Noise Cancelling Wireless In-Ears – Edifier NB2 Pro Review
In-ear headphones already do a pretty good job at blocking out the world around you, so it seems a little nonsensical to have full active noise cancellation tech built into a set of TWS buds like these. I’ll admit I was a tad skeptical, but having tested them for a while I’m actually pretty impressed. These are the Edifier NB2 Pros, and this is my review of them!
Let me give you a rundown of the key features. These are TWS or truly wireless earbuds, with an interesting leather textured plastic charging case. The buds themselves have a pretty unique design, with the silicone earpiece protruding from a little bulb, then you have a rectangular arm jutting off of that. The external face is a light silver, although you can get the blub and earpiece in either black like this or more of a light cream, and the case matches those options.
Each headphone has a 10mm diaphragm, and dual microphones to run it’s active noise cancellation. They also have tiny infrared sensors on the blub section that detect, with considerable delay, if you’ve got them in your ear or you’ve removed them. You can change what they do if they detect you’ve taken them out or put them in – by default it’ll pause when you remove even one and play when you insert one but you can switch that off or have it only pause when you take them out but not play when you put them in.
The buds are also IP54 rated, which means they are “splashproof”, so a run in the rain or a sweat filled workout at the gym won’t damage them at all. They aren’t rated for submersion or direct spray, but a bit of rain and sweat is fine. If you did want to wear them while working out, I can’t say their fit in the ear is the most secure. It’s fine for commuting, but actively running I’d expect them to slip out.
Battery life is listed as up to 32 hours total, although that includes either 7 hours with ANC on, or 9 hours with ANC off, from the earbuds’ built in battery, and a further 18 hours with ANC on or 23 hours with ANC off from the charging case. It takes 15 minutes of the buds charging in the case to get 2 hours of listening time or about an hour to go from fully dead to 100%. The case uses a USB C port on the back to charge, has a little status LED next to it too, and takes around 2 hours to charge fully. In terms of size, you get a 60mAh battery in each earbud, and a 500mAh battery in the case.
Each earbuds’ outer face is a touch surface, where a fast double tap on the left bud will cycle through the noise reduction and ambient sound modes, a triple tap cycles through the sound effect modes, a double tap on the right bud is play/pause and a triple tap skips to the next track. Interestingly there aren’t any controls for volume, something that’s sorely missed, nor to go to the previous track or activate your Google Assistant or Siri. The controls are also fixed to each bud no matter if you’ve only got one out, so if you’re only listening with the left bud you have no way of pausing or skipping tracks, and if you’ve only got the right you can’t switch modes or enable ambient sound.
As for the sound modes, on the noise reduction side your options are ANC off, ANC on, or ambient sound on, where it pipes the outside sound in via the microphones. Unfortunately their implementation of that leaves a lot to be desired as when it’s enabled it adds a shrill, harsh tone to everything and picks up noise significantly, so much so that with it enabled I hear the quiet fan noise from my system more than I do anything else.
The listening modes are normal, spatial sound and game mode, where spatial is effectively digital surround sound which “applied panoramic 3D technology” to your audio. In reality, while it did have an interesting effect making the track feel a little more around me than being played from a speaker in my ear, it also added a single tone whine to the background that ruined any benefits the mode might offer. As for game mode, that’s supposedly a low latency mode, offering “80ms” latency which as I understand isn’t too bad for bluetooth headphones. I know some, with the right codecs and apps, can be what I’d traditionally consider normal at more like 10-30ms, but it’s a mode available if you want it.
Lastly on the features side of things, something I did like a fair bit is the full independence of each bud. They connect as a single device rather than left/right, are connected when you open the case lid, and operate with both or with either in the case. You can be listening with both, then put one in the case and beyond the in-ear detection pausing the audio it’ll generally start playing again once it’s back in the case.
So that’s the features, what about the experience of using them? Well, audio quality is what I’d call fair. It’s plenty fine but it’s not the best I’ve ever heard. You get a reasonable range, although the bass is more pronounced. The higher pitches often come across as harsh and sharp especially at higher volumes which can make for an uncomfortable listening experience. I’d say they offer the same sort of quality you’d get from the majority of TWS buds, perhaps pushing towards the higher quality end. I generally enjoyed my time listening to them especially while doing other activities like working out or programming at my desk.
Comfort and fitment wise, they felt fine to me. Not obtrusive and relatively secure. Like I mentioned I wouldn’t want to go running in them, but for a daily commute on public transport they’d be fine at least for me. And, speaking of public transport, the active noise cancellation works remarkably well. It’s able to filter not only consistent noises like the low hum from my PC, or the drone from an airplane’s engines, but even variable sounds like talking or short sounds like me tapping away at my keyboard. Yes, without it on you do get a significant reduction in outside noise thanks to the headphones filling your ear canal, but when you turn it on there’s an extra level of quietness and isolation I’ve not really had from in ears before.
The one thing that makes the experience of using these a pain is their app and the bugs. The play/pause feature when you remove the buds takes almost exactly 2.5 seconds to activate either way, so you’ll often start reaching for your phone to start playing again when it’ll finally kick in. Sometimes when you put one bud back in the case to charge, you have to remove the one you have still in your ear and reinsert it to trigger playback again. I even had it where when I put one back in, despite my phone saying it the headphones were still connected it would only play audio through the phone’s speakers and required me to disconnect and reconnect the headphones to play through them again.
Then there is the app, on Android at least, once you install and run it once, it’s permanently open in your notifications tray. It doesn’t turn off when you disconnect the headphones or even turn off bluetooth, it just sits in your notifications saying “device disconnected”. Inside the app, you can control a few extra settings like what to do when the buds are removed or inserted, or tap sensitivity, and you can see each bud’s battery level. It mostly works ok, although when you go to the settings you’ll see the iOS 5 style selection options, and silly stuff like the game mode setting isn’t a capital G like Standard and Spatial Audio next to it, and the words “Headphones” and “Discovery” are clipped on the bottom bar. Details like that take this from being a professionally made and designed product to something that looks cobbled together and DIY.
