Open Active Noise Cancelling In Ears?? Soundbud OpenANC Review

When I was offered a pair of these SoundBud OpenANC headphones, I must admit I was intrigued. I do like good open-ear headphones, especially for working out, so having even a little active noise cancellation included would be really cool! I say this up front so you know that I got these with all the best intentions – with the intention of really liking them in fact. Perhaps that expectation is why I feel so utterly disgusted by these things. These are the worst sounding headphones I think I’ve ever used – and that isn’t hyperbole, I mean ever. Even the cheap wired tat from 2008 I bought in HMV for a tenner. THOSE sounded better than these things. Let me explain some more. 

On the face of it, these seem pretty legit. The box looks nice enough, although my first hint that something was up here was the five KSPs on top: “Pro-level ANC & ENC”; “IPX7 Waterproof”; “Comfy Arc Titanium+Silicone”; “Aerospace Sound”; and “Ultra Battery Life”. What does “Aerospace sound” mean? What is an “Ultra Battery Life”? Something isn’t right here already. In the box you get this short and funky USB C to C cable and the headphones. You do get an instruction leaflet which details the distinct lack of controls this offers – basically only ANC on/off and Play/Pause, no next or back, or volume options, and no app to let you tweak settings later. The case is on the bigger side – and heavier too – although due to the bigger size of the headphones themselves, that isn’t too surprising. As you might expect, the case has a USB C port on the back for charging, and status LEDs on the front. Opening the case, you’ll find both headphones magnetically held in place, with the tiniest LEDs onboard to show you they are on – except from the factory they aren’t. They have little stickers over their charging contacts you need to remove and pop them back into the case to wake them up, then they’re good to go. Pairing seems to need them out of the case – not just case open – and that’s important because one of the single most annoying things about using these is that the headphones just randomly wake up, connect to your phone, and start playing audio IN THE CASE. Like you’ll be listening to music from your phone, these things wake up (in the case, not being opened or even moved), then your phone’s audio cuts and you have to manually disconnect them or turn Bluetooth off. What a pain. Imagine you’re on a call and these just decide it’s time to connect and now you have to work that out, on the fly, disconnect Bluetooth, and carry on. What a pain. 

Actually putting them on is super easy. These just sit over your ear and are genuinely comfortable, despite their relative heft. They stay in place well enough, and for both myself and my wife, these fit well. But then you start playing music and OH BOY IT’S BAD. Genuinely, I think the £10 wired Skullcandy’s I’d buy almost every week in year 7 because they’d break almost instantly were better sounding than this. This is ‘needs more JPEG’ in music form. They are so disgustingly compressed, tinny and just… horrible. There is no bass whatsoever, nor is there treble, and the mids that are left are muddy yet harsh. It’s really quite impressive just how bad these sound to me. Just so you have some idea, I’m going to try and edit this part of the video to have the same sort of audio quality that these things have. I doubt I’ll even be able to match it exactly, but hopefully future editing me gave it our best shot. It’s awful.

And that isn’t even the main selling point these things are meant to offer! The ANC is! Sometimes ANC can affect the listening experience, BUT ALL OF THOSE THOUGHTS ARE FROM ANC OFF! What’s worse is that toggling ANC on and off while listening to music seems to do absolutely nothing! I hear the little beep to tell me it’s on or off, but there is no perceptible difference! If you turn the music off and just sit in silence with your open headphones on you can hear a bit of a difference, although due to these being open headphones, all you really get is an amplified high pitched white noise pumped into your ears, which is mighty uncomfortable. There’s also the inherent limitation that open headphones have for not naturally blocking sound – standard in-ears have a physical seal on your ear canal which does a lot of heavy lifting for outside sound reduction. These open ears have to deal with a lot more, and it seems the actual speakers in them can’t do even part of this spec well. Oh, and the other thing with open ear headphones is not just outside sound rejection, but sound emission. I could hear what my wife was listening to from across the room, so don’t think most people on the plane, bus or train next to you can’t hear everything you listen to with these things. 

One rather confusing thing is that these headphones don’t actually exist yet. Searching the name “Soundbud Open ANC A535” returns literally ZERO results, although with some careful searching you can find three pages. Soundbud.ai, which does list these “Open ANC” headphones, but the images are all wrong, and seems to be more of a hearing aid instead. If you go to soundbudai.com you’ll find the actual product page, but one that’s clearly unfinished. And finally you might find their kickstarter campaign page which just lists itself as “coming soon”. I asked the PR rep that sent me these, and they said, “The launch date is still being finalized”. They did tell me the prices though. The kickstarter price will be $89, down from its $129 MSRP. Having actually used these, you’d have to pay me that much to even take them, and you’d have to pay me a lot more to actually use them. The phrase, “there’s no such thing as a bad product, only a bad price” may be true, but the ‘good price’ for these is -$1000. To be optimistic, I sincerely hope they take this as the constructive feedback (and edu-tainment) it is, and take the time to genuinely improve these things before selling them. I don’t think they will, but I really hope they do.