I bought a set of ANC IEM's as a Christmas gift. What a miserable shopping experience.
I gave my Sony's to my son, but now they only hold a 30 minute charge. The safe choice were the premium ANC IEM's from Apple, Samsung, and Bose, but I don't trust a high school freshman to a set of $300-ish Cdn headphones.
I checked a variety of headphone review websites, and they're just awful. Most of them just don't test enough models, nor make it easy to browse competitors and their feature set.
I settled for rtings as the best headphone website for me. At the time of this writing, their headphone reviews were no longer behind a paywall, and their sound quality measurements and scoring were against the Harman target curve.
I settled on a pair of JBL Tune 130NC for 80% less than what I paid for the Sony's in 2019. Sound neutrality was a 7.5, the same as the WF1000XM3 and better than the 6.8 of my old Apple EarPods (subjectively, the sound quality gap is huge between the two).
We'll see how he likes it after Christmas.
