WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:03.120 Earbuds that go inside your ear canal? 00:00:03.120 --> 00:00:07.100 Gross, cringe, no thank you. I don't like those at all, 00:00:07.100 --> 00:00:13.840 but they seem to be the most popular option. I am looking for earbuds that don't go inside my body. 00:00:13.840 --> 00:00:19.240 I've always been a fan of earbuds that don't want to violate your bodily autonomy, you know? 00:00:19.240 --> 00:00:25.480 Like ones like the Sony link buds clip. This is the latest entry in the form of earbuds 00:00:25.480 --> 00:00:29.320 that I'm more interested in, where they just kind of sit outside your ear canal 00:00:29.320 --> 00:00:32.960 and kind of, you know what, like we're just gonna keep our distance. Personal space is important. 00:00:32.960 --> 00:00:36.240 I really liked the original Sony link buds 00:00:36.240 --> 00:00:41.600 with that kind of circular design. The link buds clip use a different design 00:00:41.600 --> 00:00:47.080 where they clip on to your outer ear. There's at least one other model out there that does this, 00:00:47.080 --> 00:00:51.080 the Bose Ultra Open, and there's probably more that I'm not aware of, 00:00:51.080 --> 00:00:56.240 but this is Sony's take on it. I gotta say Sony seems to have stuck with this sort of like 00:00:56.280 --> 00:01:01.080 gray recycled paper packaging for their earbuds, 00:01:01.080 --> 00:01:04.520 which even after a few years, which is nice to see them stick with that, 00:01:04.520 --> 00:01:09.080 I appreciate that, I like the look. And maybe it's environmentally friendly, I don't know. 00:01:09.080 --> 00:01:12.720 Oh, extra cushions. Normally with the earbuds, 00:01:12.720 --> 00:01:18.200 you'd have different size tips that come with it, but this one, there are no tips, which is what I like. 00:01:18.200 --> 00:01:22.640 So they're giving you little cushions. I'm not sure whether you're supposed to wear them 00:01:22.640 --> 00:01:25.720 with or without the cushions by default. We'll find out. 00:01:25.720 --> 00:01:30.040 All right, we got a nice, look at that glossy finish 00:01:30.040 --> 00:01:33.160 on the top combined with a matte finish on the bottom. 00:01:33.160 --> 00:01:36.880 That's definitely a look. It looks like a little ottoman. 00:01:36.880 --> 00:01:40.040 It looks like, well, I mean, maybe you wouldn't wanna put your feet on the top there, 00:01:40.040 --> 00:01:44.760 but you'd maybe, I could put my feet on that. As long as we're looking at the outside here though, 00:01:44.760 --> 00:01:47.960 we got a USB-C port on the back for charging. 00:01:47.960 --> 00:01:51.160 We got a pair button as well. Nice to see. 00:01:51.160 --> 00:01:55.920 You know, Apple comes out here with their new cases and they were like, oh, there's no buttons. 00:01:55.920 --> 00:01:59.880 Figure it out. Inside, we got the Link Buds clip. 00:01:59.880 --> 00:02:04.680 Definitely the strangest looking earbuds I've ever seen. 00:02:04.680 --> 00:02:08.040 You got your charging contacts there. You got a little hole there, 00:02:08.040 --> 00:02:12.620 probably a mic of some sort. And then also, you know, Vietnam. 00:02:13.760 --> 00:02:19.560 And then on the other side, you've got the kind of audio output grill, 00:02:19.560 --> 00:02:23.120 speaker grill, you know, the earbud grill. I don't know what to call it. 00:02:23.160 --> 00:02:26.480 What are these? I don't even know what they are, but I like them. 00:02:26.480 --> 00:02:30.160 Oh, there's also a little either a mic 00:02:30.160 --> 00:02:34.060 or speakers on the inside. 00:02:34.060 --> 00:02:38.520 Can I bend this? So these are bendy, which makes sense. 00:02:38.520 --> 00:02:44.520 You probably don't want them to be too stiff, but I'm also worried, like, how far can I bend it? 00:02:44.520 --> 00:02:48.600 Probably shouldn't test it too much. Someone's ear, someone doesn't have an ear that big. 00:02:48.600 --> 00:02:55.080 I don't wanna judge. You can't really see in there, but like inside there, there's another little grill. 00:02:55.080 --> 00:02:59.200 So I don't know whether audio comes out of that little hole inside there. 00:02:59.200 --> 00:03:01.400 I feel like I'm getting ready for the ball. 00:03:02.400 --> 00:03:06.280 That's gotta be how it is. Right? It looks cool. 00:03:08.080 --> 00:03:11.160 Wow. It feels like you can kind of position it 00:03:11.160 --> 00:03:16.480 in a bunch of different, like you can kind of put it lower or like higher. 00:03:16.480 --> 00:03:19.720 I mean, my glasses are there than it runs into my glasses in the back. 00:03:19.760 --> 00:03:24.240 I mean, you probably just want it in kind of a more neutral position there. 00:03:24.240 --> 00:03:29.920 I've seen some takes from people saying that they couldn't wear this for longer than 30 minutes. 00:03:29.920 --> 00:03:34.400 Like it's unbearable and it bothers their ears. And I've seen other people saying that it feels great 00:03:34.400 --> 00:03:38.040 and it feels fine. And other people complaining are just whiny. 00:03:38.040 --> 00:03:45.920 So I'll let them sort that out. But for me right now, it definitely feels weird. 00:03:46.600 --> 00:03:50.880 It definitely feels unusual, but like not in a bad way. 00:03:52.320 --> 00:03:57.280 If I was walking around like this, like I feel like I'm in an alternative band or something. 00:03:57.280 --> 00:04:00.560 I feel like I need to now adjust more of my look 00:04:00.560 --> 00:04:04.560 to be more goth because of this. What do I, do I look like a normal person? 00:04:05.680 --> 00:04:10.240 I'm getting nose. So the cushions, pretty simple as far as I can tell. 00:04:10.240 --> 00:04:15.040 You just kind of squish them on there and then they're on there. 00:04:15.040 --> 00:04:20.920 I feel like if you wanted cushions anywhere, you would want some silicone like on the part 00:04:20.920 --> 00:04:25.880 that's pinching your ear, not on this part. But I mean, you know, we'll see. 00:04:27.960 --> 00:04:31.960 They're pretty, pretty intuitive just to kind of clip on like that. 00:04:31.960 --> 00:04:34.560 Probably more so than a regular earbud honestly. 00:04:35.480 --> 00:04:39.800 Oh, take it back. Okay. 00:04:39.800 --> 00:04:43.840 That kind of makes them feel like, if anything, it's less of a cushion 00:04:43.840 --> 00:04:47.520 and more kind of like a grip. Like I feel like it's keeping them in place 00:04:47.520 --> 00:04:51.000 more so than without. But they are earbuds. 00:04:51.000 --> 00:04:54.440 We can't forget that they are earbuds. So we should probably listen to something 00:04:54.440 --> 00:04:59.240 after this message from our sponsor. Oh, now that I think about it, this case is actually a little thick. 00:04:59.240 --> 00:05:02.600 So maybe I do want to do like a little pocket test. 00:05:02.600 --> 00:05:07.520 Is this, is this going to stick out of my pocket here? Like I wouldn't want to put that in my front pocket. 00:05:07.520 --> 00:05:11.040 You know, but that's just me. Like if you go, like what, what is, 00:05:11.040 --> 00:05:14.280 you got a growth or something. You got, I mean, you should get that looked at. 00:05:14.280 --> 00:05:18.040 That's kind of what's happening there. I guess people who carry bags with them everywhere 00:05:18.040 --> 00:05:22.920 won't care, they can just toss them in there. But for me, that might be an issue. 00:05:22.920 --> 00:05:28.280 Okay, it's time to see how these things actually sound. Just by default, before we get into any of the crazy 00:05:28.280 --> 00:05:35.040 features and stuff, I'm just going to play a song off Apple Music and see, see what we're dealing with here. 00:05:35.040 --> 00:05:38.640 Whew, whoa, that's loud. You can hear that. 00:05:38.640 --> 00:05:42.960 Okay, how about this? I'll turn it down and you tell me when you can't hear it anymore. 00:05:48.640 --> 00:05:52.080 Right now? Now you can't hear anything? That's pretty good. 00:05:52.080 --> 00:05:56.000 We're just under half volume. It's a little, I would want to turn this up 00:05:56.000 --> 00:05:57.400 a little bit more than this. 00:05:59.080 --> 00:06:03.200 Can you hear it now? Yeah. Now we should note that the guys here 00:06:03.200 --> 00:06:07.040 are eight to 10 feet away from me, but we're in a pretty quiet room. 00:06:07.040 --> 00:06:10.920 So I feel like, you know, it's a pretty good representative situation here. 00:06:10.920 --> 00:06:12.720 And as for sound quality, 00:06:14.160 --> 00:06:17.280 there's like a surprising amount of bass. It's actually kind of funny. 00:06:17.280 --> 00:06:25.200 I feel like there's a lot of bass going on and a lot of highs and not as much mids 00:06:25.800 --> 00:06:29.200 or at least, you know, at least those seem overly 00:06:29.200 --> 00:06:33.160 representative, the lows and the highs. That said, I don't know what sound mode I'm in 00:06:33.160 --> 00:06:36.560 and there are EQ options in the app that we'll look at in a second. 00:06:36.560 --> 00:06:40.400 Now, before I listen to any other music, I want to just head into the app here 00:06:40.400 --> 00:06:44.640 because some of these modes and features might affect the experience. 00:06:44.640 --> 00:06:50.480 We've got three listening modes here, standard voice boost and sound leakage reduction, 00:06:50.480 --> 00:06:54.420 which is the one that will stop your noise 00:06:54.420 --> 00:06:57.800 from leaking out into the environment so that other people can hear it. 00:06:57.800 --> 00:07:02.160 So it turns out we were in voice boost mode there, which probably affected my perception 00:07:02.160 --> 00:07:05.320 of the lows and the highs there. So let's go to standard, let's go back, 00:07:05.320 --> 00:07:08.360 see what that sounds like. Yeah, that seems a bit fuller. 00:07:09.360 --> 00:07:15.800 That kind of fleshed out the mids a little bit more. Voice boost will make things like, you know, 00:07:15.800 --> 00:07:18.840 have things be crisper, have voices be more audible to you, 00:07:18.840 --> 00:07:21.840 but it will probably be more audible to people around you as well. 00:07:21.840 --> 00:07:25.120 And this is just on standard mode and already on standard mode, 00:07:25.120 --> 00:07:28.360 the noise leakage is already a bit better. 00:07:28.360 --> 00:07:31.360 Interesting. Okay, sound leakage. Let's try that real quick. 00:07:31.360 --> 00:07:36.020 Let's see. I want to be able to go to max volume and have you guys not here at all. 00:07:36.020 --> 00:07:40.080 Oh man, that's muffled. That's much more muffled to me. 00:07:40.080 --> 00:07:43.680 You guys hear? You can't hear anything? 00:07:43.680 --> 00:07:46.960 You can't hear it? Just a little bit. Just a little bit. 00:07:46.960 --> 00:07:50.840 Wow. Okay, Sony. 00:07:50.840 --> 00:07:55.280 Sound leakage reduction mode is indeed sound leakage reduction mode. 00:07:55.280 --> 00:08:00.160 It works. In voice boost mode, they could hear it all the way down to like here. 00:08:00.160 --> 00:08:03.240 In standard mode, it was more like around here. 00:08:03.240 --> 00:08:06.800 And in this one, I forget exactly where, but it was like up here. 00:08:06.800 --> 00:08:10.080 So sound leakage reduction mode does affect the sound quality. 00:08:10.080 --> 00:08:13.840 You heard me say when I started playing it that it was immediately more muffled. 00:08:13.840 --> 00:08:18.560 But like if I go back to like the heart, you know, the active part here, 00:08:20.200 --> 00:08:25.440 it's definitely quieter, but this still feels like fairly loud volume. 00:08:25.440 --> 00:08:30.640 Like it's, I wouldn't want it this loud unless like I was in a very, very loud environment. 00:08:30.640 --> 00:08:34.200 So you, you know, there's trade-offs with these things. 00:08:34.240 --> 00:08:38.760 You're going to get slightly reduced sound quality, but not in a way that's like, 00:08:38.760 --> 00:08:44.040 it's not like it's not making it more tinny. It's kind of putting like a blanket on it, 00:08:44.040 --> 00:08:47.600 but it's still kind of there. It's obviously up to you. It's a bit of a subjective thing, 00:08:47.600 --> 00:08:51.560 but for me as someone who is looking for these 00:08:51.560 --> 00:08:55.960 kind of open earbuds, it's nice to see something that doesn't go 00:08:55.960 --> 00:09:00.840 into my ear canal, but gives me a lot of options about how to tailor my experience. 00:09:00.840 --> 00:09:06.020 It's nice to see. And of course that comes from Sony. They care about us, right? 00:09:06.020 --> 00:09:11.240 So let's go back to standard mode here, head back into the app and see what we're dealing with. 00:09:11.240 --> 00:09:17.480 So there is an equalizer mode because we're in standard, we can go in here and switch between a bunch of presets here, 00:09:17.480 --> 00:09:21.280 heavy, clear, hard, soft, manual, 00:09:21.280 --> 00:09:25.120 the standard names for EQ settings. 00:09:25.120 --> 00:09:28.920 Okay, now in device settings, I saw something that was kind of interesting about the controls. 00:09:28.920 --> 00:09:33.200 These are earbuds where you can customize 00:09:33.240 --> 00:09:37.360 what the taps do. On the right side, you've got sort of your default controls 00:09:37.360 --> 00:09:40.880 for Sony earbuds anyways, where a double tap is a play and a pause, 00:09:40.880 --> 00:09:44.240 a triple tap is an X song. And then I guess you also have the option 00:09:44.240 --> 00:09:47.280 to tap a bunch of times to raise the volume. 00:09:47.280 --> 00:09:50.560 On the left side, if you tap a bunch of times, 00:09:50.560 --> 00:09:54.960 it will lower the volume. And then you have a double tap and a triple tap 00:09:54.960 --> 00:09:58.760 that you can assign to change modes or to what? 00:09:58.760 --> 00:10:02.400 I don't know. So that setting that I couldn't change on the left here 00:10:02.400 --> 00:10:06.440 is you can set it to one of these services, 00:10:06.440 --> 00:10:10.400 Amazon Music Play Now, Endel, quick access, 00:10:10.400 --> 00:10:14.680 I don't know what that is, and Spotify tap. I don't think there's anything in the app here 00:10:14.680 --> 00:10:19.080 that won't be familiar to people who have used Sony earbuds before, 00:10:19.080 --> 00:10:22.440 but there's a number of ways that you can kind of customize your experience 00:10:22.440 --> 00:10:25.640 if you so choose. But I'm just thinking about the earbuds experience, 00:10:25.640 --> 00:10:31.040 like these earbuds as hardware here. So on that note, I'm just gonna listen to a couple tracks real quick 00:10:31.040 --> 00:10:36.200 that aren't crab rave because sometimes that's nice to listen to. 00:10:36.200 --> 00:10:40.000 This sounds pretty good. Like I'm at a pretty high volume here 00:10:40.000 --> 00:10:44.480 and I'm in standard mode without any EQ. In any situation with open earbuds, 00:10:44.480 --> 00:10:48.720 if you're right next to somebody, they're probably gonna be able to hear a bit of what you're listening to. 00:10:48.720 --> 00:10:52.040 That's just kind of the trade-off that you go with. I'm okay with that. 00:10:52.040 --> 00:10:58.280 I'm not usually listening to stuff that is inappropriate for children. 00:10:58.280 --> 00:11:01.760 Another one of the trade-offs that you make going with open earbuds 00:11:01.760 --> 00:11:05.320 is the potential that you are losing some sound quality. 00:11:05.320 --> 00:11:08.960 Obviously like an isolated environment where they can control exactly 00:11:08.960 --> 00:11:13.280 what sound waves you're listening to. There isn't like distortion happening or disruption. 00:11:13.280 --> 00:11:17.160 That's the environment that you're gonna wanna choose if you just are prioritizing sound quality. 00:11:17.160 --> 00:11:20.640 If you're going with open earbuds, you're kind of acknowledging that like, 00:11:20.640 --> 00:11:25.320 okay, tip-top sound quality is not the most important thing to me. 00:11:25.320 --> 00:11:29.200 I just don't like do hickies inside my ear canals. 00:11:29.200 --> 00:11:32.600 Why do they keep wanting to go in there? It's that's for me and my wife. 00:11:34.520 --> 00:11:37.520 But I gotta say, this is a very quiet environment, 00:11:37.520 --> 00:11:42.680 but like, it sounds really good. There's definitely things with these earbuds, 00:11:42.680 --> 00:11:45.920 you know, that I would like to kind of tweak with the EQ. 00:11:45.920 --> 00:11:49.840 I'd wanna spend a little bit of time in the app tweaking the EQ to my liking, 00:11:49.840 --> 00:11:54.080 but there's nothing that I'm experiencing right now that's like, ooh, that's bad. 00:11:54.080 --> 00:11:58.040 But overall, it's fine. It's, it's fine. 00:11:58.040 --> 00:12:03.200 Generally, I'm someone who wouldn't wanna do a lot of tweaking with my, with my headphones or earbuds. 00:12:03.200 --> 00:12:06.480 I would want to just kind of put them in and have them sound good. 00:12:06.480 --> 00:12:10.640 And that's why I feel like I'm satisfied with this because I put them in, they sound pretty decent. 00:12:10.640 --> 00:12:14.760 And I know that there's some trade-offs that you're gonna make with open versus closed earbuds 00:12:14.760 --> 00:12:18.320 or headphones or whatever. Now that's all my subjective experience, 00:12:18.320 --> 00:12:21.920 but we had Labs test these earbuds 00:12:21.920 --> 00:12:25.160 and they came back with this frequency response graph. 00:12:25.160 --> 00:12:28.360 Now, in case you haven't seen our graphs here, 00:12:28.360 --> 00:12:31.680 this gray band here is the average listener preference. 00:12:31.680 --> 00:12:36.840 So that's generally what the average listener is going to want to hear. 00:12:36.840 --> 00:12:40.840 And the red band here is what the link buds returned 00:12:40.840 --> 00:12:46.960 in terms of frequency response. So as you can see, the lows drop off pretty harshly 00:12:46.960 --> 00:12:52.040 around the 100 Hertz mark. And that's mostly to be expected with, you know, earbuds. 00:12:52.040 --> 00:12:56.000 We are partly within the preferred range through the mids, but then as we get to the highs, 00:12:56.000 --> 00:13:01.560 we're in some weird kind of variations and spikes. So it's a good thing the app has a decent EQ tool 00:13:01.560 --> 00:13:06.480 you can use to try to compensate for those. Labs left a note here that this frequency response 00:13:06.480 --> 00:13:09.560 is relatively normal for what you'd see 00:13:09.560 --> 00:13:14.120 from a open ear device. And one thing to note here is that this is a Sony device, 00:13:14.120 --> 00:13:18.160 but they do not support Sony's LDAC codec 00:13:18.160 --> 00:13:21.480 that they developed. So anyone going for these open earbuds 00:13:21.480 --> 00:13:25.320 are probably, there's a trade-off. You know that you're not going to get 00:13:25.320 --> 00:13:28.480 like the absolute highest quality. So I guess they thought, 00:13:28.480 --> 00:13:31.920 oh, we won't even put the LDAC in there. I don't have enough background information 00:13:31.920 --> 00:13:36.200 to know why they chose not to put LDAC in there. But just so you know, it doesn't have LDAC 00:13:36.200 --> 00:13:40.200 if that's what you're looking for. Okay, that's audio quality. What about mic quality though? 00:13:40.200 --> 00:13:43.640 And this is kind of interesting because the link buds clip apparently use 00:13:43.640 --> 00:13:49.040 bone conduction for the mic. They don't use bone conduction to play audio, 00:13:49.040 --> 00:13:54.000 like, you know, shocks, headphones or something, but they do use it to record audio 00:13:54.000 --> 00:13:57.480 or at least to detect that you're speaking. So I'm going to give Bell a call here 00:13:57.480 --> 00:14:01.480 and he's going to record and we'll see how it sounds for him. 00:14:01.480 --> 00:14:05.880 So this is me speaking from the mic, from the link buds. 00:14:05.880 --> 00:14:09.200 Obviously this will depend on your particular device 00:14:09.200 --> 00:14:12.920 and your speaker setup. You know, maybe that'll sound good or bad to you. 00:14:12.920 --> 00:14:16.360 I don't know what it sounds like. I can't hear through your ears. 00:14:16.360 --> 00:14:19.960 I'm listening to the recording that I've just recorded through these earbuds 00:14:19.960 --> 00:14:24.720 and it sounds like I'm a bit far away in it. It doesn't sound bad. 00:14:24.720 --> 00:14:28.080 So audio quality, mic quality, not bad 00:14:28.080 --> 00:14:31.640 for an open set of earbuds. In terms of battery life, Sony says 00:14:31.640 --> 00:14:35.120 that the earbuds themselves can last for nine hours 00:14:35.120 --> 00:14:38.320 and then you get 28 hours of battery life in the case 00:14:38.320 --> 00:14:42.000 for a total of 37. That's obviously in optimal conditions. 00:14:42.000 --> 00:14:47.000 They got Bluetooth 5.3, IPX4 water resistance rating, 00:14:47.520 --> 00:14:53.280 which is pretty standard for these kinds of things. And it comes in four colors, lavender, grayish, 00:14:53.280 --> 00:14:57.080 green and black for $230. 00:14:57.080 --> 00:15:04.000 Now that's a little bit on the high side for what some people would feel is like a compromise 00:15:04.000 --> 00:15:09.980 in terms of sound quality, but for someone like me who is really looking for open earbuds, I don't know. 00:15:09.980 --> 00:15:14.320 There's not a ton of really great options. We mentioned the Bose Ultra Opens. 00:15:14.320 --> 00:15:18.840 There are the nothing open ears, whatever they're called, 00:15:18.880 --> 00:15:23.600 but those are a little bit of a different design because they don't clip on. They like sit on top of your ear. 00:15:23.600 --> 00:15:27.840 So there's not a ton of options out there. So I don't know, 230, it's up to you. 00:15:27.840 --> 00:15:31.320 Well, that's it for the link buds clip, guys. Thanks for watching. 00:15:31.320 --> 00:15:34.460 If you're looking for another video to watch, let me tell you, I had a lot of fun 00:15:34.460 --> 00:15:37.500 with the Ricci Mini Robot. I think we're friends now. 00:15:37.500 --> 00:15:40.600 We're supposed to hang out this weekend, but we'll see. 00:15:40.600 --> 00:15:42.480 Subscribe to ShortCircuit. Bye.