Great audio and a friendly price are inviting while noise cancellation and questionable bass ask as many questions as they drown out.
I don’t skimp on sound. I have a pair of over-ear headphones that I adore and spend months working my way through earbud after earbud while trying to get the right sound fit and feel. I can be a little picky and, frankly, snobbish when it comes to headphones. But! Stu assured me the Edifier products he has used in the past have impressed him and so I went in with as open a mind as I could muster. Here’s what I thought about Edifier’s W820NB Plus headphones.
| Pros | Cons |
| Great sound quality overall Impressive battery life and charging Very light on the head | Mediocre Noise Cancellation Not very sturdy and easy to scuff and damage Wind and environment spills into the headphones substantially |
Build Quality, Materials and Design
Out of the box I was struck with two major feelings that clashed quite spectacularly. On one hand, the headphones felt a little…flimsy isn’t the right word…but they definitely didn’t feel sturdy. I was concerned about chucking them in a bag during my days and felt like pulling on them a little too hard could cause some unnerving breaks or snaps. On the other hand. They are exceptionally light! In my hand, they were almost weightless and putting them on my head for the first time the headband almost disappeared. It almost felt like I had a couple of headphone cups glued to the side of my head. In a good way though!
So the materials and plastics being used here don’t feel particularly strong but they do feel very light. Pros and cons of light plastic I guess. A downside to this though is that the Earcups twist for storage but they don’t really fold away at all. This is another reason I remain concerned about the longevity of these headphones. The plastic doesn’t feel sturdy and there’s no way to fold them away nicely so I just feel they might be prone to damage during day-to-day use. If you can find a hard case of some kind I would recommend making decent use of them.
Unfortunately, after a couple of morning commutes this exact situation did occur. One day in my backpack saw some unfortunate scratching and scuffing on the right ear cup. It leaves me wondering what kind of state these headphones would be in after consistent use over a few months.
The pairing was really straightforward, press and hold the power button to jump into pairing mode. They were ready to go from there with volume up and down buttons on either side of the power button and an ‘M’ button that’s used for Ambiance/Noise Cancellation and Game Mode. Truthfully I’m still not sure what ‘Game Mode’ is but we’ll get into that later.
The Battery life has impressed me as has charging. They charge quickly in line with Edifier’s promise of 10 minutes for 7 hours of use and I’ve not had to worry about charging a lot that much. Edifier promises 49 hours or so with Noise Cancellation turned off and approximately 33h with Noise Cancellation turned on. during my time with the headphones, there was nothing that made me question these claims but as always there are a whole lot of variables around battery life so take these promises with a grain of salt.
So in summary my first impressions are that the materials are light but not sturdy. Pairing and connectivity are nice and easy. Most importantly, and this is important, they sound pretty damn good. I popped them on, flicked through a few tracks and was initially impressed. But of course, in 2023 Headphones are used for a whole lot more than just Music. We’ll dig into that. But before I do a disclaimer is required. All of what I’m about to discuss was tested in my study. A small, cosy room with little to no noise other than the occasional barking dog. When I was out and about there was a significant impact on overall sound quality that I think is important for you to remember. I’ll discuss this more a little later on in this review.
Music
Music sounds great on the Edifier W820NB Plus at times but falls flat at others. Teenage me was the emo kid of all emo kids so I always default to The Black Parade album My Chemical Romance for a first listen. I’ll argue that it’s dense and layered and covers the spaces of rock and roll, punk, musical theatre and power ballads bleeding in out each and the other throughout the record (@ me I dare you). More important than my feelings about the music however is the fact that I know this album more than any other. I know when headphones carry it well, tear it to pieces or elevate it beautifully. These headphones do a solid job and sound impressive for a headset under the £100 marker. BUT. There’s always a but. There were some inconsistencies. Pop and rock music sound great, and classical music has reasonable breadth and depth but I found they fell really short with Hip-Hop, Drum & Bass, House music and the like.
Bass is contentious when it comes to headphones. I think a sensible and consistent approach to balancing sound profiles is obvious managing lows, mids and highs evenly. When. Preferences are taken, I can get behind them. there are headphones (that will go unnamed here) that really favour and boost the bass out of the box. I quite like it. It’s a preference thing. In all my testing Bass is where these headphones fall apart. I feel like they wanted to fill the bass and get that thumping impact that a lot of people find impressive. What I found is that the Bass on these headphones is just a mushy mess. The bass fills the sound completely, washing out the rest of the music without having any real shape, form or punch. I particularly remember V.3005 by Childish Gambino and Humble by Kendrick Lamar feeling like prime examples of this. Both tracks hold off on the bass early on and let it drive the song from there. Both tracks were lost as the lifeless bass suffocated the rest of the song. It helped a little when I added a Bass Reduction EQ in the settings of my smartphone but I still didn’t feel like I was listening to the music the way it should be heard. Edifier also offers its own app to balance EQ and this gives some pretty reasonable balancing options and it did address some of my concerns but not entirely.
TV / Movies / Gaming
I really enjoyed using these headphones for media, content and gaming. That’s the overall takeaway here. While I found some balancing issues with listening to music these headphones were consistently solid. I watched movies pairing them to my home television, and TV shows on my iPad during my morning commute and have put in a lot of time, probably more than I should have, into The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and pairing them to my switch was easy and simple. The game leans massively on its music and sound when it comes to establishing a sense of place and atmosphere. The Edifier WB20N8 Plus carries this sound well with what I found to be pretty decent 3D audio.
These headphones have a Game Mode…I don’t really know what it does. It says you’re in Game Mode when you press the Noise cancellation button a couple of times. Edifier tells us on their website that this is essentially a super low latency mode so maybe I just don’t have the eyes to see it but it seemed fine to me without turning on Game Mode. It’s good that it’s there I guess but I didn’t experience any real-world differences.
Noise Cancellation
I really liked these headphones. In a pre-noise cancellation world, I could have really liked them. But as noise-cancellation rolls out on more and more devices and expectations change you really need to try and get this feature right. A whole chunk of this review dedicated to this feature might seem unnecessary but I really think it’s the most contentious part of this product. Noise-cancellation for less than £100 is a really great offering. It’s impressive at this price point. But it’s not great here.
On the W820NB Plus, the noise cancellation disappointed me. There’s a huge amount of spill and it doesn’t take away noise substantially to the degree I would expect. The ‘Ambient’ mode is Edifier’s equivalent to a ‘transparency mode’ that you may have seen on competing headphones and that’s not too bad but they both suffer really poor isolation overall. More so I found this was a real problem when I was out and about. Whether I was walking the dog, riding the train or wandering around town the overall ambience of a space, particularly the wind, was really invasive with these headphones. I’m not sure if it’s the design of the headphones, the materials used or the way Noise-Cancellation is managed but wind was a massive issue here. No matter what I was listening to it sounded like gale-force winds were hitting me when I had these headphones on. I’m in Wales so take this with a pinch of salt but the winds were never so bad that I would have expected my listening experience to be hampered to the extent that it was. It made them really unpleasant to use and there was no clear way to outright turn Noise Cancellation off other than using Edifier’s own App.
The real disappointment for me was that after experiencing these issues, downloading Edifier’s own app, figuring out how best to turn off Noise Cancellation in their app and then heading back out for a walk…It didn’t do much. My initial thoughts that an old of the wind slurs whizzing past me when I’m out and about was using the noise cancellation proved to be a little off. what is unfortunate is that it appears to just be down to build quality. It feels like the materials used are just letting the environment spill into the audio experience when the headphones are used out in the wild. A real shame because in calmer and gentler environments they sound great.
Final Track
I feel like I’ve been really critical of these headphones, particularly when the price is so good. For less than £100 these are a really great purchase. Fantastic experiences with gaming and watching content, tv and movie, solid performance listening to music and even an Edifier App to help improve performance are all things that make it a worthwhile purchase if you’re looking in for a reasonably priced new set of wireless headphones. The materials used are a little lacklustre and the noise-cancellation isn’t the best but if you can overlook these details and recognise that a solution to them may require putting down a little more cash then you’ll find a good solution here to an important question.
Can you buy a decent pair of over-ear headphones for under £100? Edifier says yes you can and I’m inclined to agree with them, even if they fall short from time to time.
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