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Right, here's the scenario; You're on yet another plane for yet another business trip. But you're an experienced traveller. You knew not to eat too much in the lounge because they'd be serving a meal half-an-hour after take-off. You've calculated the exact amount of alcohol required to help you get to sleep without making you feel yuck. And you have your fancy pair of noise-cancelling headphones so you can genuinely enjoy the in-flight entertainment and even more importantly, tune out the plane noise, the screaming babies and... well... everything else.

One problem. Now you need to go to the loo. Which means taking your fancy headphones off again, getting all tangled up with the cable and the tray-table and the person sitting next you and it's all a bit of a disaster really.

Help, JBL! Help!

On the face of it, the JBL Tour One M3 Smart Tx wireless, over-ear, noise-cancelling headphones are just the kind of cans that hypothetical business traveller might have chosen.

They're very light, extremely compact and they fold up even smaller to fit in an extremely well-designed case I'll get into in detail shortly. 

The Tour One M3 headset is comfy - really comfy - not just because it's so light but also because the ear cushions and the padding on the headband are extra squidgy. (NB: squidgy is a technical term only fine headphone connoisseurs like me know how to use properly)

That means you'll have no problem wearing them for extended periods - like on long-haul flights, for example. You'll also need outstanding battery life for those marathon listening sessions and you'll be hard-pressed to outlast the Tour One M3. 

JBL claims about 40 hours playback on a full charge - and that's with Active Noise Cancelling on. Flick it off and you can listen for up to 70 hours. Which seems unbelievable. And yet, here I am still listening after only one charge when I first took them out of the box.

In terms of sound performance, I've been more and more impressed by JBL's headphones over the last few years. I used to think of them as being sort of a big-bass-boom one-trick-pony - and make no mistake, the Tour One M3 is certainly capable of respectable bass punch - but these latest 40mm mica dome drivers offer so much more, right across the frequency spectrum.

This means a conventional dance track like Dua Lipa's "Hallucinate" keeps pumping along nicely - every bass drop expected yet still impressive. Meanwhile, Lorde and her production team are up to all kinds of sonic trickery on "Shapeshifter," a song that just keeps growing and growing, adding more and more layers and you hear each one throughout.

Of course, there's a lot of other technical wizardry going here - from the built-in Digital-to-Analogue Converter that combines with the LDAC wireless codec so you can enjoy "lossless" high-res recordings the way they were intended - to adaptive noise cancelling, using a grand total of 8 microphones to block out virtually everything except the thing you really want to hear.

As with other recent JBL headphones and earbuds, you can now use the JBL Headphones app to take the Personi-Fi 3.0 hearing test. You can then apply the results of this test to create your own personalised EQ - boosting the frequencies you struggle to hear.

But none of this is as groundbreaking as JBL's latest and greatest gadget; the Smart Tx audio transmitter itself.

Any avid JBL earbuds fan can tell you about the smart charging cases JBL has brought to the market, complete with their own touch screens so you can adjust settings or just check your battery life without having to open an app.

JBL went a step further with this year's Tour Pro 3 earbuds, turning that smart charging case into a wireless transmitter, which meant you could now use your True Wireless earbuds to listen to analogue sources like desktop PCs and yes, aeroplane entertainment systems.

Now, in a further stroke of genius, JBL has imbued the Smart Tx audio transmitter with all the abilities of those smart cases and more... and included it with the Tour One M3 headset.

You could already use the Tour One M3 as a wired device, either via the USB-C to USB-C or Mini-Jack to USB cables included in the box. The difference is - and this is the breakthrough - you can now plug those cables into the Smart Tx transmitter instead and continue to use the headset wirelessly.

This instantly solves that tray-table-tangle I described earlier - you'll be amazed at how freeing, how much less claustrophobic it is using your wireless headphones to watch your movie on a plane. Or rather, movies plural - the little Smart Tx box has a battery life of about 18 hours, which would be a very long-haul flight indeed. Not that it matters much; the transmitter has two USB-C ports so you can charge it while you use it anyway.

JBL has even thoughtfully thrown in a USB-A to USB-C adapter, so you should be sorted for any connection option, wherever you are.

All these bits and pieces nestle snugly into the the Tour One M3 hard-shell case. It's a high-end case, by the way - even the zip is protected by a rubber sleeve which looks like it'd keep any dust, debris and possibly liquids away from your new favourite headphones. Even the case has its own little piece of JBL genius - a hybrid carry strap and carabiner, allowing you to attach it to any strap, loop or tether.

This is yet another example of the cunning way JBL applies advances made in one product line to another - we've seen loop/carabiner options on JBL's 2025 portable speakers so why wouldn't they pop up here as well?

And the same philosophy applies to Auracast - the wireless connectivity option that lets you create a multi-speaker sound system at the push of a button. The Smart Tx box can work as both Auracast transmitter and receiver - so you can share what you're listening to with anyone else with an Auracast device - just as they can with you.

All a bit overwhelming, isn't it?

I'm trying to think of a feature the JBL Tour One M3 Smart Tx DOESN'T have... and I simply can't. Best of all, it's not just a clever box of tricks - it sounds fantastic, has phenomenal battery life and is light enough and "squidgy" enough to get you through the longest of flights - or bus or train ride.

AND it comes in Mocha. What more could you ask for?