> These are Wirecutter's suggested Bluetooth headphones

I stopped trusting Wirecutter a long time ago when they "recommended" powerline adapters that sucked. After buying some and doing my own testing I realized the whole product category sucks unless you're super desperate with no other options.

Of course instead of saying that Wirecutter happily gives the best piece of garbage 8 or 9 stars. That's the problem with affiliate marketing blogs like Wirecutter. They'll happily do relative rankings of pure crap if it means you'll buy something for them to get the affiliate revenue.

We need a new generation of review sites and reviewers.

Powerline networking is a great example of where review sites totally fall down; it's amazing in most cases, providing great bandwidth and very low jitter and packet loss. Then for no reason*, it will absolutely suck for some people. The only way to find these kinds of problems is to survey every situation and test each product in all of them, which is clearly impossible.

People will hear this and go, "aha! Crowd sourcing!" The issue with that is that with modern technology the problem is overwhelmingly user error (or to be generous, perhaps UX). So you will spend essentially all your time chasing down people who don't know how to charge their product, or have their powerline adapter hooked up upstream of a UPS, etc

Your wiring is to blame. Maybe some staple missed and nicked the wire, maybe you have something leaking EMI, maybe you just have dirty power.

IIRC their tests were over a short, direct run of wire. I tested them using different lengths of runs, across circuits, and in different houses. The Wirecutter test setup was the most ideal environment possible. It was as if a manufacturer dictated the setup.

To their credit, I think they updated their test setup to be more realistic.

> Your wiring is to blame.

That’s quite the assessment for the info given. Lol.

> The Wirecutter test setup was the most ideal environment possible. It was as if a manufacturer dictated the setup.

The thing with comparison tests is, you have to use a reliably reproduceable, documented testing environment. Everything else just ends up with nasty letters from lawyers complaining about the test being unfair or whatever.

Your uncle's shoddy 1960s-era farmhouse wiring may be the ultimate stress test for a powerline adapter in real life, but no way you can use that house as any basis for a comparison test looking like resembling science...

I have several college friends who made serious money during COVID "fixing people's Zoom dropouts" by installing MoCA adapters. They installed them for hundreds of people during the last two years, and some of those installs had issues. They ended up getting testing gear to look into the issues and be able to give people a definitive answer for why. Every single time, it came down to something wrong with the wiring. Maybe you're special, but if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...

Dirty power and poor wiring are terrible for many things. It's not a surprise it might cause issues with this too.

Yeah, this is sketchy behavior for a premium brand. They really seem to need you to run their mobile app. It's hard to tell from their advertising that it covers more than iPhones... although it does say it works with Google Assistant.

The only info I found about supporting other laptops (it mentions phones, tablets, and mobile devices?) was in their help faqs:

https://www.jabra.com/supportpages/jabra-elite-85t/100-99190...

Which basically says it won't fully function... but it might work with MS teams?

I wonder what data they're collecting with the mobile app, whether it's being monetized to support development, or simply that they don't care about a fairly common use case.

That's different than OP was implying. They're saying that a lot of the playback and volume controls may not work as expected, not that you won't be able to hear and speak.