Best Headsets for Working From Home in 2024

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David Carnoy Executive Editor / Reviews

Executive Editor David Carnoy has been a leading member of CNET’s Reviews team since 2000. He covers the gamut of gadgets and is a notable reviewer of mobile accessories and portable audio products, including headphones and speakers. He’s also an e-reader and e-publishing expert as well as the author of the novels Knife Music, The Big Exit and Lucidity. All the titles are available as Kindle, iBooks, Kobo e-books and audiobooks.

Budget

Before anything else, you’ll want to figure out how much you’re willing to spend on new wireless headset. The quality of value-priced headsets continues to improve, so you can find good affordable headsets and headphones for less than $100. But the premium models, which offer better build quality and performance, tend to cost $200 or more — sometimes much more. 

Boom microphone or not?

When a headphone has boom microphone, that’s when it technically becomes what we describe as a “headset.” While many consumer headphones work well for making calls, having an extended microphone that sits closer to your mouth can improve how well your voice gets picked, making it sound clearer. When retracted, some boom microphones will mute the headset so people can’t hear you. And some boom mics now feature mute buttons on them. This is an important feature for video calls where you want to easily mute and unmute yourself. The downside to having the boom microphone is that it makes you look like you’re wearing a headset instead of headphones. That’s a bit of factor if you plan on wearing whatever you buy outside your home or office.

Fit, aka comfort

It’s key that the headset or headphones you buy fit your head well. They should offer a comfortable fit that’s snug yet not too snug. Ideally, you want a headset of headphones you can wear over the course of a day with minimal breaks.

Durability

You want headset that hold up well over time, so look for models that we note have sturdy build quality.

Return policy

It’s critical to buy your headphones at a retailer that has a good return policy, in case you have buyer’s remorse. Some people who are having trouble deciding between two models sometimes buy both, try them out for a few days, and then return one.

We test headphones and earbuds based on six key criteria. These criteria include design, sound quality, noise-canceling performance, voice-calling performance, features and value. 

• Design: Evaluating design, we assess not only how comfortable the headphones and earbuds fit (their ergonomics) but their build quality and how well the controls are implemented. When it comes to earbuds, we also look at water- and dust-resistance ratings. 
• Sound quality: We evaluate sound quality by listening to a set playlist of music tracks and comparing the earbuds to top competing products in their price range. Sonic traits such as bass definition, clarity, dynamic range and how natural the headphones sound are key factors in our assessment.
• Noise-canceling performance: We evaluate noise-canceling performance by wearing the headphones in the same spot indoors near a noisy HVAC unit to see how well they do at muffling lower frequencies. Then we head out to the streets of New York to test the headphones in a real-world environment where we see how they do at muffling not only street noise but people’s voices. 
• Extra features: Some great-sounding headphones and earbuds aren’t loaded with features, but we do take into account what extra features are on board. These include everything from quick-access awareness to transparency modes (your music pauses and the headphones open up to the outside world so you can have a conversation) to special sound modes to ear-detection sensors that automatically pause your music when you take the headphones off your ears. For home office headphones, Bluetooth multipoint pairing is an important feature (and other connectivity options such as an included Bluetooth dongle for easy pairing with a computer). We also take a look at the companion app for the headphones if there is one and how user friendly it is. 
• Voice-calling: When we test voice-calling performance, we make calls in the noisy streets of New York and evaluate how well the headphones or earbuds reduce background noise and how clearly callers can hear our voice. We also evaluate how they perform on video-conferencing applications such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams.
• Value: We determine value after evaluating the strength of the headphones and earbuds against all these criteria and what they’re able to deliver compared to other models in their price class. 

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Plantronics Voyager Focus UC: After Plantronics became Poly, it released a new version of this oldie-but-goodie headset called the Voyager Focus 2 (see above). This model remains on sale. However, we are steering people toward the newer model.