Look, people, I get that there’s a shiny new penny on the table called the Soundcore Liberty 5 Pro. Yes, they deserve all the credit in the world for the phone call ability to make calls while you are in the middle of a football game or mowing your yard. They deserve a lot of praise for this. They also deserve kudos for the ANC tech improvement. But I need people to stop running the narrative that somehow these earphones are as good as the Sonys or Samsungs in sound quality. Can we please stop this nonsense?
Facts:
• Sony uses high-end proprietary drivers developed in house and custom tuned by real record studios engineers.
• Soundcore uses generic mass produces drivers without any confirmation on how they went about tuning them nor if they even did beyond the basics.
I get it, I truly do. We need hype, and so we create it through assumptions and the placebo effect. But again, there is nothing about their driver that can beat the level of quality in the drivers in the Samsung, let alone the Sonys. This is not even a close call. Now, if the Sonys don’t fit your ears, that’s fine, but make no mistake about this fact: the Sonys are the best-sounding earphones on the market under $350. And when you add the features and abilities in their ANC and Google Voice, amazing battery life, and text message reading abilities, along with the ability for multi-point for any device, there isn’t a better earphone, PERIOD.
Now if there’s something to compare it to, the Samsung is the only one. Their sound is very close to Sony’s. They have the same Google voice/text reading feature and voice commands. They are only limited by the requirements of brand matching for their features. But again, the Soundcore Liberty 5 Pro are not there in sound quality. It doesn’t matter about the EQs they have or the THUS chip. It doesn’t make up for the cheap drivers inside the Soundcore Liberty 5 Pro. Anker just doesn’t invest the money in that direction for the earphones. And until they do, they will never beat the top players out there regardless of phone call abilities. It’s not enough to beat the fanboys of the other models. Why? Because the problem with having something that proves it’s the best through extreme situations is that extreme situations aren’t happening in most people’s lives. Therefore, they would have to purposefully look for moments to brag about or compare, but after that new thing is done and old, what’s going to settle the most is sound, battery life, and ANC. And the first two they just don’t compete in.
So I hate to be the one with the bad news, but I’m just going to be honest: these earphones are a novelty, a one-trick pony. Their phone call noise rejection isn’t going to hold the majority of people out there. And I promise there will be a new shiny penny that will come soon, and people will again forget about the Soundcore options, like they do every single year. When all is said and done, Sony, Samsung, and possibly Sennheiser (if they release new earphones) will be the leading sales at the end of the year for everything not named Apple. It won’t be Soundcore; it never is, no matter what they do in innovations. They have to put better drivers in their earphones and kill off the “sacrifice feature” model that forces people to pick only certain features instead of having access to all of them, while killing their battery. If they do this, then they will place themselves in more direct competition with the top players. For now, they are merely the new toy and flavor of the month until people get bored or something else comes out. I’m sorry…
Tech-N-Things 