large, and the touch controls are easy to accidentally trigger. Overall, the best part of these was the little winglet/fin that held the earbuds in place comfortably.

Wired

Apple EarPods: For our panel, the general feeling with the EarPods was that they’re unobjectionable but unremarkable. They come with Apple devices, but if they break or get lost and you need to replace them, we recommend buying anything else we’ve described in the sections above before paying for a second set of these.

Beyerdynamic Beat Byrd: The conical tips come in three sizes, but they likely won’t fit larger ear canals. In our tests, the Beat Byrd had bass that was loud and blurry sounding, as if it had too much reverb. Male vocals in hip-hop tracks got lost, and rock music sounded smeared.

Final E2000: This pair had more mids and highs than lows, leaving it sounding unbalanced and unsupported.

Monoprice Triple Driver 18516: The Triple Driver (formerly the TripleXXX) got a good review elsewhere, so we thought we’d check it out. We were disappointed to hear just how piercing and sibilant it was. We couldn’t turn the sound up very loud without the high frequencies feeling painful.

RevoNext QT5: The QT5 wired earbuds sound far more expensive than they are. In our tests, the bass was a tad forward in the mix and the highs were a bit pronounced, but overall the QT5’s sound quality rivaled that of some $100 earbuds. As for build quality, this pair felt very well made, with a metal housing for the drivers and a replaceable cable. The earbuds are comfortable, too, equipped with three sizes of ear tips and a flexible wire hook that loops the cable over your ears. Unfortunately, the QT5 doesn’t come with a remote and mic on the cable, so you’d need to spend an additional $20 to $30 to purchase one. If it weren’t for that omission, and the permanent price drop on the Marshall Mode, the QT5 might still stand among our top picks. But if you don’t mind the hassle and expense of buying a second cable, or if you don’t need a remote/mic, the QT5 remains a fantastic-sounding affordable option.

RHA MA390: This pair is beautifully designed and well made, but only one panelist liked the sound, with the others finding the bass too boosted and prone to veiling everything from the middle of the piano on up.

Sony MDR-XB50AP: These Sony headphones came recommended by The Verge, and overall we agreed that this set wasn’t bad—it just wasn’t quite as good as some of the other options we had available. With boomy bass and sibilant highs, it couldn’t compare to our picks.

Wicked Audio Drive 1000cc: Drumstick hits on the rim of a drum had more of a “thwack” quality than a “snap” sound, and we heard coarseness where there should have been detail. The low notes on electronic music sounded formless, like a blanket over a too-loud subwoofer.