Why You Can Trust CNET t-Jays One earphones review: t-Jays One earphones
The t-Jays One's audio output is crisp, clear and above all loud. If you can deal with a few minor tangles, they're well worth buying.
Design and features
The t-Jays One headset uses a standard thin round headphone cable, albeit one with a split. The main cable is only 60cm long, but an extension cable that ships with the headphones adds another 70cm of cable. Depending on your needs, that could give you 130cm of comfortable cable length — or 130cm of tangles to unwind.
t-Jays One earphones
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
As with other entries in the Jays line, the t-Jays One ships with a large plastic case to house both headphones and silicone sleeves. It's good for home storage, but we'd strongly argue that it's too large to realistically be carried around for terribly long.
The buds of the t-Jays One sit in front of solid plastic wedges that sit in the rear of your ear. Five sets of silicone sleeves are provided at differing sizes for a more comfortable fit and better acoustic performance.
The t-Jays One sports 10mm Dynamic Speakers with a claimed frequency range of 18-20,000Hz. Like the a-Jays range, it's also possible to spend a little more for a better experience, with the more expensive Two and Three models offering better audio quality as well as flight adapters and stereo splitters.
Performance
The physical speakers in the t-Jays One aren't that big, but we were bowled over by how particularly loud they can get while still retaining audio clarity. That's at least in part due to the physical design, which does an excellent job of blocking out ambient noise and concentrating your listening purely on the music you're listening to. It's not quite up to the level of really good noise-cancelling headphones, but on public transport (both trains and planes) we found they blocked out all but the worst of the background hum, and most of the conversations around us. It also meant that we didn't have to have softer mastered tracks booming in order to hear them properly, saving our eardrums from unnecessary pounding.
We can't stress enough how important getting the right-sized sleeves on is, however. Too small and they'll drop out easily and you won't get the right in-ear blocking taking place. Too large, and they will squish to fit, but you'll end up with rather sore ear canals as a result — we certainly did very rapidly.
Conclusion
There are some minor things we'd like to have seen in the t-Jays One. We can't quite work out why the cheaper and lesser a-Jays One gets the nice flat cable, for a start, as we spent a lot of time untangling the 130cm cable in our tests. We're still not entirely sold on the overly large carrying case, either. Those are ultimately just minor complaints, however, and on the basis of audio quality, which is the key determinant of any set of headphones, the t-Jays One comes highly recommended.