Can a company that has focused on mono earphones made for phone conversations make a great sounding pair of stereo headphones? The answer is yes, absolutely they can and they have. I was very pleased with the sonic character of the C820s. On the airplane, I used the included adapter to listen to the in-flight movie and music, both of which sounded very good – for an airplane at least. I found that in this environment, having the noise reduction feature turned on definitely boosted and improved the sound and overall experience. The source material on the airplane leaves something to be desired in terms of fidelity though, so I moved to my MacBook Pro laptop. I plugged in and listened to some songs from my iTunes library. I was really impressed with the fidelity. After trying different styles of earbuds, there is no question that I am ready to go back to a fully enclosed over the ear headphone. Even with the noise on a flight, I enjoyed rich fidelity at moderate volumes, and could crank it up extremely loud when I so pleased.

Back home in my office, I began testing the C820s again. This time I listened to CD's, my iPod, and my iTunes library. The first thing that I noticed, in this relatively quiet environment, was that the noise reduction feature degraded the sound considerably. This is not a criticism of the headphones, rather an observation on how to use them. When there is no real ambient noise to be reduced, the circuitry seems to find whatever it can, and the result is a muffled, more muted sound. It kicks the overall volume up a bit, but at a cost of fidelity.

Turning off the noise reduction revealed a very high quality stereo headphone. The C820s handled anything I threw at them. Deep, rich lows, with very bright high end - a tad bit too bright on some rock material at higher levels, but overall a very balanced and pleasing sonic experience.

Author’s Note: For those of you not familiar with Active Noise Reduction technology, here is a simplified explanation of what is going on: A microphone on the headphones measures the ambient noise. Then the noise cancellation electronics generates an inverted copy of the noise itself which when combined with the original sound disturbance results in a lower level of noise perceived by your ears. Sound confusing or bizarre? Maybe so, but it works. And it is really cool!

Conclusions and Overall Perceptions

The Jabra C820s excel as active noise reduction headphones, and are more than adequate as stand-alone stereo headphones. (When listening at home, you will want to keep the noise-canceling feature turned off.) If your primary need for headphones is in your home listening room, you will probably want to consider other options. But if you are like me, and find yourself all too often listening to your music and movies on an airplane, subway, bus or train, these headphones offer exceptional value and flexibility. The quality is equal or superior to other active noise reduction headphones on the market costing significantly more.

While the C820s is not cheap, with a MSRP of $199 it is still well over $100 less than the leading competitor. For more information visit: http://www.jabra.com.