this video is sponsored by lg but guys i still gotta call a spade a spade here
this is lg's tone free
hbs fn6 or as i'm gonna be calling it
the airpods competitor i've actually got both
variants of them in white and black and
the most exciting thing about them is the feature that doesn't immediately
disqualify them for everyday use from me
the size of the charging case yes my
friends the most important thing to me when it comes to wireless earphones is
whether it passes the does it fit in this pocket test and
not only does it fit really nicely in that totally otherwise useless pocket
but because of the glossy finish it actually slides in and out really really
nicely in fact compared to an airpods pro case
it's a little bit on the thicker side but it's actually smaller in the x
dimension and not much different in the y dimension
not bad not bad at all especially considering that one of the big features
according to the front of the box anyway is their uv
nano which is a disinfecting light that
is included in the case you see yeah actually you can you can see it in there
to kill apparently 99.9 of the bacteria that are going to end up
on the ear tips of your earbuds when you put them in your case to charge they
were very specific about this i am to inform you that the tone free fn 6 is
the only one that has been approved by official organizations such as tuv
actually kind of a big deal it charges via usb type c they rate it for six
hours of music playback from the earbuds themselves and then the case is rated
for another 12. so while the case only
has two extra charges for the earphones in it the earbuds themselves actually
run for quite a long time and part of the reason they're able to squeeze better battery life out of these is that
while they are noise isolating they do not have active noise cancellation which
is a feature that can suck up quite a lot of battery life huh they really want
to sit at quite an aggressive forward-facing
angle honestly the form factor of them reminds me more of the airpods pros and
less of the regular airpods due to the short stem
why am i even putting in the white ones i was so excited about those uh bat pods
airpods clones a little while ago just because i wanted black airpods pros so
why don't i just open up the ones that have got the little nice little short
circuit thing on it and everything here oh would you look at that they wrote me
a handwritten note i actually know people over at lg who are big enough
nerds to write a message like that oh wow
i'm impressed i was gonna say i bet they send the same note to everyone but it's
totally not this one's to me and this one's to Colton dear Colton hope you are
smiling reading our little surprise to show our gratitude little do they know
that he's not allowed to keep their samples oh Colton's never getting it you got
more ear tips although i actually found the medium ones out of the box
sufficient for me i often switch to small but i don't think i'll be doing
this with these usb cable no wall wart
and just like a little warranty manual thing now as with a lot of their audio
products one of the big headline features for lg is their collaboration
with meridian audio oh wow look at that
just got a notification everything in spite of the fact that this is
not an lg phone i got the same automagical pairing process that you
would expect out of something like airpods or pixel buds and they're
connected i didn't have to press a pairing button or do anything although
it does have a manual pairing button if you do end up needing that down the line
if i understood the product packaging correctly it also features wireless
charging how do i tell if it's working
oh yeah look at that awesome the meridian audio collaboration
is a funny one for me because it's at the point now where i honestly can't
tell who's paying who because on the one hand lg wants meridian's expertise so
they created some eq profiles that are supposed to kind of simulate the natural
crosstalk between the right and left to give it the more open sound stage like
if you were listening to actual stereo speakers and that kind of tuning
obviously has a value but on the other hand lg spends
so much of their product page basically talking about meridian's expertise when
it comes to building speakers and digital sound processors and all this
kind of stuff like look at this it's ridiculous i don't know who's getting the most out of that relationship there
the tone free app is surprisingly well rated for like a bluetooth speaker
included app 4.2 stars device is currently using the latest
software nice so controls are handled with tapping i don't have a music app
open so i guess that's not going to do anything apparently you can long press as well where's the button oh i think i
activated it there
okay while they don't have active noise
cancellation they are quite noise isolating i'm not hearing any of the
regular you know ac hum or anything here in the office but they still include an
ambient sound mode so it'll pass through some of the external audio oh there we
go it's working now first time i think it wasn't actually on i wouldn't
describe it as as natural sounding as the airpods pros for sure but if the
idea is just like hey i'm crossing the street right now i need to make sure that nothing hits me you can definitely
hear the things around you better i can hear my own voice better it's the kind of thing i would normally leave off if
i'm not using active noise cancelling headphones ooh i wonder if part of the
problem is that i was in immersive mode hey brandon can you talk to me for a sec
yeah it's definitely less natural sounding that's fine i don't need you to
oh interesting you can actually you can tune it though so you can have a little
bit of ambient sound and a lot find my earbuds this is cool so some vendors
lock their find my earbuds feature depending on what kind of phone you're
using but lg maybe because they are realistic about how much mobile phone
market share they have uh seems to allow the feature to work
with the app regardless of which phone you have so theoretically whoops
hello what just happened
oh so it's not for when they're in the case
it's for actually finding the individual
earbuds okay so left
it's pretty quiet oh it gets a little louder actually
yeah it keeps getting louder okay that's not bad that's usable
like obviously you'd have to walk around your house to find the thing one thing
lg points out is that these ear tips
rather than actually feels a little stickier than the the regular silicone
ones it's apparently made from a medical grade ear gel in terms of the fit
i would describe them as very similar to the airpods pros which are
my everyday carry so i i consider that to be pretty high praise um
although i guess it's kind of easy to have a similar fit if you
also have a very similar design
time for some uh laszlo supernova the song i'm allowed to play definitely for
sure you know i gotta say not every audio
company partnership has ended up turning into products that legitimately sound
better but lg is clearly benefiting from
meridian's expertise there's clearly defined base but it's not overpowering
it's tight i'm probably talking really loud right now because yeah sorry
brandon between the fact that i'm actually listening to music although not
at an unreasonable volume combined with how their noise isolating means that
it's it's kind of hard to hear what i'm saying i kind of want to play around
with the different profiles though so i automatically went to natural
because that tends to be what i prefer but let's see what bass boost sounds
like still reasonable
fuller for sure but not overpowering and not muddy
oh thank goodness brandon did you ever
watch the video on the sennheiser momentum true wireless twos their eq
control app was unusable thank you lg or meridian or whoever is
responsible for this being the eq control this is exactly how eq control
should work one thing that i wish they would improve actually is that it'd be
nice if it gives you a live preview of what it's going to sound like as you're
moving it around as it is right now you have to actually click save to hear your
your amped up base as someone who actually likes the sound like that inside your
skull sound of in-ears the immersive profile doesn't really do anything for
me but the good news is that both natural and bass boost are actually
really nice stock eqs and i think a lot of people aren't gonna end up playing
around with the custom ones although it's really cool that they let you have two of them i probably end up with bass
boost it's actually really clean sounding i definitely like the black one
more i think it's too bad that they decided to go with a glossy finish on
the white because this matte black
looks and feels in the hand a lot better even though surprisingly the glossy
white so far is less of a fingerprint magnet i think this one actually i'd
expect to look kind of nicer on a day-to-day basis but when it's when it's
clean this is like that's pretty sleek you
know i'm surprised oh it automatically detects taking your earbuds out one
thing that um i hope is not unavoidable is that it looks
like it stopped playing when i took one out okay it looks like you can start
playback again with just one in your ear because it is supposed to know if it's
in your ear or not and automatically pause playback
yeah and it paused it again so that's something you will have to restart if
you just pop out one earbud at a time and see i don't know if there's a 100
right answer for everyone when it comes to that that's another thing that might
be kind of cool to add to the app is hey do you do you want that behavior or not
oh one thing that i just noticed is that
it doesn't disable the touchpad when you're holding the earbud in your hands
so it doesn't seem to be clever enough to know if it's right up
against an ear from the sensor here or if it's just like kind of casually
rolling around in your hand that's another thing that's probably
quite tunable in a software update and given what a nice base they're starting
with here so solid battery life good features the wireless charging and all
that good stuff good sound quality right out of the box and an easily tunable eq
this is uh this is a great start it's sponsored by
lg but i don't know if you guys are familiar with the ftc guidelines i'm not
allowed to say anything that i don't actually think these are
really solid just like the idea of subscribing to ShortCircuit make sure
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