Dave Eckhardt's idiosyncratic Bluetooth headphone reviews

Rough notes for now

Sony DR-BT50 (2007?): Range is much too short. Ear cups are small. UI is reasonable, e.g., forward/back is a rocker next to the volume-up/volume-down buttons, and there are three other buttons for other functions. Battery life is long enough.
JBL E50BT (2015?): Range is excellent. Ear cups are ok. UI has many positive features, e.g., large four-way rocker plate on left ear does most functions other than on/off. Charging/charge-complete indicator on power button is very visible. Battery life is longer than DR-BT50. Huge failing: the ear cups are on an arm which is metal on the outside, plastic on the inside, and the plastic crumbles, at which point the ear-cup assembly remains attached only by a thin wire. Multiple people online report this failure mode.
Anker Soundcore Life Q20 (2019?) ($60): Range is short: only 50% of the JBL E50BT (this is a big disappointment). Ear cups are nice and large, and significantly block ambient sound even with power off. This is good, but using the headset for a phone call or videoconference is a little disconcerting because the ear cups suppress your own voice, and it does not appear that the device provides sidetone (adjustable sidetone would be nice!). Ear cups rotate in two dimensions. It is easy to turn noise cancellation on and off via a dedicated button (though it is annoying that powering the device on always enables noice cancellation). WARNING: it does not support HSP (the Bluetooth "headset profile"), only HFP. This may cause compatibility issues, for example with Linux.
V-Moda Crossfade Wireless ($99, on sale): Appears fairly robust physically (headband flexes in multiple dimensions), though the wires connecting to the ear cups seem a little thin. Bluetooth range is good. Sound is good (though I am not an audiophile). Controls are only mediocre (the giant disk of the JBL E50BT has spoiled me). The volume-up button on the device I received creaks and is hard to press. Perhaps more disturbingly, when a connection is made, the device plays a loud exuberant connection sound, and it turns out that the volume is adjusted to something like +6 (i.e., it's not only the connection sound that is loud). Turning the device off plays a sound loudly, too. Surprisingly, the ear cups are smaller than on the JBL E50BT.
Pioneer SE-MS9BN-B ($199): Amazon reviews: only 52! The headband isn't as flexible as the V-Moda Crossfade, but it doesn't seem likely to self-destruct either, and the ear cups ride on metal rails. Bluetooth range is fine, sound quality is fine, passive noise blocking is noticeably good. The controls are ok, but not stunning. The giant easy-to-find button is for Google Assistant, which I am a dissenter from. The power button is also used to switch among modes. The device always turns on in noise-cancellation mode; to get it into "just headphones" mode takes two more presses, which elicit non-obvious beep codes. The three-way volume-down/call-control/volume-up button is arguably too close to the power button, and arguably the middle call-control nub feels too much like the power button. Overall the control situation cries out for the four-way rocker panel that the JBL E50BT has. It appears that the headset, unlike others, does not try to connect with the most-recently-connected device, but instead always first attempts to reach the first device it was paired with. It also seems less nimble than the JBL E50BT at arbitrating among connections from multiple devices. The good news is that, unlike the V-Moda Crossfade, this headset does not "helpfully" crank up the volume on every connection.