Tech
JBL Quantum 100P review
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It seems a perennial truth that no matter how many gaming headsets we have, a new year always brings new platform-specific renditions of familiar models and form factors. In that light, the JBL Quantum 100P tells you a lot with just its name—it’s a P-for-PlayStation themed model of one the most basic gaming headsets JBL sells in a now crowded Quantum line. Simple isn’t always a bad thing—in fact, it’s often preferable.
Let’s see if the Quantum 100P has what it takes to become a new budget classic.
Editor’s note: this is the first version of the article. Updates will follow as the market changes.
About this JBL Quantum 100P review: We tested the JBL Quantum 100P over a period of 5 days. The company provided the unit for this review.
The JBL Quantum 100P targets PlayStation gamers, but really it’s an attractive gaming headset for anyone who wants to save some money. The headset works equally well across any device with a headphone jack, whether that’s Sony’s console, Microsoft’s, a smartphone, or a computer.
What’s it like to use the JBL Quantum 100P?
It may be PlayStation colored, but this headset works everywhere.
The JBL Quantum 100P is about as basic as it gets. It’s an all-plastic over-ear gaming headset, sporting a PlayStation 5-esque white and blue look. There’s no extra buttons, LED lights, or frills of any kind. It’s just a pair of headphones with a boom mic attached.
While the plastic doesn’t feel terribly durable, the Quantum 100P is very comfortable to wear. It’s lightweight, no doubt owing in part to the lack of internal components, like a battery. The ear cups are wide, and deep enough to allow for big ears, which means getting a seal around your ears is easy. The headset’s hinges have a decent capacity to tilt and can rotate to lay flat, which means you shouldn’t have much trouble finding a comfortable fit, regardless of your head shape.
This is a very lightweight headset, so it’s great for long sessions.
Actually using this gaming headset is extremely simple. There’s no software or device drivers to install. The Quantum 100P comes with a detachable 3.5mm boom microphone, and features a volume dial and mic mute switch on the bottom edge of the left headphone. That’s pretty much all there is to it.
How do you connect the JBL Quantum 100P?
If it’s got a headphone jack, you can play.
This is a wired gaming headset, and the only way to connect it is by plugging it into a 3.5mm TRS headphone jack. There’s no USB dongles or Bluetooth functionality to speak of. That means the JBL Quantum 100P works on PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, PC, mobile devices, and more. Simple as can be.
No. The JBL Quantum 100P and JBL Quantum 100X are functionally identically headsets. They both connect via 3.5mm jack. The only difference is the color.
How well does the JBL Quantum 100P attenuate noise?
Fairly standard for a closed back headset.
The JBL Quantum 100P features good passive isolation performance, but nothing too remarkable. Attenuation like this will be more than adequate for handling most of the environmental sounds you might hear while gaming at home—roommates talking, someone washing dishes in the kitchen, a car horn out the window—but not much past that. There’s no active noise cancelling, so low-end attenuation is pretty much nil.
How does the JBL Quantum 100P sound?
Definitely a quirky looking frequency response.
The JBL Quantum 100P has an odd looking frequency response for a headphone, but one that’s typical of many gaming headsets. Particularly odd is the big bump in the 70-400Hz bass range. Sound like this could be pretty disruptive depending on the kind of music that you listen to—anything that relies primarily on the low and mid range sound could come through sounding disproportionately loud. Needless to say, it lands pretty wide of our in-house target curve for headphones.
Listening to a rock song like Dracula’s Daughter by Beach Day, the reverb on the distorted rhythm guitar steamrolls the rest of the track. The bass guitar comes through pretty clearly, but drums and vocals sound notably less present. The guitar is supposed to be very prominent, but on this headset it seems to dominate the rest of the instrumentation in a bad way.
This kind of sound profile works fine for playing most games, though. The over-tuned bass makes the rumbles and big reverberant aspects of environmental sounds feel a little too present in a single player game like Star Wars Jedi: Survivor on PlayStation 5, but multiplayer games don’t have the same issues most of time. When there’s no backing track or atmosphere environmental sounds, it’s a lot less distracting, so the silence punctuated by gunfire and explosions in games like Apex Legends and Valorant doesn’t sound terribly out of whack.
How good is the JBL Quantum’s microphone?
The bass measures higher than you normally see with headset microphones, and it sounds quite muffled.
The JBL Quantum 100P sounds loud, and it suffers a little from a tendency to blow out the bass in lower voices. You can mitigate this a little by positioning the mic a bit farther from your mouth—it’s on a flexible wire, so finding the right spot is easy. Voice and video calling apps like Google Meet or Discord will also do a lot to pick up the slack, so others may not even notice an issue in the first place.
JBL Quantum 100P microphone demo (Ideal conditions):
JBL Quantum 100P microphone demo (Office conditions):
JBL Quantum 100P microphone demo (Reverberant conditions):
Should you buy the JBL Quantum 100P?
If you don’t like the color, you can always get the Xbox version.
If you’re on the hunt for a budget gaming headset you don’t have to think too hard about, the JBL Quantum 100P is definitely worth considering. It’s not a spectacular piece of hardware—the sound is pretty wonky, after all—but it’s also under $40 USD. What you get for that money is a lightweight, easy to use, no-nonsense device. The microphone is okay, the design is comfortable, and it works everywhere. That’s a pretty compelling proposition.
We haven’t tested the Quantum 100X, but by every indication it is basically an identical gaming headset to the JBL Quantum 100P. Basically, if you want a gaming headset that’s white with blue accents, get the 100P. If you want something that’s black with green accents, the 100X could be for you.
What should you get instead of the JBL Quantum 100P?
If it’s got a 3.5mm headphone jack, it works with the Quantum 50.
If you’re on the hunt for bargain gaming audio products, there are tons of great options to choose from. JBL’s own Quantum 50 is a common recommendation we often make for anyone open for a pair of earbuds instead of over-ear headphones. It’s doubly worth bringing up here, given how much better it sounds than the Quantum 100P. It’s cheaper too ($24.99 at Amazon).
However, for more substantial offerings, you may need to spend a little more. For $50.41 at Amazon, the SteelSeries Arctis Nova 1 brings comfortable suspension style headband, and ear pads covered in soft mesh fabric—perfect for long gaming sessions. The headset also sounds a little more reasonable.
Frequently asked questions about the JBL Quantum 100P
It may be tuned slightly differently, but otherwise there doesn’t seem to be much difference—at least, not apart from the respective products’ ages. You can at least Quantum 100 in other color options.
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Less than a month after its release on the App Store, OpenAI’s ChatGPT app is getting its first big update. The new version, out today, brings native iPad support to the AI chatbot app, as well as support for using ChatGPT with Siri and Shortcuts. Drag and drop is also now available, allowing users to drag individual messages from ChatGPT into other apps.
The latter could be useful in iPad’s split-screen mode, for instance, as you could ask ChatGPT for answers in one window and then drag its replies to another.
On iPad, ChatGPT now runs in full-screen mode, optimized for the tablet’s interface. This change, along with drag-and-drop, will likely make it preferable to using the web browser version of the chatbot, which is what many iPad users were still doing ahead of today’s release. The update could also drive incremental new downloads of the ChatGPT app, which had popped to the top of the App Store right out of the gate with half a million installs in less than a week from its debut.
It has since rolled out to other markets outside the U.S., including Albania, Croatia, France, Germany, Ireland, Jamaica, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Nigeria, South Korea and the U.K., and promised an Android version would arrive soon.
Another new feature of interest with today’s release is ChatGPT’s support for Siri and Shortcuts. While that doesn’t mean you can fully swap out Siri for the OpenAI chatbot as your iOS device’s voice interface, it does mean you can create custom ChatGPT Shortcuts that work with Siri. For instance, you could turn your favorite prompts into Shortcuts and then have those perform an additional step after the query is completed, like saving the response to a different app. You can also now ask Siri to open ChatGPT using voice commands.
Like its iPhone counterpart, iPad users can also opt to upgrade to ChatGPT’s paid subscription, ChatGPT Plus, which starts at $20 per month, providing elevated access to ChatGPT even during peak times, faster response times and priority access to new features and improvements.
The ChatGPT mobile app has proven to have staying power in the App Store in the weeks since its launch. In the U.S., the app is still the No. 4 app on the App Store’s Top Free charts, for example, and has a 4.8-star rating across 421,000 ratings and reviews — a figure that’s hard to achieve for any app. Estimates from third-party app intelligence provider data.ai indicate the app has now seen 7.3 million worldwide installs on iOS, and hasn’t left the top five in the U.S. since its debut. The app is also now No. 1 overall in 31 countries worldwide.
Apple this week updated its App Store rules with a seeming eye on ChatGPT clones, noting that submitting apps that impersonate others is a violation of the Developer Code of Conduct and may result in removal from the Apple Developer Program. The App Store had been overrun with ChatGPT pretenders ahead of the arrival of the official version.
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Meta is Apple’s chief competitor in the VR market, and it launched its premier offering, the Quest 3 just a few days before Apple dropped the Vision Pro.
So it’s interesting to hear what Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg thinks of Apple’s inaugural VR headset.
During a meeting with Meta employees, Zuckerberg addressed Vision Pro in detail. He said that Apple didn’t find “magical solutions” to the constraints of physics that Meta’s teams haven’t already explored.
He notes Apple’s use of higher-resolution displays but adds that it requires more energy to power, a battery and a wire attached to use it, and the fact that it costs seven times more than the Quest 3.
Perhaps most importantly, Zuckerberg talks about the “difference in the values and the vision” between Meta and Apple when it comes to their headsets. He adds that Meta’s vision is “fundamentally social” and that “it’s about people interacting in new ways and feeling closer in new ways”. He continues that Apple’s approach, by contrast, showed “a person sitting on a couch by themself”. He finished off by saying that Apple’s Vision Pro could be “the vision of the future of computing”, “but like, it’s not the one I want”.
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Even for fans of Final Fantasy, the news that Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth would ship on two discs was eye-catching. Like, dang, are we actually still doing this?
Well, yes, even if the PlayStation 5 now uses 100 GB Blu-ray discs, compared to the PlayStation 4’s 50 GB discs. It likely means one is a data installation disc and the second is the play disc, meaning it’s the one that is always in the drive when the game is being played. That’s how plus-sized games on the PS4 rolled.
We assume it’s the same because this will seemingly be the first PS5 game on two discs. (It doesn’t appear that Xbox Series X has had any multi-disc games, if you were wondering.) They used to be quite common, but with media capacity ever increasing — and most players shifting to online purchases and downloads of games — they’re now rare enough to remark on.
In fact, Square Enix seemed almost proud that the multi-disc tradition would carry on with Rebirth (calling that out in the final title card). Final Fantasy 7 Remake was two discs when it launched on PlayStation 4 in 2020, and of course the original Final Fantasy 7 was a three-discer back in 1997.
Image: Square Enix
This doesn’t necessarily portend a completely ridiculous download size for those no longer interested in collecting game cases. Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade was 81 GB when that launched in 2021. That’s about half of Cyberpunk 2077, and it’s regularly dwarfed by annual sports titles (to say nothing of Call of Duty’s indulgent sizes). But it does mean that PlayStation 5 fans with unexpanded storage will have to budget their space wisely once Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth arrives in early 2024.
We reached out to Square Enix representatives to see if we could get more of a sense of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth’s size, and why two discs are still the norm.
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