In a super-busy market, they're hard to recommend

The Anker Soundcore C40i sound pretty good, but they aren’t the most comfortable or feature-rich pair around.

These in-ear Creative headphones are stylish, and perfectly good for the price, though some advanced features could have been implemented better.

Super stylish and a pleasure to wear for hours on end, the Panasonic RB-F10s are otherwise winning open earbuds let down by really irritating controls.

The OpenRock S try too hard with features that don’t work well and it's a shame, because at their core, these are respectable low-cost fitness earbuds

The Sony Inzone H9 wireless gaming headset, is big, beefy, and beautiful, with noise-cancelling plus a chunky 32-hour battery life.

With a comfortable design and impressive microphone quality, the SteelSeries Tusq are excellent wired gaming earbuds.

Despite solid noise isolation, these wired earbuds fall short due to uninspiring audio and mic quality.

A clever solution for people who are constantly in video meetings and need to switch between phone and laptop.

The world's best bone conduction headphones get a bass upgrade that gives your workout playlist some real punch.

The Anker Soundcore AeroClip supply adept audio, a secure fit and neat call quality, all at a more than reasonable price.

The JLab Epic Lab Edition has one neat feature, but that’s not enough to make up for the high price, struggling ANC and low-quality sound.

The Canyon Doublebee GTWS-2 earbuds falter with a shoddy low-end, but you can do worse for the price.

The Edifier LolliClip are a great pair of open ear headphones with ANC and health monitoring and are only let down by a few small hiccups.

The popular Sony MDR-EX15AP offer decent audio and an attractive design but are unlikely to excite you.

The detailed listening tests, circumaural sound and on-ear extras make for an ideal set of cans for this level – a resounding win for CMF

The JBL Tune 310C are cheap, feature-rich and comfortable, but they’re unlikely to blow you away with next-level audio.

Perfect for Arc Raiders?

LG’s latest earbuds aren’t the most suave, but their broad feature-set and solid sound still makes them worth a look.

The JLab JBuds Lux ANC are the brand's first 'luxury' over-ear headphones, which offer lots of bass but a few aches too.

Jabra’s Elite 10 is a premium alternative to its sporty lineup of true wireless earbuds, with spatial audio, advanced ANC, long-lasting battery life and more.

Everyone’s idea of ‘mainstream’ is slightly different, of course, but in the case of the Dali IO-8 wireless noise-cancelling headphones it would seem to mean ‘really quite expensive’...

The Speck Gemtones Play earbuds are perfect for smaller ears but don’t hold up well against the competition.

The most eco-friendly headphones just got a little bit eco friendlier – and slightly better sounding, too

The H2O Audio Tri 2 Pro Multi-Sport have the build and features that make them ideal for long runs, swims, or both.

The Xiaomi OpenWear Stereo Pro fix the ever-present noise leaking problem of open earbuds, but they only sound okay and the design has some issues.

Super-lightweight, comfortable, with superb audio quality for the price.

The AONIC 3 make a statement with sharp separation and nifty passive noise isolation.

The Turtle Beach Stealth 600 Gen 3 wireless headset doesn’t sacrifice features to hit a low price point.

The Sony WF-C510 are the brand’s cheapest earbuds, but you wouldn’t be able to tell if it wasn’t for the price tag.