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 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 of 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,
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 mesh like material
that they're calling a bird's eye mesh. I haven't looked too many birds right in the eye,
but I don't really understand the 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 USB-C cables
that are connecting here. For earphone adjustment, you don't have a ton of wiggle room.
There's a little bit of tilt up and down, not really much by the way of swivel.
And for the adjuster, it is a smooth adjustment. And oh, that's not a great look.
Just for me trying to adjust it, I kind of pulled the headband off a little bit.
It happens on both sides. It's not exactly flattering,
but the good news is that if you wanna change the band cushion or fabric tape,
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 USB-C.
You can also listen over the USB-C, but it does require the headphones to use battery,
which is a little bit of a bummer. It's not passive like it would be
if it was like a 3.5 millimeter 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 Phillips double zero screws,
but note that there are a few different screw lengths that you'll wanna keep track of
if you're taking these 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 into 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 millimeter drivers,
which they claim have better tuning and a 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 gonna 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, why don't you listen to this message from our sponsor?
Welcome back. These aren't the most comfortable, not gonna lie.
They're a little firm. The ear cups are quite firm. They have a little bit of a clamping.
And also they don't really seal at the bottom that well. Also being not the largest ear cups,
you larger-eared fellows might have, 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 canceling, 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
that 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 premium tiers
from like Apple or Sony. But the nice thing is that you can also just choose
to have the noise canceling 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 five band equalizer, which is fine.
Personally though, I would like to see more granularity from the equalizer.
Then there's tips color. Oh, you can select it so that reflects the color of the app.
You can update the headphone firmware through the app.
Pretty basic app, not gonna lie. Cool, let's take a listen to some tunes.
You might notice that I look a little bit different, perhaps cuter, hopefully.
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 sh**. The moment you touch the EQ,
it just f**ks everything up. I kind of want to update the software. Basically, within the app,
you have four preset EQs, default, base boost, podcast, and detailed clarity,
as well as a five band 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,
to sound really, truly terrible, quite bad.
It just sounds like you're listening to it through like a piece of foam or something.
It's like 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 sub-bass,
which is a matter of preference. I would say that the treble presentation on these
is a little 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 gonna 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
and 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.
Also, I've been wearing these for a couple of days now. The ANC, I would, I'll still say it's 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 headphones gonna 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 kilohertz
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,
well, it's not really flat at all. In fact, it's truly awful.
The pronounced muddy bass hump that's just over 100 hertz
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 euros.
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 and it provides really simple upgrades. So it's more repairable
and you're more likely to have parts that are gonna be around for a lot longer.
If you wanna 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 watching this video.
I love you.