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 bodily autonomy, you know?
Like ones like the Sony link buds 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 gonna keep our distance. Personal space is important.
I really liked the original Sony link buds
with that kind of circular design. The link buds 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 gotta 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 like.
So they're giving you little cushions. 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 definitely a look. It looks like a little ottoman.
It looks like, well, I mean, maybe you wouldn't wanna put your feet on the top there,
but you'd maybe, I could put my feet on that. As long as we're looking at the outside here though,
we got a USB-C port on the back for charging.
We got a pair button as well. Nice to see.
You know, Apple comes out here with their new cases and they were like, oh, there's no buttons.
Figure it out. Inside, we got the Link Buds 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 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, someone doesn't have an ear that big.
I don't wanna judge. You can't really see in there, but 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 gotta 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 than 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 unbearable and it bothers their ears. And I've seen other people saying that it feels great
and it feels fine. And other people complaining are just whiny.
So I'll let them sort that out. But for me right now, 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 an alternative band or something.
I feel like I need to now adjust more of my look
to be more goth because of this. What do I, do I look like a normal person?
I'm getting nose. 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, 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 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
after this message from our sponsor. Oh, now that I think about it, 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, I mean, 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 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.
Whew, whoa, 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. Now we should note that the guys here
are eight to 10 feet 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,
there's like a surprising amount of bass. It's 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 those seem overly
representative, 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 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 fleshed out the mids a little bit more. Voice boost will make things like, you know,
have things be crisper, 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 want to be able to go to max volume and have you guys not here 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. 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 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 heart, you know, the active part here,
it's definitely quieter, but this still feels like fairly loud volume.
Like 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 trade-offs with these things.
You're going to get slightly reduced sound quality, but not in a way that's like,
it's not like it's not making it more tinny. 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 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 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 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 a double tap is a play and a pause,
a triple tap is an X 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 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, Endel, 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 that you can kind of customize your experience
if you so choose. But I'm just thinking about the earbuds experience,
like these earbuds as hardware here. So on that note, I'm just gonna listen to a couple tracks real quick
that aren't crab rave because 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 gonna be able to hear a bit of what you're listening to.
That's just kind of the trade-off that you go with. I'm okay with that.
I'm not usually listening to stuff that is inappropriate for children.
Another one of the trade-offs that you make going with open earbuds
is the potential that you are losing some sound quality.
Obviously like an isolated environment where they can control exactly
what sound waves you're listening to. There isn't like distortion happening or disruption.
That's the environment that you're gonna wanna 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 do hickies inside my ear canals.
Why do they keep wanting to go in there? It's that's for me and my wife.
But I gotta 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 wanna 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's bad.
But overall, it's fine. It's, it's fine.
Generally, I'm someone who wouldn't wanna 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 trade-offs that you're gonna make with open versus closed earbuds
or headphones or whatever. Now that's all my subjective experience,
but we had Labs test these earbuds
and they came back with this frequency response graph.
Now, 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 link buds returned
in terms of frequency response. So as you can see, the lows drop off pretty harshly
around the 100 Hertz 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 in some weird kind of variations and spikes. So it's a good thing the app has a decent EQ tool
you can use to try to compensate for those. Labs left a note here that this frequency response
is relatively normal for what you'd see
from a open ear device. And one thing to note here is that this is a Sony device,
but they 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 link buds clip apparently use
bone conduction for the mic. They don't use bone conduction to play audio,
like, you know, shocks, 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 link buds.
Obviously this will depend on your particular device
and your speaker setup. 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've 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 nine 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 water resistance rating,
which is pretty standard for these kinds of things. And it comes in four colors, lavender, grayish,
green and black for $230.
Now that's a little bit on the high side for 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.
There are the nothing open ears, whatever they're called,
but those are a little bit of a different design because they don't clip on. They 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 link buds 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 Ricci Mini Robot. I think we're friends now.
We're supposed to hang out this weekend, but we'll see.
Subscribe to ShortCircuit. Bye.