Earbuds that go inside your ear canal?
Gross. Cringe. No, thank you. I don't like those at all, but they seem to be
the most popular option. I am looking for earbuds that don't go inside my
body. I've always been a fan of earbuds that don't want to violate your your
bodily autonomy, you know? Like ones like the Sony LinkBuds Clip. This is the
latest entry in the form of earbuds that I'm more interested in, where they just
kind of sit outside your ear canal and kind of you know what? Like we're just
going to keep our distance. Personal space is important. I really liked the
original Sony LinkBuds [music] with that kind of circular design. The LinkBuds
Clip use a different design where they clip on to your outer ear. There's at
least one other model out there that does this, the Bose Ultra Open, and
there's probably more that I'm not aware of, but this is Sony's take on it. I got
to say Sony seems to have stuck with this sort of like gray recycled paper
packaging for their earbuds, which even
after a few years, which is nice to see them stick with that. I appreciate that.
I like the look, and maybe it's environmentally friendly, I don't know.
Oh, extra cushions. Normally with the
earbuds you'd have different size tips that come with it, but this one there
are no tips, which is what I [music] like. So, they're giving you little
cushions. Um I'm not sure whether you're supposed to wear them with or without
the cushions by default. We'll find out. All right, we got a
nice Look at that glossy finish on the top combined with a matte finish on the
bottom. That's kind of that's definitely a look. It looks like a little ottoman.
It looks like Well, I mean, maybe you wouldn't want to put your feet on the top there, but you'd you'd maybe I could
put my feet on that. As long as we're looking at the outside here, though, uh
we got a USB-C port on the back for charging. We got a We got a pair button
as well. Nice to see. You know, Apple comes out here with their new cases and
they're like, "Oh, and there's no buttons. Figure it out."
Inside we got the LinkBuds clip. Definitely the strangest looking
earbuds I've ever seen. You got your charging contacts there. You got a
little hole there, probably a mic of some sort. And then it also, you know,
Vietnam. And then on the other side you've got
the kind of audio output grill, speaker
grill, you know, the earbud grill. I don't know what to call it. What are
these? I don't even know what they are, but I like them. Oh,
there's also a little either a mic or
speakers on the inside. Can I bend this? So these
are bendy, which makes sense. You probably don't want them to be too
stiff, but I'm also worried like how far can I
bend it? Probably shouldn't test it too much. Someone's ear that someone doesn't
have an ear that big. I don't want to judge. You can't really see in there,
but I like inside there there's another
little grill. So I don't know whether audio comes out of that little hole
inside there. I feel like I'm getting ready for the ball.
That's got to be how it is. Right? >> It looks cool?
Wow. It feels like you can kind of position it in a bunch of different like
you can kind of put it lower or like
higher. I mean my glasses are there then it runs into my glasses in the back. I
mean, you probably just want it in kind of a more neutral position there. I've
seen some takes from people saying that they couldn't wear this for longer than
30 minutes. Like it's it's unbearable and it bothers their ears and I've seen
other people saying that it feels great and it feels fine and they're
other people complaining are just whining. So I'll let them sort that out.
>> [clears throat] >> But for me right now,
it feel it definitely feels weird. It definitely feels unusual,
but like not in a bad way.
If I was walking around like this like I feel like I'm in a I'm in an alternative
band or something. I'm like I feel like I need to now adjust more of my look to
be more goth because [music] of this. What do I Do I look like a normal
person? I'm getting nose.
>> [laughter] >> So the cushions, pretty simple as far as I can tell. You just kind of squish them
on there. And then they're on there.
I feel like if you wanted cushions anywhere, you would want some silicone
like on the part that's pinching your ear, not on this part, but I mean, you know,
we'll see. They're pretty
pretty intuitive just to kind of clip on like that. Probably more so than a
regular earbud, honestly. Oh, I take it back.
Okay. That kind of makes them feel like if
anything it's less of a cushion and more kind of like a grip. Like I feel like
it's it's keeping them in place more so than without. But they are earbuds. We
can't forget that they are earbuds, so we should probably listen to something
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think about it, this this case is actually a little thick, so maybe I do
want to do like a little pocket test. Is this Is this going to stick out of my
pocket here? Like I wouldn't want to put that in my front pocket, you know? But
that's just me. Like if you go like what What is You got a growth or something.
You got You You should get that looked at. That's kind of what's happening
there. I guess people who carry bags with them everywhere won't care. They
can just toss them in there, but uh for me, that might be an issue. Okay,
it's time to see how these things actually sound. Just by default, before
we get into any of the crazy features and stuff, I'm just going to play a song
off Apple Music and see see what we're dealing WITH HERE. WOO!
WOW, THAT'S LOUD. YOU CAN HEAR THAT. OKAY, how about this?
I'll turn it down and you tell me when you can't hear it anymore.
Right now? Now you can't hear anything? That's pretty good. We're just under
half volume. It's a little I would want to turn this up a little bit more than
this. Can you hear it now? Yeah.
Yeah. Now, we should note that the guys here are 8 to 10 ft away from me, but
we're in a pretty quiet room, so I feel like, you know, it's a pretty good representative
situation here. And as for sound quality,
>> [snorts] >> there's like a surprising amount of bass. Which is actually kind of funny. I
feel like there's a lot of bass going on
and a lot of highs
and not as much mids. Or at least, you know, at least the uh those seem overly
represented, the the lows and the highs. That said, I don't know what sound mode
I'm in and there are EQ options in the app that we'll look at in a second. Now,
before I listen to any other music, I want to just head into the app here
because uh some of these modes and features might affect the experience.
We've got three listening modes here: standard, voice boost, and sound leakage
reduction, which is the one that will stop your noise from leaking out into
the environment so that other people can hear it. So, it turns out we were in voice boost mode there, which probably
affected my perception of the lows and the highs there. So, let's go to
standard. Let's go back, see what that sounds like. Yeah, that seems a bit fuller.
That kind of flushed out the mids a little bit more. Voice boost will make
things like, you know, have things be crisper, and have voices be more audible
to you, but it will probably be more audible to people around you as well.
And this is just on standard mode, and already on standard mode the noise
leakage is already a bit better. Interesting.
Okay, sound leakage. Let's try that real quick. Let's see. I I want to be able to
go to max volume and have you guys not hear at all. Oh man, that's muffled.
That's much more muffled to me. You guys hear?
You can't hear anything? You can't hear it? Just a little bit.
No, pretty much. >> Just a little bit. WOW.
OKAY, SONY. Sound leakage reduction mode is indeed
sound leakage reduction mode. It works. In voice boost mode, they could hear it
all the way down to like here. In standard mode, it was more like around
here. And in this one, I forget exactly where, but it was like up here.
So, the sound leakage reduction mode does affect the sound quality. You heard
me say when I started playing it that it was immediately more muffled.
But like, if I go back to like the hard, you know, the
the active part [music] here. It's definitely quieter.
But this still feels like fairly loud volume. Like it's it's it's I wouldn't
want it this loud unless like I was in a very very loud environment. So, you, you
know, there's there's trade-offs with these things. You're going to get
slightly reduced sound quality, but not in a way that's like it's it's not like
it's not making it more tinny. It's it's kind of putting like a blanket on it.
But it's still kind of there. It's obviously up to you. It's a bit of a subjective thing, but for me as someone
who is is looking for these kind of open
earbuds, it's nice to see something that doesn't go into my ear
canal, but gives me a lot of options about how to tailor my my experience.
It's nice to see. And of course that comes from Sony. They care about us.
Right? So, let's go back to standard mode here,
head back into the app and see what we're dealing with. So, there is an equalizer mode because we're in
standard. We can go in here and switch between a bunch of presets here. Heavy,
clear, hard, soft, manual. The
The standard names for EQ settings. Okay, now in device settings I saw
something that was kind of interesting about the controls. These are earbuds
where you can customize
what the taps do. On the right side you've got sort of your default controls
for Sony earbuds anyways where double tap is a play and a pause, a triple tap
is a next song. And then I guess you also have the option to tap a bunch of
times to raise the volume. On the left side, if you tap a bunch of
times, it will lower the volume. And then you have a double tap and a triple
tap that you can assign to [music] change modes or to what? I don't know.
So, that setting that I couldn't change on the left here is you can set it to
one of these services. Amazon Music Play
Now. N-Del Quick Access. I don't know what
that is. And Spotify Tap. I don't think there's anything in the app here that
won't be familiar to people who have used Sony
earbuds before, but there's a number of ways you can kind of customize your
experience if you so choose. But I'm just thinking about the earbuds like
like these earbuds as hardware here. So, on that note, I'm just going to listen
to a couple tracks real quick that aren't Crab Rave because, you know,
sometimes that's nice to listen to. This sounds pretty good. Like I'm at a pretty
high volume here and I'm in standard mode without any EQ.
In any situation with open earbuds, if you're right next to somebody, they're
probably going to be able to hear a bit of what you're listening to. That's just
kind of the trade-off that you go with, you know. I'm okay with that. I'm not
usually listening to stuff that is like
inappropriate for children. Another one of the tradeoffs that you make with
going with open earbuds is the potential that you are losing some sound quality.
You know, obviously like an isolated environment where they can control
exactly what sound waves they're listening. There isn't like distortion
happening or or disruption. [music] That's the environment that you're going to want to choose if you just are
prioritizing sound quality. If you're going with open earbuds, you're kind of
acknowledging that like, okay, tip-top sound quality is not the most
important thing to me. I just don't like doohickeys inside my ear canals. Why do
they keep wanting to go in there? It's That's for me and my wife.
Uh >> [laughter] >> But I got to say, this is a very quiet
environment, but like it sounds really good. There's
definitely things with these earbuds, you know, that I would like to kind of
tweak with the EQ. I'd want to spend a little bit of time in the app tweaking
the EQ to my liking, but there's nothing that I'm experiencing right now that's
like, "Ooh, that Ooh, that's bad." But overall, it's fine. It's
It's fine. Generally, I'm someone who wouldn't want to do a lot of tweaking
with my with my headphones or earbuds. I would want to just kind of put them in
and have them sound good. And that's why I feel like I'm satisfied with this
because I put them in, they sound pretty decent, and I know that there's some
tradeoffs that you're going to make with open versus closed earbuds or headphones
or whatever. Now, that's all my subjective experience, but we had Labs
uh test these earbuds, and they came back with this frequency response graph.
Now, uh in case you haven't seen our graphs here, this gray band here is the
average listener preference. So, that's generally what the average listener is
going to want to hear, and the red band
here is what the LinkBuds returned in
terms of frequency response. So, as you can see, the lows drop off pretty
harshly uh around the 100 Hz mark, and
that's mostly to be expected with, you know, earbuds. We are partly within the
preferred range through the mids, but then as we get to the highs, we're
getting some weird kind of variations and spikes. So, [music]
it's a good thing the app has a decent EQ tool you can use to try to compensate
for those. [music] Labs left a note here that this frequency response is
relatively normal uh for what you'd see from a open-ear device. Now, one thing
to note here is that this is a Sony device, but they [music] do not support
Sony's LDAC codec that they developed.
So, anyone going for these open earbuds are probably there's a trade-off. You
know that you're not going to get like the absolute highest quality, so I guess
they thought, "Oh, we won't even put the LDAC in there." I don't have enough
background information to know why they chose not to put LDAC in there, but just
so you know, it doesn't have LDAC. If that's what you're looking for. Okay,
that's audio quality. What about mic quality though? And this is kind of
interesting because the LinkBuds Clip apparently use bone conduction for the
mic. Uh they don't use bone conduction to play audio like, you know, Shokz
headphones or something, but they do use it to record audio or at least to detect
that you're speaking. So, I'm going to give Bell a call here and he's going to
record and we'll see how it sounds for him. So, this is me speaking from the
mic from the LinkBuds. Uh obviously, this will depend on your particular
device and your speaker setup. Uh you know, maybe that'll sound good or bad to
you. I don't know what it sounds like. I can't hear through your ears. I'm
listening to the recording that I just recorded through these earbuds and it
sounds like I'm a bit far away in it.
It doesn't sound bad. So, audio quality, mic quality, not bad for an open set of
earbuds. In terms of battery life, Sony says that the earbuds themselves can
last for 9 hours and then you get 28 hours of battery life in the case for a
total of 37. That's obviously in optimal conditions. They got Bluetooth 5.3, IPX4
uh water resistance rating, which is which is pretty standard for
these kind of things. And it comes in four colors, lavender, beige, green, and
black for $230. Now, that's a little bit on the high
side for, you know, what some people would feel is like a compromise in terms
of sound quality. But for someone like me, who is really looking for open
earbuds, I don't know. There's not a ton of really great options. We mentioned
the Bose Ultra Opens. Uh there are the
Nothing Ear open ears, whatever they're called. Uh but those are a little bit of
a different design cuz they don't clip on. They are like sit on top of your
ear. So, there's not a ton of options out there. So, I don't know. 230, it's
up to you. Well, that's it for the LinkBuds Clip, guys. Thanks for
watching. If you're looking for another video to watch, let me tell you, I had a
lot of fun with the Richie mini robot. I think we're friends now. We're supposed
to hang out this weekend, but we'll we'll see. Uh subscribe to ShortCircuit.
Bye.