People are always asking what's the new tech, but never how's the new tech made?
And if you look into it, a lot of the parts of the supply chain are um
ethically dubious. Whether that's due to wasteful manufacturing processes or just
unfair working conditions, it can be hard to be excited about new tech when
you know about the downsides. But that's Fairphone's whole mission. They're
trying to make tech a little bit more equitable. And these are their new
Fairbuds XL. A couple years ago, we took a look at the first generation of these.
also just called Fairbuds XL, which is a weird name, but I guess if you can call
them AirPods Max, then you can call these Fairbuds XL. The front of the box
says Fairphone. The side of the box says Fairbuds XL, but they are just
earphones. I guess Fairphones is too close to Fairphone Phone, so this is the
best they could do. I liked what they had last time, especially due to the repairability aspects, and they are
keeping that going with this generation. In fact, if you saw the other one, they
are pretty much identical in shape. That means that no matter what generation of
Fairbuds you have, you can use spare parts from the new one or the old one.
They all work together. Before we get any further, let's take a look in the
box. You get a nice little egg sack, as Dankpods likes to call them, as well as
a quick start guide. And the packaging is fully recyclable. I love to see it.
The darker green color, I think, is a lot nicer than last gen. And while last
gen did have that kind of cool speckled appearance that you get from a lot of
recycled plastic, this has gone for a more classy pine green. There are still
some changes from last gen though. And for the ear cups and headset, they've gone from a polyurethane leather to a
new meshlike material that they're calling uh bird's eye mesh. I haven't
looked too many birds right in the eye, but I don't really understand the um
correlation there. But I do think they just look a lot more premium. And I
think the texture on the top here looks really quite cool. For the material
change, this isn't my usual first pick, but I'll give you more impressions when
I try them on. Let's keep looking around the headphone. The headband still feels
relatively durable, and we still have folding ear cups, which is cool. And I
also like to point out that these are like USBC cables that are connecting
here. For earphone adjustment, you don't have a ton of wiggle room. There's a
little bit of tilt [music] up and down. Not really much by the way of swivel.
And for the adjuster, it is a smooth adjustment. And oh, that's um not a
great look. Uh [music] just from me trying to adjust it, I kind of pulled
the headband off a little bit. And it happens on both sides. It's not exactly
flattering, but the good news is that if you want to change the band cushion or
fabric type, you can just slide it off and don't have to replace a whole band.
So, that's pretty cool, I think. For controls, you get a single button plus a
joystick that also acts like a button. And for charging, you have USBC. [music]
You can also listen over the USBC, but it does require the headphones to use
battery, [music] which is a little bit of a bummer. It's not passive like it would be if it was
like a 3.5 mm jack. The batteries are
replaceable. Oops, wrong side. And inside the left ear cup, there is a
battery, which they claim will provide you 30 hours of battery life on a single
charge. And it's a lithium ion battery that has a little recycling symbol on
it. And it's nice and blue. Isn't that a nice blue color? I like that blue. And
they use standard Phillips0ero screws. But note that there are a few
different screw lengths that you'll want to keep track of if you're taking these
[music] apart yourself. Another thing that I like how they even labeled the
inside of this ear cup to be left. Like it's just that kind of extra like
accessibility work that they put in to make this not just repairable for
somebody with experience with electronics. But for the average user,
it's little things like that that make a huge difference when you're trying to put this thing back together. The one
that lasts. Keeping on what's inside of the
headphones, they have new and improved 40 mm drivers, which they claim have
better tuning and better bass response thanks to stronger magnets. We'll see if
that's true when we get to our listening impressions, but I'm just going to take their word for now. Well, I've done a
lot of talking, but I haven't done a lot of listening. So, while I'm doing that,
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description. >> Welcome back. These aren't the most
comfortable, not going to lie. They're a little firm. The ear cups are quite
firm. They have a little bit of clamping and also they don't really seal at the
bottom that well. Also, being not the largest earcuffs, you larger eared
fellows might have um well, you might have issues. I don't mind the headband,
but I'm also not very sensitive to the headband and stuff on the top of my head
in general. The noise cancelling, which is already on, I can tell is improved
from the last generation. There is a slight bit of white noise that you can
hear even when the ANC is on. And also like this is not a very loud room, but I
can tell just from how it's affecting my voice that it's a little bit more of an aggressive profile. When I switch to
transparency mode, or as they call it in the gentle voice, it just appeared in my
ear. Ambient sound. There's quite a lot of white noise hiss. It's not as
convincing of a transparency mode as you might get from the uh premium tiers from
like Apple or Sony. But the nice thing is that you can also just choose to have
the noise cancelling off. We've connected it to Android and we'll take a
quick look at the app. We got the app installed, but it wasn't as smooth of an
experience as I would hope. A lot of headphones these days, even like cheaper
ones, are doing that kind of magic pairing that you can get on Android and
iPhone. That was not the case with these. You had to download the app, manually pair them, but once it finds
them inside of the app, we have some default sound profiles as well as a
fiveband equalizer, which is fine. Personally though, I would like to see
[music] more granularity from the equalizer. Then there's tips color. Oh,
you can select it so that reflects coming out. You can update the headphone
firmware through the app. Pretty basic app, not going to lie. Cool. Let's take
a listen to some tunes. You might notice that I look a little bit different,
perhaps cuter, hopefully. Uh, don't answer that. But it's because we found
some really strange behavior within the app, and we decided to go back and
retest these headphones before we talked about their performance anymore.
Okay, I don't know what happened. These sound like The
moment you touch the EQ, it just everything up. I kind of want to update the software. Basically, within the app,
you have four preset EQs, uh, default,
bass boost, podcast, and detail clarity, as well as a fiveb equalizer. But the
thing is that when you leave the equalizer at flat, it turns off these
settings and makes a different sound profile than what is default. It's very
strange behavior. And it caused this
profile, the equalizers set to zero,
uh, to sound really truly terrible. Quite bad. I It just sound sounds like
you're like listening to it through like like a piece of foam or something. It's
like in in the other room. But when we're in the default profile, to my ears, these are serviceable. They
definitely have kind of a U-shaped sound profile where we're getting a lot of
extra treble sparkle and a big bump to the bass and subbase, which is a matter
of preference. I would say that the treble presentation on these is a little
un I don't know, unrefined. There's some kind of weird peaks. But what was kind
of a pleasant surprise is that as I was listening to these, I did actually
notice certain parts of songs that I had not heard before. I'm not going to say
that that's because these are like super resolving or anything like that. They're
not that great, but the unique tuning
allowed me to hear cool new things in songs that I didn't quite notice were
there. So, that's always fun. The mids end up being scooped out as per usual in
a U-shaped sound signature to a point that I'd say like it kind of feels
almost distant sometimes. A lot of the most important parts of the music where
there's like vocals and the main, you know, the body of your instruments just
kind of not there. And the bass can be a little bloated at times. But I don't
think these sound too terrible. Um, also I've been wearing these for a couple of
days now. The ANC I would I'll still say is pretty good. The comfort isn't ideal.
I find it's a little bit too much clamping pressure and as we noted earlier, there's not a ton of movement
for the ear cups and that makes these a little bit uncomfortable and honestly
they end up a little bit warm around my ears. Your mileage may vary. Comfort is
very, very subjective. But what isn't subjective is our measurements. Let's
take a look at those. Here is the frequency response and variation graph
from Labs. The white highlighted area is what we consider to be good for most
people. The average listener will enjoy headphones that fall in between the
white lines. Now, every headphone is going to have some level of variance,
and that's where the red comes in on this graph. This is our frequency
response plus the headphone transfer function variation. Basically, we
measure these headphones across a variety of different measurement rigs,
and this is the variation in performance between these tests. So, the red area
represents what you might hear based on your unique biological construction. And
sometimes headphones are more or less varied. As you can see in the treble
region weighed at the top, it's a little bit erratic where you have some specific
spikes that different people might be very sensitive to. As I said that the
treble was a little bit wonky. That spike that's just above 10 kHz kind of
sticks out for me, but I don't know if I saw all of that level of wonkiness. And
if we look at the overall shape of the graph, you can see that it's pretty consistent in the lows and the mids. And
we also see that kind of bass bloat as the red line goes outside of the white
area, as well as that mid-range scoop that contributes to that U-shape sound
signature that I talked about. The treble is obviously a little erratic,
perhaps could be tamed, but it's not
truly bad, but I wouldn't call this a
high performing or analytical headphone, you know? But I think you might have a
lot of fun if you're a bass head. This second graph shows the difference between the flat EQ and the default EQ
on this. And you can see that the flat EQ is um well, it's not really flat at
all. In fact, it's truly awful. The
pronounced muddy bass hump that's just over 100 Hz is even bigger. And the
treble is way, way, way pulled down, which makes for a very, very muddy and
bad experience. It sounds like you're listening to something in a different room almost. It's truly insane that they
would call that flat. Hopefully, they can figure that out with a software update. For now, I'd say stick to the
default sound profile. So, that's the sound quality impressions. I know I
wasn't too positive, but don't let that scare you off. If this is a cause that
you support, then maybe consider these.
They are a little bit expensive at €250.
And considering that that price point has decent competition, you should do
your research before you pull the trigger on these, especially because a
lot more headphones are more repairable than you might think. However, Fairphone
does have a track record and history, [music] and it provides really simple
upgrades. So, it's more repairable and you're more likely to have parts that
are going to be around for a lot [music] longer. If you want to see how these
come apart, check out the ShortCircuit we did on the previous version of these.
They're basically the exact same structure. You can literally swap the
drivers in and out. If you want the new drivers, you can put them in the old headphones if you got those, so you
don't have to buy a whole new set of headphones.
I think that's pretty cool. Thanks so much for for watching this video. I love
you.