Spoiler Alert: If you move around a lot, the Jabra Engage 75 is expensive, but worth every penny.
Like most people, you’re probably spending a lot more time in virtual calls using Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Webex, etc. than you ever dreamed of. Even for those of us that have been doing remote meetings for years, we’re doing A LOT more now and people are putting more energy into production values.
As a photographer, the first thing that I did was work on my lighting & camera setup, but probably for the same reasons, audio was sort of an afterthought.
For me, it was simple, I’ve been using my phone & Bluetooth headset for meetings since that became a thing years ago. Yeah, the audio isn’t great, but it is what it is. I’m one of those guys that tends to wander around while I’m talking, so I’ve always gladly traded quality for mobility. The more time I spent in Microsoft Teams, the more I took advantage of the ability to connect to a meeting from more than one device – again allowing me to roam around more freely, but also see & share from screens when I had to. It wasn’t until I started doing a lot of large audience sessions where I was being recorded that I realized how much my bluetooth kinda sucked.
That’s when I started to give more thought to my audio setup. Obviously, in this day & age, there are a bajillion headsets & studio-quality microphones out there so it was a bit of a pain to zero in on exactly what I wanted. Everyone does this math a little differently based on your own constraints, but for me, I started looking in the ~$100 range. Then I moved to sampling headsets in the couple hundred-dollar range and I kept hitting the same wall – moving just a room away from my desktop and the quality would drop sharply. Despite each having distance ratings of 30-50 feet, they all seemed to fail at half that. One day, in a moment of frustration, I said “screw it, what’s the best one I can find?” – which is what brought me to the Jabra Engage 75.
There are others in that range, but at over $400, it seemed crazy – at least when compared to the legions of headsets in the >$50 range. Even the $200 Jabra Evolve 65 UC that I test drove for a while seemed excessive. I liked it a lot, but even a 20′ walk into my kitchen rendered it useless.
I thought about it for a bit and I couldn’t shake the idea that virtually every single professional interaction that I was going to have for the foreseeable future was going to be had through a headset… the cost of being misunderstood was real. So, I decided to try it out.
I learned very quickly that there was a reason for its price tag.
It lets you connect up to 5 devices, has 13 hours of talk time and even lets you use it as a wired headset if you need it. There are a ton of features that I’m not taking advantage of yet, but the wireless audio quality is crystal clear and entirely consistent whether I’m at my desk, walking around the room, getting something out of the bedroom upstairs, working in the garage or even out watering my lawn. It just works.
Not once, in the few months that I’ve been using it, have I thought about how comfortable it was, how much battery I had left and now, (thankfully) I’m starting to not think about my distance from the desk.
I didn’t intend to necessarily do a product review, but I did think that some of you might get some value in seeing how I came to love it – despite its cost.
If you want to see deeper product reviews for the Jabra Engage 75, these reviews certainly helped me when I was trying to figure out what I wanted:
I found that once I did an honest re-evaluation of the role that it would play in my life, combined with my subconscious need to move around while I’m talking, I found myself reaching a different conclusion than where I started.
Whether its due to its use of DECT instead of Bluetooth, or its specific frequency range, relative to the other radio signals bouncing around my house – this headset is absolutely exceeding my expectations.