You don’t have to spend £100s on headphones this Black Friday – our favourite budget pair are down to £46 and they’re surprisingly good

I get it. You’re like me. You hate spending money you don’t have to, but you’re always hankering after something new and fresh. Well here’s a way to scratch that itch without breaking the bank: Anker’s eminently affordable Soundcore Life Q30 headphones.

These headphones are normally around £72 and they’ve been discounted to a tempting £46 in the Black Friday sales; frankly, that’s a stupid amount of money for a pair of headphones this capable. I remember a time, not all that long ago, when all £50 would buy you was a pair of wired on-ear headphones with no ANC and pretty woeful audio quality.

That’s a long way from what’s on offer here. Ignore the silly name for a moment and focus on the features list. For what is the cost of a meal out at a cheap restaurant, the Anker Soundcore Life Q30 provide active noise cancelling as well as decent sound quality – and if you don’t like the default sound profile, which we found a little heavy on the bass, you should be able to tweak exactly to your liking via the extensive EQ options in the accompanying Anker app.

Expert Reviews’ resident headphones expert, Andy White, didn’t care for the styling much, especially the words “Active Noise Cancelling” emblazoned on the headband, and he said that “wear detection would be a welcome addition” – it’s always nice to have the music pause automatically when you take your headphones off – having to remember to do that manually is a bit of a faff.

However, he was impressed with the headphones’ “class-leading” battery life, which extends to a whopping 60 hours with ANC off and 40 hours with it enabled. And with three levels of noise cancellation, he found the Soundcore Life Q30 were able to compete with headphones much more expensive in this particular area.

If I’m going to be completely honest with you, the Soundcore Life Q30 is one of those products that is discounted pretty regularly, especially during sales periods such as Black Friday, but does that mean you shouldn’t buy them? Of course not. If you have £50 to spare and you fancy – or need – a new pair of noise-cancelling headphones, you can’t do much better than this.

If that’s whetted your appetite for more savings, check out our main deals page here, and if these Anker headphones are just too cheap for you, but you want to keep up with the latest deals on more premium models, we’re keeping a Black Friday headphones deals live blog updated with the best offers as well.

Written by

Jonathan Bray

Head of reviews at Expert Reviews, Jon has been testing and writing about products since before most of you were born (well, only if you were born after 1996). In that time he’s tested and reviewed hundreds of laptops, PCs, smartphones, vacuum cleaners, coffee machines, doorbells, cameras and more. He’s worked on websites since the early days of tech, writing game reviews for AOL and hardware reviews for PC Pro, Computer Buyer and other print publications. He’s also had work published in Trusted Reviews, Computing Which? and The Observer. And yet, even after so many years in the industry, there’s still nothing more he loves than getting to grips with a new product and putting it through its paces.

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