Life Q35 | Noise-Cancelling Headphones with LDAC

I've had these for probably over a year or more, so, I'll start with the good - these sound great, period.

Wearing over longer periods of time is good but not fantastic temperature wise, especially if you're in a hot room, but that's somewhat obvious being an over the ear headphone with foam, plastic and whatever faux leather material is on these, but at least my ears and head don't feel squeezed, so they're probably like a 7/10 for comfort, if not better (as long as you aren't in a super warm environment or sweating, like AT all).

Audio quality in teams, slack and zoom calls is great.

On to the bad:
Connectivity!!!!!!!! Man oh man. These things are meant to detect when they are taken off your head and pause whatever is playing, e.g. if you're watching youtube videos or something, but try as I may, there are continually issues with random pausing over and over while watching any content with the headphones snugly on my head, and having to go back and hit play again and again and again is a no go while I'm trying to be productive.

If I use them in teams calls for work, probably 2 or 3 in 10 times after a meeting when I try to connect to another they just fail silently and I get no sound output, but people can hear me. Re-pairing with bluetooth fixes it, but that's annoying and looks unprofessional when it happens frequently.

Multi-connect functionality works okay across two devices, though one source device for the audio will take precedence over the other (which is fine and makes sense, I guess), however it's very annoying to have no good way to manage which notifications are silenced, so if you're working away on your work computer and streaming audio from a personal laptop or phone, you constantly get little dings and reminders which make the audio from the second device fully stop for a few seconds. There is no simultaneous playback, which is TOTALLY fine, that's probably something baked into the bluetooth standard and not within Anker's control - but again, probably 20% of the time the audio connectivity doesn't realize that your secondary source is still playing and resume automatically, requiring you to pause and resume the media on the other device and that kind of playback detection IS within the realm of what the device driver and firmware should control.

Finally, the lack of support for an app to update software or settings on PC is annoying. I can pair the device with my phone to make the update but... why? Are development teams so absolutely blind to VoC that nobody recognizes that there is a common and likely use case for gigantic hamburger headphones while sitting at a desk at home, and not just out and about in public paired to a phone or tablet? I use earbuds for that, not generally something large and isolating.

Overall, the sound quality is pretty good and they're not bad for casual use, but for someone that uses them 5-8 hours a day these definitely have some issues that are annoying to work around, given the price. If the connectivity wasn't so obnoxious to deal with and the driver updates were a bit friendlier to people who full-stop don't WANT the device paired with their personal phone and would rather use it with one or more PC's, these could easily be a 5 star, but I just can't justify that rating for the price, these aren't a totally entry level device.

love them

Gave me some trouble to start with, but then hit the hang of it

These have like everything...had a pair of Q30s that I lost and these are better, they fixed the mids and it has decent separation. For $100, what more do you want? I am happy with them.

If I had to run it back though, I would get a pair of $300 Klipsch ones that I see on sale for $120.

Sounds terrible out of the box but is really good once adjustments are made in the EQ in the included app. The battery life is legendary, goes on forever. The noise cancellation is decent too. Didn't have any issues pairing them with my phone.