8 best headphones under $100: The best budget options we’ve tested

These headphones are massive — reminiscent of a gaming headset (think wide and deep ear cups, a thick band, and an undeniable heaviness). That being said, they certainly aren’t meant for working out (especially not running), unless you don’t mind wearing something clunky and heavy on your head while boosting those endorphins. If you’re planning on wearing them around the house, on a long plane ride, or during your daily gaming ritual, you’ll fall in love with these budget headphones. After all, nothing about them screams “budget” and they’re super new on the market.

Despite their cumbersome frame, these headphones take “accommodation” to the next level with a floating axis design, rotating ear cups, and a cozy plush headband.

The Space One outclass their rivals in two key areas. The first is (and don’t laugh) the fact that they come with a cute, color-coordinated carrying bag. The second is that five quick minutes of charging boosts the power of these headphones not by one hour, not by two hours, but by four whole hours. They also have three mics with an AI algorithm that pinpoints your voice and amplifies it on calls. In case you don’t want to hear the voices of others, they are specially designed to reduce crowd noise by up to 98 percent.

In terms of how this crowd noise reduction feature fared in real-time, I would say that the passive noise cancellation aspect of the headphones was more responsible for making it feel like you’re in your own musical bubble than the ANC. We still recommend trying the adaptive noise cancellation feature since it adequately adjusts noise reduction to your surroundings. You’ll get to enjoy the full-bodied sound that blasts from Anker’s 40mm dynamic drivers with minimal interference.

The (completely free) Soundcore app is chock-full of add-on features that you can enable at your convenience. One of these is currently in beta testing — it’s called Easy Chat and lowers your music volume when it detects speech. While this is theoretically good for calls (no more scrambling to turn off your rap/hip-hop song queue when grandma calls to check in), I once started to sing along to a song, which sadly turned off, thanks to this feature being enabled. Bear that in mind when toying with all of Soundcore’s fancy audio tools.