the airpods pros are in my opinion the gold standard for in-ear wireless
earphones but that doesn't mean that you should buy them
let's expand our horizons today and take a look at
seven alternatives from the industry's top brands to find the best option for
those of you who just can't bring yourself to join the apple zombie army
but who also want something slightly better than 20 airpods knock-offs
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all of our options here share some common features so before we pit them
against each other in a battle to the pain
let's talk about their similarities every one of these buds has some sort of
way to play and pause music skip and
reverse tracks activate an ai assistant of some sort and some of them can even
adjust their volume they also all support at least bluetooth 5.0 so you
shouldn't have any concerns about either bandwidth or range when considering one
over the other lastly they all go for at least four hours on a charge and feature
some kind of quick charging where a few minutes docked in the case nets you an
hour or so of listening time surprisingly the model with the worst
battery life in the bunch was actually the airpods pros with four and a half
hours of music listening time with anc enabled which wait
are they not the gold standard
our first challenger then is this one the pixel buds the true
wireless version not that first gen thing with the cord yeah
google's second attempt has got great sound isolation and a full sounding mix
and their in-ear feel is almost as good as the airpods pros the one thing that
sours the feel is the rubber support sometimes you can kind of feel it
tickling your ear button it kind of seems like someone's trying to get your attention in a way that is quite frankly
inappropriate unless it's my wife their on-device controls are awesome
incorporating both taps and swipes for controlling volume but they can also be
customized via the pixelbuds app or directly in bluetooth settings on pixel
devices and there's also some google perks like okay you know you know
support and instant translation that is
definitely not quite as good as in a sci-fi movie but hey at 179 dollars
they're cheaper than 2nd gen airpods non-pros with the wireless charging case
on the subject of the case it's still mini pocketable but it is thicker longer
and girthier than the airpods pro case and folks the cases only get worse from
here so strap on samsung launched the galaxy buds lives earlier this year
receiving much praise for their unique bean-like shape and
that's mostly what they've got going for them i mean okay look it's not like
they're horrible the sound quality is fine it's just that the main issue is
how the sound quality fluctuates depending on how you position them in
your ears so they sound more tinny when
they're loosely placed you know kind of flat and then more bassy when you push them
into the ear canal more but that's clearly not what you're supposed to do
because they quickly get uncomfortable the beans do not use an in-ear canal
design so they don't achieve the same noise isolation as our other options but
and this is weird samsung went and built an active noise cancellation which sort
of helps level the playing field except there's no physical seal so obviously a
lot of outside sound still gets in
time for our case pocket test and um i don't know it's okay a bit thicker than
i'd like that's what she said fortunately the galaxy ware app is where
the beans make up some lost ground there's a lot of great options here
including customizable controls a few eq presets and a find my earbuds feature
about 169 dollars nice an extra 10 for the pixel buds
looks like a pretty good deal if the metallic bean eared look isn't your thing hey
look you gotta grow up stop and then get the giant all right
or you know what you could do is stick with
samsung and just get there older cheaper
and in my opinion universally better option the galaxy buds plus
they've got an in-ear design and the highest single charge battery life out
of our whole lineup at 11 hours of music
playback wow the mix has a good amount of bass and
mids and can also be tweaked in-app and while they don't feel as great in the
years as the airpods pros and there's no active noise cancellation at 149 or even
less depending on where you find them they range anywhere from solid value to
that's a freaking good deal but challenging the buds plus that the
same msrp is of course samsung's eternal
korean rival lg
lg's tone-free earbuds which they built in collaboration with uk hi-fi company
meridian now normally i wouldn't mention that kind of cross branding marketing
wank but in this case the combined effort really shows because i was
impressed with these in my ShortCircuit unboxing the design is very similar to
the airpods pros and sure enough they also feel great in the ear now there's
no active noise cancellation and the mix can be a bit muddy but thankfully lg's
accompanying app not only has eq presets but also an 8 point custom eq tool with
the ability to save two custom profiles which should be absolutely standard in
fact Android should just have this built in how's that not a thing at this point
the kicker for the tone free buds is that the wireless charging case also
disinfects the earbud tips with uv light
when the case is plugged in now these came out during the pandemic
but like right away so i'm not sure whether they were planning this feature
already or whether they just like plonked it in there right before they launched it either way it's definitely a
plus in these trying times and the case fits nicely in my special pocket so far
all of these buds have been pretty fancy feast though costing over a hundred us
dollars each maybe what you're after is a flagship bud killer well that
is not what the one plus buds are but they do
only cost 79 oneplus approach here was to apparently
take the pixel buds case and then fill
it with an airpods clone that frankly is
much bigger than a regular airpods and
doesn't sound that great noise isolation is about what you'd
expect from a non-in-ear design and it also borrows the og airpods other
weakness of not fitting great in everyone's ears on top of that they do
have an app with some customization but right now it's only available on oneplus
phones the hell were you guys thinking but on the other hand they're only 79
which isn't really that cheap so okay
then let's try going the other way in price all the way up to the sennheiser
momentum true wireless twos at 299 us dollars these brought some big
improvements over the first gen model including active noise cancellation and
improved battery life unfortunately the case still doesn't support wireless
charging and they didn't make it or the earbuds any smaller
woof when i unboxed these what i had to say about the sound quality was yeah
they're decent out of the box but they're held up by the eq customization
in the app that was frankly unusable apparently though
sennheiser listened because now there's a true slider style ui which really
unleashes the quality of sennheiser hardware making this a great sounding
but expensive option for the apple avoiding audiophile of course if
avoiding apple based on some kind of weird reverse fanboyism isn't your thing
hey apple is still an option and maybe still
the gold standard the airpods pros have excellent noise isolation while still
managing to feel super light in your ear and even if their design sensibilities
really rub me the wrong way sometimes see exhibit a
and b other times apple gets it just so right
so many in-ears have thick tips that make you feel like you have to jam them
into your ear canal but the pros are so
light they just hang there naturally and there's almost nothing you could do to
remove them if you don't want to beyond that they have a great neutral sound
that isn't going to blow you out of the water with its awesomeness but it also
won't draw your attention because there isn't say a gaping hole where the mids
are supposed to be furthermore especially under noisy conditions the
active noise cancellation which can be toggled by long pressing the stem helps
that sound profile out a lot as for the controls on iOS customizability is great
and on Android well it can be okay with
the assistant trigger app and last but certainly not least in fact it's one of
the most important features to me the case is a great size it's not as small
as the regular non-pro air pods but it's still small enough to effortlessly slip
in and out of my little baby pocket you're safe now just
dream sweet dreams of lttstore.com
if the pros price is a problem of course you can stay in apple land with the
regular airpods and they're fine i guess
but at 199 or 159 without the wireless
charging feature in the case almost all of our alternatives except
you one plus not you give us better bang for the buck so
now the key neared among you probably noticed that we forgot to record part of
each product segment with its integrated microphone so check out the link in the
video description where we'll have little microphone samples that's so that
you can be the judge of which version of your voice you wish to transmit to your
friends and family it's possible you're not going to look at it because you just
don't care about the audio quality on the other end of the line but hey at
least it's there if you are one of those considerate people but wait a second the
video is pretty much over and you didn't mention
you're right there there are a ton of other fine options out there like soundcores
liberty air 2s and sony's wf1000xm3s
but we selected these models because we felt they were a good representation of
what we consider to be a solid combination of price and performance
reliability and extra features and then
we also included the oneplus pods
so which one should you get well if you've made it to the end of the video
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if you guys enjoyed this video maybe you'll enjoy a lower priced roundup
where james actually checked out 50 that is 5-0
wireless earbuds that we bought off amazon to see which ones cut the mustard
and which ones fart the mustard