JBL Quantum 910 Wireless Review

The JBL Quantum 910 Wireless is one of the company’s latest gaming headsets. Priced at $299, it offers a range of connectivity options, including Bluetooth, a wireless dongle, or the 3.5mm cable included in the package. Build-quality wise, it’s not the most gorgeous headset you’ve ever seen, but it is extremely comfortable, and ideal for those extended hours of play. Taking into account its excellent sound, comfortable fit, and useful companion app, it definitely makes it worth its price.

JBL Quantum 910 Wireless – Design and Features

The JBL Quantum 910 Wireless Gaming Headset offers many of the frills you’d expect to see in a $299 gaming headset. The headset comes carefully packaged in a velvet carrying bag with a ton of accessories. You get a Type-C charging cable, a 3.5mm audio cable for when your cans run out of juice, and a 2.4GHz wireless dongle to facilitate a low-latency wireless connection. The cables are made of woven nylon and exude sophistication. 

However, the headset doesn’t look like it carries a price tag that high. The Quantum 910 Wireless features an all-plastic body and a pretty average build quality. It neither looks nor feels premium. In fact, the boom mic and the headband slider feel so cheap that you want to be careful using them. Usually, plastic is preferred over metal to reduce the weight of a headset. However, weighing 420g, the Quantum 910 Wireless is far from lightweight as well. Overall, there’s barely any aspect of the aesthetics of this headset that is impressive at first glance.

The headband slider offers a range of settings and caters to a pretty broad variety of head sizes. The hinge on the earcups offers just the right ratio of firmness and flexibility and is fully rotatable, which means the headset can be made to lie flat around your neck. However, I would’ve liked the boom mic to be retractable, 360-degree rotatable, and for its flip-to-mute feedback to be a little more tactile.

The left cup hosts an ANC button, followed by two dials; one is the game audio-chat balance dial and the other is for volume control. The same cup also features the mute button, the 3.5mm audio jack, and the charging port. Though these may sound like a lot of controls for a single earcup, the intuitive layout made it very easy to navigate them. Thankfully, the two audio dials differ in feel so you know which one you’re using. The right cup sports a spatial sound button (more on that in a bit) and a power toggle. The latter doubles as a pairing button when it’s pushed all the way to the back.

JBL Quantum 910 Wireless – Software

JBL Quantum Engine, the headset’s accompanying software, is pretty helpful and considerably changes your game experience. The interface is clean, smooth, and intuitive. The app offers equalizer settings with both preset profiles and the option for you to tweak how you like your sound. While there isn’t a notable difference between some of the seven given presets, you can tell the Bass Boost preset, for instance, does emphasize the low end to a significant degree.

The lighting settings on the app allow you to customize the RGB zones on the earcups. You get to pick colors and tempo for the logo, ring, and notch and create multiple lighting profiles. Apart from providing intel on things such as battery status and headset volume, Quantum Engine also facilitates tweaking the mic sidetone, mic volume, and the game audio/chat balance.

The most exciting feature of this software is the spatial sound options that it offers. You can choose between DTS Headphone:X audio or the company’s proprietary sound, JBL QuantumSPHERE 360. The latter offers three profiles: precise, balanced, and immersive. There’s also, of course, the option to turn on 7.1 surround sound. Using the calibration tool provided in the box, you can run a quick calibration test to make sure the sound is best suited for the shape of your ears. The head tracker option also lets you run a quick test to provide the app with a rough image of your head. You can take this a step further with their advanced mode and input the exact diameter of your head, too. By learning the diameter of your head, it is able to make precise calculations and adjustments to accurately position the sound. This information helps it with determining the distance between your ears, the angle at which the sound should be delivered to each ear, and the appropriate timing for the sound cues.

JBL Quantum 910 Wireless – Performance and Gaming

The Quantum 910 offers excellent sound, and it has a lot to do with QuantumSPHERE 360. I noticed a huge difference while playing Call of Duty Warzone 2 with and without that turned on. With the spatial sound off or even on DTS, the game sounded much flatter than it did with the SPHERE. The SPHERE 360 induced brilliant sound imaging and positioning. Enemy footsteps were much clearer and I could exactly pinpoint where each sound was coming from.

JBL’s proprietary sound also enhanced layering to a great degree. The sound of the helicopters, for instance, felt like a completely separate layer from what was happening on the ground. The in-game speech never interfered with the gunshots. There was plenty of space in the orchestra for every element to shine. The space made sure the elements don’t sound clustered.

JBL hit the sweet spot on the head tracking feature. It was neither underwhelming nor overly dramatic; it’s just perfect. It was subtle enough to be noticeable as well as enjoyable. I don’t move a lot during gaming, but I can imagine how much fun it would be to go to a silent disco with these headphones.

I would recommend the Quantum 910 Wireless for treble as much as I would for bass. In fact, I can’t decide what it does better. The high-end is crisp, clear, and focused. It manages to sound perfect without coming off as overly sharp or tinny. The bass has that low-end thump to it; the kind that you feel in your throat, too. While I couldn’t really tell the difference between balanced and precise, the immersive profile really took things up a notch. It enhanced treble and layering and made the gameplay significantly more dramatic and immersive.

The thick memory foam earcups ensured a comfortable fit. My ears and noggin were happy throughout and, despite the weight, the headset didn’t feel like a burden. I’m not sure if it was the generously padded headband or the leatherette and memory foam ear cushioning, but, fit-wise, I found the Quantum 910 perfect for long gaming sessions. The heavily-padded cups also achieved excellent passive noise isolation. Even without turning ANC on, most ambient noise was considerably muted.

I’m not the biggest fan of the ANC on the Quantum 910. While it wasn’t terrible, I would’ve preferred a little more ambient noise reduction. The Talkthrough (transparency/ambient) mode featured a loud and artificial hum. This hum is found on the ambient mode of most ANC headphones, but it was annoyingly loud on the Quantum 910 Wireless.

I did a one-hour call to test the mic and learned that it was excellent. It received praise overall, but the focus was on the crispness and noise-reduction capabilities. With a promised 45-hour battery life on Bluetooth and 39 hours with the dongle (RGB off), you don’t have to worry about being tethered to a cable.