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What really sets the JBL Tour One M3 from the rest of the competition is the nifty Smart Tx dongle. It has a screen that not only gives you access to the M3’s custom options, it also serves as a wireless transmitter to the headphones, giving you another way to connect to any wired audio source.

But hey, can’t the headphones be connected with a wire directly? Isn’t it pointless having an external dongle to do that? Turns out that if you connect to the dongle, there are 2 main benefits.

First, you get better 24-bit transmission from sources who don’t have hi-res codec support, and second, you can still get multipoint pairing, which lets you connect the headphones wirelessly to a second source. But if you connect the wire directly to the headphones, you cannot use multipoint.

It can also broadcast the audio to an unlimited number of Auracast enabled speakers, headphones or earbuds. So if I’m watching something, and my friend’s using the Sennheiser MTW4 which has Auracast, I can share my audio with them, at very low latency and decent quality. So the Smart Tx is not a gimmick, it’s actually useful. But what about the headphones themselves? How do they compare to headphones like the Sony WH-1000XM6 in terms of mic pickup, active noise canceling, ambient mode, and sound quality?

Microphone Quality

The Tour M3’s got an 8-microphone setup which is fewer than the XM6’s 12-mics, but we have to remember that most headphones out there are still stuck at 8 or fewer, and more mics don’t always mean better. Putting that aside, the Your One M3 is very comparable to the Sony in both quiet and noisy conditions. It may be letting through a bit more noise but my voice did come through a bit cleaner.

👉 Have a listen to the mic quality samples

(Tested under both quiet and noisy conditions using simulated loud cafe noise and wind noise from a fan.)

Active Noise Cancelling

In terms of active noise canceling on their max ANC settings, we can see that the Tour One M3 is good, almost at the level of the Mark 6, but it’s not as quiet almost across the board from the lower mids to the highs. It might cut a little more bass but the JBL also has somewhat of a damping issue under 60hz so some rumble might be more obvious in situations like a plane or loud noises from public transport. But in general, it is still going to be very quiet under moderate noise levels like at the mall, the cafe, and roadside conditions.

👉 Have a listen to the mic quality samples

Ambient Mode

The Tour One M3 has very good ambient mode. As we can see from this measurement, it’s very close to the base noise level like the Sony, and it even has that spike in the highs to give that little extra airiness, so it sounds natural as a whole. It may be a little darker than the Sony in the upper mids and lower treble which can blunt the crispness of voices, but even without using talkthrough mode, it’s transparent enough that you can have a totally natural face to face conversation.

Sound Quality

As for its sound quality on default settings over Bluetooth, the Tour One M3 sounds very different from the XM6. It leans brighter, crisper, and more laid back, closer to the Harman target curve, whereas the Sony’s emphasis is more on bass and mids, and because of its rolloff in the treble, the XM6 can sound muddy by comparison.

My first impression is that the Tour One M3 sounds cleaner, more analytical. Some of you may prefer how it sounds, but it’s not very enjoyable for me because I find it lacks punch and body.

👉 Have a listen to the sound quality samples

An easy fix would be to choose the Bass preset, and in doing so, it retains all of that crispness and clarity while also giving me that gravity and body. But if you want to make more granular changes, the parametric EQ’s awesome for that, allowing you to pick the precise frequency you want to tweak, as long as it’s within 32-16khz.

This is more than what you can do with the Sony’s EQ which only allows 10 fixed bands. I recommend that you do it after you calibrate the JBLs to the sensitivity of your hearing using Personi-Fi.

After calibrating them with my custom EQ settings, they do sound pretty awesome. Full of bass and clarity, as well as a wide and airy soundstage. But let’s assume I’ve also calibrated the Sonys to perfection, which one sounds better? Well, it’ll be a very close fight, but somehow the Sony still feels more enjoyable. Seems to me that its separation in the mids is cleaner, bass is tighter, less sluggish, and it has overall more impact than the more laid back Tour One M3.

So that was over Bluetooth. What about wired connections? Are there any differences between listening over USB-C versus 3.5mm? Yes, both in terms of tuning and volume. For example, if you were to listen over USB-C, it won’t really sound different from Bluetooth, but it is 5x louder! 50% volume on Bluetooth is like 10% on USB-C. It’s that loud!

On 3.5mm, it’s a little softer than USB-C, but it’s still twice as loud as Bluetooth. And the sound signature will be different because the 3.5mm cable is taking the signal directly from the DAC of my source, which, in this case, is my PC.

Those differences between connections are the same whether I was using the Smart Transmitter or not. Interesting. What’s also interesting is that, if you are actively streaming something over Auracast, all the volume gains default to regular Bluetooth levels.

Which one should you buy?

Sound quality aside, and having looked at their performance, there are things about the JBL headphones itself that I prefer like the fact that they’re more customizable than the Sony from their ANC to the parametric EQ, even their mic quality can be customized instead of Sony’s take it or leave it approach.

They also have spatial audio with head tracking that works with any device and content, whereas the Sony only has spatial audio, and if you want head tracking, it needs to be with 360 Reality Audio content on selected devices.

And finally, the Tour One M3 has the Smart Transmitter which adds another interesting dimension to the user experience, letting me customize the headphones without my phone, and giving me even more connectivity options both wired and wireless, like Auracast. So I’ve got to say, the Tour One M3 has more interesting things going for it than the Sony.

That said, as we saw, the Sony is better at certain things like noise canceling, mic pickup, and to me, after EQ-ing, it sounds better than the JBL. As for which one is more comfortable to wear, in my opinion, the Sony Mark 6. The JBL’s cushions are plush, and the headband is more padded too so people with thinner hair might find them more gentle on the head, but the cushions on the earcups feel a bit stiffer, like they’ve got less surface area on my face, so I feel the clamp more.

The skin material also feels like it traps more heat, not so ideal in tropical countries like Singapore. The XM6 isn’t perfect, comfort wise, but these are still more comfortable than the JBL because you don’t feel the clamp as much.

Honestly, if I were to choose based on performance and comfort, I would still choose the XM6, but for more custom options, and especially the extra connectivity options from the Smart Tx, I would choose the JBL. The fact that it actually performs pretty well, sounds pretty good with comparable mic pickup, and as a whole, costs less 50 bucks than the WH-1000XM6, makes them easier to recommend.

Check latest price:
JBL Tour One M3 - https://amzn.to/44tcmHd
Sony WH-1000XM6 - https://amzn.to/4n6OcuL

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