The Best Wireless Earbuds, According to the Reviews

Buy the Bose if you want silence, the Technics if you want sound, and the Sony WF-C710N if you want neither badly enough to spend $249. All three average the same 9.7 from three published outlet scores each.

Then read the next section, because an $89.99 pair averaging exactly what a $249 pair averages is not the bargain it looks like, and the reason is in how star ratings work rather than in the earbuds.

The five, at a glance

	Review consensus	Price	Best at	The catch
Bose QC Ultra Earbuds (2nd Gen)	9.7 — one outlet cooler	$249	Noise cancelling	Six hours a charge
Technics EAH-AZ100	9.7 — one outlet cooler	$249.99	Sound quality	Cancelling is good, not best
Sony WF-C710N	9.7 — one outlet cooler	$89.99	Price	Scored against cheap rivals
Apple AirPods Pro 3	9.3 — close agreement	$249	Living on an iPhone	Battery, and Android
Sony WF-1000XM6	8.7 — genuinely contested	$298	Features and control	Dearest, lowest average

Consensus averages three published star ratings per pair, normalised to ten. Every price is the seller’s own, read from Apple, Bose, Sony and Technics on 5 September 2026 rather than from a retailer. The “best at” column is ours, read off what those reviewers found — none of them ranked these five against each other.

What a five-star budget product actually means

This is the thing to carry into the sales, and it is worth more than any pick on this page.

Reviewers do not score in a vacuum. They score against what a thing costs, which is why the same outlet can give five out of five to an $89.99 pair and five out of five to one costing three and a half times as much without contradicting itself. What Hi-Fi did exactly that, to the Sony WF-C710N and the Sony WF-1000XM6, and neither review claims the two sound alike.

So the honest reading of the table is not “the cheap one is as good”. It is: for what it costs, the cheap one is as impressive as the expensive one is for what it costs. Those are different statements, and only the second survives contact with a listening test.

The practical consequence is simple. A star rating tells you whether something is worth its own price. It does not tell you how two things at different prices compare — which is precisely the question most people are asking when they open a buying guide in November. Our piece on the cheap one against the flagship works through what that pattern looks like across every shortlist we hold.

Sony against Sony

The cleanest illustration is inside one brand. Sony makes both the cheapest pair here and the dearest, and the cheap one comes out ahead on averaged score.

TechRadar reviewed both and preferred the budget pair — four and a half out of five for the WF-C710N, four for the WF-1000XM6. Its complaint about the flagship is specific and repeated by Tom’s Guide: the noise cancelling improved over the last generation but still does not reach Bose. Two of the three outlets that scored the XM6 marked it down for the one thing its price is meant to buy.

That is not a reason to avoid the XM6. It is the most configurable pair on this page and What Hi-Fi rates it a five. It is a reason to know what you are paying the extra $210 for, which is codec support, app depth and control — not silence.

What to actually do

• Decide which one thing you want first. Silence, sound, or spending as little as possible. All three answers are on this page and they are different products, not better and worse versions of one.
• If you are buying a gift, the $89.99 Sony is the low-risk answer. Three outlets, one of them twice, put it at the top of what its money buys, and nobody resents an earbud that cost less than they expected.
• Ignore the average when comparing across price brackets. It is the one thing a star rating cannot do, and the section above says why.
• Check the price the week you buy. Every figure here was read from the maker’s own store on one day, in a category that reprices constantly. Two of the five were on sale when we looked, so the gaps in the table are today’s, not permanent.