Jabra Elite Active 45e Review

Item: Jabra Elite Active 45e
Rating: 88
Author: tfk, the5krunner

Jabra is releasing a lot of new products tailored to sports usage, critical listening and work environments; this blog is only really interested in those that are designed for sport, so let’s crack on with the Jabra Elite Active 45e Review, starting off with a summary and then some more details after that for those of you who want it, including the specs.

In Brief

Price - 95%
95%
Long duration comfort - 85%
85%
Build Quality & Design - 90%
90%
Features, Including App - 85%
85%
Controls - 90%
90%
Audio Quality in-Sport - 85%
85%

88%

Summary

In my opinion, the Jabra Elite Active 45e has an appropriate level of sound quality built into a physical design which cleverly keeps the earbuds in during sport, and which also accommodates the safety issues of letting in sufficient amounts of environmental sound. Couple all of that with dust+sweat resistance and a generic in-ear retention design that requires NO interchangeable wings/buds, then Jabra are on to a winner…providing that you like the aesthetics.

The Elite Active 45e seemed pair & work with every modern sport watch, Android phone and iPhone that I tried.

For once, on these earbuds, I could actually feel and operate the controls! They stay in with running and I wore them in comfort, during sport, for up to an hour. However, for non-sports usage, for me, I would NOT wear them for more than 2 hours – although that duration seems to be my personal limit for any worn audio device.

The aesthetic design is not my personal preference and my favourites for sport remain the Jabra Elite Active 65t Review ed here.

Pros

Sensible price
Sport-focused design that works
Good environmental sound awareness, appropriate-to-sport sound quality levels
Stays in your ear
Also good for small ears
Good Bluetooth connections and general compatibility with smartphones and newer generation running watches-with-music.

Cons

I don’t like the new-fangled round-the-ear design, though lots of other people seem to love the modernity of the looks.
Most people will think the sound quality is good but, in reality, it’s not good enough for CRITICAL LISTENERS who know what FLAC, 24 bit and AptX HD are. FYI: There’s probably NO sports-specific earbud that has those characteristics in any case.
With an alternative true wireless earbud design, the storage case would probably have charging abilities built into it, the wireless design of the 45e does NOT have that, so you rely on a USB cable alone for charging.

Local Amazon Link

Table of Contents (Click to Expand)

Jabra Elite Active 45e Music Quality

The music quality is fine.

If anyone tells you it’s super hi-fidelity then they’re wrong. The Jabra Active 45e doesn’t support high-quality Bluetooth CODECs. Is this important? Probably not. You’ve seen the pictures of my >$500 sports watch (Garmin Forerunner 945, below) which doesn’t support high-quality codecs either. Both sender and receiver of sound must support the codec for it to work! However, if you are using an iPhone or modern Android smartphone then other headphones WILL sound a little bit better if they support CODECs like Aptx HD.

You could get better quality audio from a GOOD smartphone with something like the Optoma NuForce BE Live5 which supports the good quality CODECs and which has a larger driver – size is everything, as you know.

Perhaps more important is that the audio quality has been intentionally compromised to improve safety by being more open to environmental sounds whilst, at the same time, including noise reduction tech. A tricky compromise that Jabra has probably got just about right in this case.

Design

The buttons have the ‘normal’ functions and you can read about those in the manual if you get stuck (or see image to right). The most important elements of design to me are:

The around-the-ear wire – this really does keep these babies in place.
The retention loop goes under the ante-helix and is bendable in form. Thus this is a super-clever way to adapt to the morphologies of different ear shapes without needing to have several sizes of earbuds and ear-wings. These DID fit a friend of mine who has SMALL ears.
9-hour battery