Technologies

Technics EAH-AZ80 Review: Are These the Best New Earbuds of 2023?

Technics’ new $300 flagship earbuds get almost everything right with an upgraded, more ergonomic design, plus excellent sound, noise canceling and voice-calling capabilities.

8.5

Technics EAH-AZ80

$300 at Amazon

Like

Stellar sound and very good noise canceling with improved fit
Good battery life
Can pair with three devices simultaneously
LDAC audio codec support for Android devices

Don’t like

Pricey
Voice-calling performance is decent but could be slightly better

At the time I’m writing this review, Sony is gearing up to release its rumored and much-anticipated WF-1000XM5 earbuds, the follow-up to its excellent XM4s that earned a CNET Editors’ Choice in 2021. Those upcoming Sony buds — presumably dubbed the WF-1000XM5s — are considered the odds-on-favorite to be the top earbuds for 2023. But wait! Another Japanese company, Panasonic, has released a surprise contender, the EAH-AZ80, under its flagship Technics brand. These are next-generation earbuds that not only sound terrific but feature very good noise canceling in a more ergonomic design. They’re available in two color options — black or silver — and carry a list price of $300.

Equipped with Bluetooth 5.3, the EAH-AZ80s have just about everything you’d want in a set of earbuds, including wireless charging, support for Sony’s higher-resolution LDAC audio codec for Android and other devices that support it and the ability to pair with up to three devices simultaneously (Panasonic says this is an “industry first” for multipoint pairing). But more on all that in a minute. Let me start with my one small gripe, which may not apply to you — and your ears — but could impact some people.

Read more: Best Wireless Earbuds for 2023

Improved fit (mostly)

Panasonic learned something from its previous earbuds, which included the EAH-AZ70W that I reviewed favorably back in 2020. Due to their shape, they didn’t quite nestle in my ears as well as they probably should have and some people complained that they put pressure on certain parts of their ears after using them, for a little while. That’s changed with this model as Panasonic has revised its design to betterconform to the natural shape of your ear, particularly that part of the ear called the concha.

The EAH-AZ80s now nestle in my ears better, fitting more comfortably and securely. My only issue was that I was sort of in between a large and extra-large ear tip — six sizes are included — and the shape of the ear tip wasn’t quite perfectly suited to my ears (I had the same issue with Sony’s WF-1000XM4 buds). I was able to get a tight seal, but the more compact AirPods Pro 2 and new Beats Studio Buds Plus fit a little more comfortably.

The Technics EAH-AZ80 earbuds offer all-around great performance — The EAH-AZ80s nestle better in your ears than their predecessors.

David Carnoy/CNET

Since I review so many earbuds, I’ve got a lot of extra ear tips, so I went in search of a better fit and eventually found a set of tips from my collection that worked a little better. The majority of people probably aren’t going to have my problem, but somewhat beefier buds like Sony’s WF-1000XM4 and Sennheiser’s Momentum True Wireless 3 can pose a fit challenge for some people. The EAH-AZ80 aren’t overly weighty for high-performance earbuds but they do weigh 7 grams per bud or just 0.3-gram less than the Sony WF-1000XM4s. They seem fairly sturdy — I dropped a bud onto the pavement as I was walking my dog — and are IPX4 splash-proof so you can run with them (they did stay in my ears while I ran with them, but that may not be the case for everybody).

I thought the touch controls were quite responsive and worked well. You can customize what your taps (or taps and holds) do in the Technics Audio Connect app for iOS and Android, which does offer a wealth of settings options, not so unlike Sony’s Headphones app.

Impressive sound

I praised Technics’ earlier earbuds for featuring very good sound quality. But the EAH-AZ80s take it up a notch on the sound front and are right up there with the very best-sounding earbuds, including the Bowers & Wilkins PI7 S2. These buds don’t feature dual drivers like the Bowers & Wilkins’ buds do, but Panasonic says they have a new 10mm driver with a “free-edge aluminum diaphragm that delivers the greatest sound quality ever from Technics’ true wireless earbuds, extending high and low frequency response while reducing unwanted resonance and distortion.”

The clarity and depth to the sound is impressive, and I noticed a slight boost in sound quality when I paired them with a Pixel 7 Pro with LDAC support and a streaming service like Qobuz that serves up high-resolution audio tracks. They also sound excellent with an iPhone 14 Pro, which uses the AAC audio codec, though Qobuz does sound better than Spotify. Note that you have to activate LDAC in Technics Audio Connect app to use that audio codec on Android and other devices that support it.

They lack that extra bit of bass extension that high-end wired earbuds offer, including Panasonic’s own Technics EAH-TZ700 in-ear monitors ($1,200), but for wireless earbuds, they deliver a premium audio experience that measures up to pretty much everything that’s out there in this price range and even higher. You get a lot of earbuds that sound very good for their size, including the AirPods Pro 2, but fewer that feature the accurate sound with extra clarity and three-dimensionality that you expect from pricey headphones.

These are the type of earbuds that allow you to distinguish separate instruments, even in complicated tracks where instruments get mushed together when listening to lesser Bluetooth headphones. Singers’ voices sound natural, there’s good sparkle to the treble (with no sibilance), and the bass is tight. They don’t have quite as much bass energy as the Bowers & Wilkins PI7 but you can kick up the low-end a bit with the bass or superbass boost settings in the Technics Audio Connect app if bass is your thing. (I test bass with tracks like Spoon’s Knock Knock Knock, Athletes of God’s Don’t Want To Be Normal, Orbital’s Dirty Rat and sometimes throw in Taylor Swift’s Vigilante Shit for good measure, because my kids tell me she’s kind of popular.)

Beyond the handful of preset EQ modes in the app, you can also create your own custom equalizer setting. I mainly stuck with the default signature sound setting because it sounded just fine.

Note that Panasonic has also released a new step-down model to the EAH-AZ80 called the EAH-AX60M2. They feature the same features as the EAH-AZ80 but have smaller 8mm drivers and are missing the ergonomic design upgrade found on the step-up model. I have not tried them yet, but they list for $50 less and I suspect will be discounted to less than $200 in the not-so-distant future. I’d personally advise you to pay the extra money for the EAH-AZ80 buds.

technics-eah-az80-up-close-natural-background — The buds’ new design conforms to the natural shape of your ear.

David Carnoy/CNET

Upgraded noise canceling and improved voice-calling

When it comes to noise-canceling for earbuds, Bose and Sony are at the top, with Apple nipping at their heels. It’s always really hard to say which company’s noise canceling is better — or best — but the EAH-AZ80 features excellent noise canceling with a couple of ambient sound modes (Apple calls it a transparency mode) that lets ambient sound in and allows you to hear the outside world.

I spent a few days commuting on foot in the streets of New York and the buds reduced what seemed like about 85% of the noise around me. Some higher pitched frequencies leaked in (I could hear people’s muffled voices) but traffic noise was muted to a nice degree, as was the rumble of trains in the New York City subway. I don’t think these are quite on the level of the Bose QuietComfort 2 earbuds, the current gold standard for noise canceling, but they seemed right there with Sony WF-1000XM4 and AirPods Pro 2 in terms of their noise muffling capabilities. (I am assuming Sony will raise its noise-canceling game with the arrival of the XM5s, however.)

In the app for iOS and Android, you’ll find a noise-canceling optimizer option that you can engage (I ended up jacking it up to the Max setting whenever I was outside). There’s also an option in the app to run a test to hear how much background noise is being reduced while you’re making a call. Also, you can opt for a “normal” noise reduction setting and a “strong” noise-reduction setting (at the strong setting your voice quality suffers a bit).

The Technics EAH-AZ80 deliver top-notch sound and noise canceling — The Technics EAH-AZ80 is shown in black.

Screenshot by David Carnoy/CNET

Panasonic says its improved JustMyVoice technology “uses eight high-sensitivity MEMS mics, a sensitive voice detection signal, and surrounding noise suppression to capture and transmit your voice clearly.” Callers told me they could hear my voice clearly at the “normal” noise reduction setting but also heard a fair amount of background noise, especially when I spoke. At the “strong” setting, background noise was greatly reduced but I sounded like I was in a tunnel, callers said (I could hear them just fine). I had two people tell me they thought the call quality was reasonably good but not up to what you get with new Beats Studio Buds Plus and AirPods Pro 2. (I did one firmware upgrade already but we may see more as Panasonic tweaks features and performance).

With the AirPods Pro 2, Apple’s transparency mode is on or off and automatically adjusts to the world around you. With these buds, you can manually adjust transparency levels in the app — I found the mode sounded most natural (most like not having earbuds in my ears) when I set it at around 50%. There’s also an Attention mode that you can toggle on, which emphasizes voices so you can hear people talking better in noisier environments.

As I said, the one unique feature is the enhanced multipoint pairing that allows you to pair three devices simultaneously — say a computer, smartphone and tablet. The one caveat is that if you use the LDAC audio codec, you can only connect two devices simultaneously, and it’s really best to have the buds paired to a single device if using LDAC for optimal bandwidth (you make your multipoint/LDAC selection in the app).

While battery life is rated for up to 7 hours playback with ANC on (at 50% volume), I got closer to 6 hours because I play my music at closer to 70% volume. You get a little more than three extra charges from the charging case, which, as noted, can be charged wirelessly or via USB-C. There’s also a quick charge feature that gives you 70 minutes of playback from a 10-minute charge.

Technics EAH-AZ80 final thoughts

One should expect a lot from earbuds that cost $300 — and yes, that’s still a lot to pay for headphones, even if plenty of people seem to be willing to pay upwards of $450 for the likes of Apple’s AirPods Max headphones. Overall, Panasonic has done a nice job of creating an all-around top-performing set of buds that offer an improved fit with excellent sound, very good noise-canceling and a robust feature set.

Voice-calling capabilities are decent but don’t quite live up to their billing (yet). Hopefully we’ll see some firmware upgrades that improve the voice-calling experience in noisier environments. Despite that caveat, as long as they fit your ears well, the Technics EAH-AZ80 are right up there with the best wireless earbuds on the market right now.

Technologies

Trump-Xi summit puts AI safety talks on the table but neither side wants to slow down

Recent weeks have seen AI safety fears reach new heights. That will be a key focus for the U.S. and Chinese leaders, analysts told CNBC.

President Donald Trump wants the U.S. to beat China in the artificial intelligence race. But as he meets Chinese President Xi Jinping, both countries are also weighing how to address the risks posed by rapidly advancing technology.

In recent months, AI systems have taken more consequential actions online: OpenAI said one of its research models gained unauthorized access to parts of the AI platform Hugging Face, while Anthropic found AI was being used to automate parts of cyberattacks. The incidents have raised fears that increasingly autonomous models could make attacks faster and harder to contain.

Ahead of Trump and Xi’s meeting on Thursday, U.S. Treasury Scott Bessent discussed the prospect of a “U.S.-China AI dialogue” with his Chinese counterpart, He Lifeng, over the weekend, including a channel for incidents “up to a national security level.”

“Leaders in both countries are spooked by the increasing cyber capabilities of AI models, and especially agents acting autonomously to escape containment and breach websites,” Aalok Mehta, director of the Wadhwani AI Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told CNBC.

But as fears have intensified, tensions have not dissipated.

Washington continues to restrict China’s access to Nvidia

What’s been said so far?

While the U.S. took an early lead in developing large language models, or LLMs, thanks to companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, Chinese models have made big capability gains in recent months and are increasingly being adopted by companies globally, including in America.

Trump previously dismissed warnings that AI poses an existential threat to humanity, risks amplified by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic chief Dario Amodei as they called for an industry slowdown and regulatory oversight.

“If we don’t win AI, we’re going to be put in a very bad position,” Trump told reporters earlier this month.

But in a Truth Social post Monday, he said the government “will rein things in if we have to.”

Some lawmakers hopeful that the talks will result in some sort of agreement on AI, while being realistic that the summit may be more about the fact it’s happening than deliverables.

“I hope Trump meets with Xi Jinping and comes up with some common sense safeguards,” Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., who represents part of Silicon Valley, said in an interview Wednesday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”

“How about we just agree that you should not be able to have self-improving AI?” Khanna said. “Why wouldn’t you want to sit down with Xi Jinping and say let’s have some reasonable agreement? And have it enforceable, trust but verify.”

AI safety and access to chips

The likeliest areas of agreement between the U.S. and China could be common definitions and frameworks for AI safety for powerful models and an emergency communication mechanism to discuss incidents, Mehta told CNBC.

A channel for relating national security-related incidents would be a “modest” but positive step, Chris McGuire, senior fellow for China and emerging technologies at the Council on Foreign Relations, told CNBC.

But an agreement to slow down AI’s breakneck development speed is “extremely unlikely,” he added.

China has historically used AI dialogues “to complain about U.S. export controls,” McGuire said, which the U.S. uses to prevent the most advanced AI chips from being sold to China.

“Its state media has largely rejected the concerns expressed by leading U.S. AI labs about the potential for catastrophic risk, which is consistent with China’s long-held skepticism of all U.S. arms control proposals,” he added.

Despite U.S. restrictions, several Chinese firms have reportedly been able to access the chips’ compute power remotely, via data centers in Southeast Asia.

While U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said controls on chips were not on the agenda during preliminary talks on the weekend, China could push to have them relaxed, said Melanie Hart, senior director of the think tank Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub.

“China’s asking the U.S. to embrace Chinese AI models and drop some of the U.S. controls on China’s access to semiconductor chips,” she told reporters on Tuesday.

Distillation could also come up in the talks. U.S. companies and officials have accused Chinese labs of using the practice to gain ground, characterizing it as theft; China rejects the allegations.

In July, Bessent threatened sanctions against companies doing it and said the Trump administration had found “watermarks of our U.S. large language models on many of the Chinese models,” calling it “unacceptable.”

Progress on AI cooperation relies on two things, said Mehta. “The first is that it can’t hurt the ability for the U.S. and China to compete on the merits of their technology.”

The second is a verification mechanism, he added. “Policymakers won’t be inclined to take their counterparts just on their word, so we’ll need to find ways to ensure information flowing between the two countries is accurate. That means both technical and governance verification tools.”

Technologies

Chinese authorities reportedly seize F-35 parts in Hong Kong

Chinese authorities reportedly seized F-35 stealth fighter components that were diverted to Hong Kong, prompting investigations by Australia, the U.S., and Lockheed Martin.

Chinese authorities are reportedly in possession of F-35 stealth fighter parts after components of the aircraft were “inexplicably diverted to Hong Kong.”

Shipping giant UPS was sending a cockpit canopy and weapons bay door to the U.S. from Australia in late May when it was diverted, Bloomberg reported on Thursday, citing sources.

Both parts were coated with a radar absorbing material that enhances their stealth capabilities, the sources said, and it was not clear why the shipment was diverted to Hong Kong.

On Tuesday, Australian Defense Minister Richard Marles told reporters Tuesday that Australia was aware of the shipment, and was working with the U.S. and Lockheed Martin to see how Canberra can assist in the investigation.

Marles also said it was his understanding that no sensitive parts were in the missing shipment, according to CNN.

Lockheed Martin, UPS and the Pentagon didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment from CNBC.

The F-35 is a fifth-generation stealth fighter made by Lockheed Martin, and Washington controls the sale of these aircraft only to its closest partners and allies.

For example, Turkey was excluded from the F-35 program in 2019 after the country purchased the Russian S-400 anti-aircraft system, which raised fears that the Russian system could be used as an intelligence collection platform to learn about the aircraft’s capabilities.

China has targeted F-35-related U.S. military data in past espionage cases, according to U.S. prosecutors in 2024.

A $24 billion sale of F-35s to Saudi Arabia was approved last week, but some lawmakers in Congress have already expressed concerns over the technology finding its way into Chinese hands.

Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL) said that the U.S. intelligence community has warned that the sale “could put the crown jewels of American military technology within reach of the Chinese Communist Party.”

Users of the fighter jet include Australia and Belgium, as well as the U.S. itself, with other countries like Japan, Canada and Singapore having also ordered the aircraft.

F-35s have also been used by the U.S. during the Iran conflict, with one aircraft suffering damage from enemy fire, according to the Department of Defense.

Technologies

Oil prices dip as diplomatic hopes for Iran conflict rise

Oil prices fell on Friday after reports of U.S.-Iran talks in New York, though investors remain concerned about inflation and geopolitical tensions.

Oil prices dropped on Friday after a report emerged that U.S. and Iranian negotiators meeting in New York are exploring a step‑by‑step agreement to resolve the confrontation in the Persian Gulf.

November Brent crude futures slipped 1% to $93.66 a barrel, while U.S. West Texas Intermediate November futures fell 0.68% to $105.86 per barrel.

According to Reuters, a senior Iranian official said the most realistic way forward is for Tehran to permit shipping through the Strait of Hormuz if the United States ends its naval blockade.

The United States and Iran had previously agreed to this approach under a June 17 memorandum of understanding, but the arrangement soon broke down and fighting resumed. It remains unclear what distinguishes the present talks from earlier attempts.

Iran now seeks a return to the June 17 memorandum of understanding before the upcoming U.S. midterm elections, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian told media outlets on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, according to Al Jazeera.

“It is understood that the two sides have been communicating via mediators,” said David Morrison, a senior market analyst at Trade Nation. Morrison added that investors remain uneasy about persistent inflation, rising energy costs, and the bellicose rhetoric exchanged by the U.S. and Iran at the UN General Assembly in New York.