The Anker Buds 2 continue the traditions Anker has upheld for years. They enter the market and provide a great challenge to any other company in the space. They give people cause to pause before spending more money on expensive earphones when they consider what Anker offers. By that statement alone, Anker is successful, regardless of the results for me. I respect what they have done, if for no other reason than because they had the courage to do it when others wouldn’t or couldn’t. This is why they fall within my top five suggested earphones for this year.
So why the title? Why am I returning them? Well, for me it comes down to the same things that caused me to return the Liberty Pros. They are really good earphones that never quite make it all the way. They get you almost to the finish line but never get you fully over it. But at their price, you tend to forgive that. For me, the sound quality is a big jump this time around, but unfortunately, other companies like Sennheiser and Sony stepped up too. No matter how much effort the driver put into the Buds 2, they still fall short of matching Sennheiser, Noble, and Sony. The specific areas are timbre, imaging, and mids. The Ankers seem to have the bass and treble down, but the drivers really had a tough time nailing the proper mid balance, tonality, timbre, and the overall layered effect in separation. The tuning is where I think they fall short. It is like the difference between a speaker that gets loud for noise’s sake and a speaker that has proper pitch and quality. You typically see this when cheaper drivers have to be turned up to hear dynamic ranges properly, while higher-quality drivers do not have to be turned up as much to reveal their range. Their sound still seems a little more generic, basically.
But the sound wasn’t the biggest thing. What really made me change my mind was the very thing they are being praised for: phone call quality. You see, what I discovered was that, yes, it cancels out noise better than any earphones in the world, so they did advertise this correctly. But what most people fail to mention in their tests is that the voice clarity for phone calls is not very clear, sounding very nasally and a little muffled, even in quiet rooms. I called my wife thinking I was going to impress her, and she told me within minutes that my voice wasn’t as good as it had been on past earphones. She said she could hear me, but the clarity wasn’t as clean. I get that people want to brag about being able to take a call while mowing their yard, but in most cases, I’m not in those extreme situations. I’m in normal situations, and if my voice sounds nasal or slightly muffled in those environments, what good is it to me? So, this is what really decided things for me. I mean I have a ton of earphones and if I’m still going to reach for my Sennheiser or Airpod Pro 3 for a sound or phone calls I don’t need to have the Anker Buds 2.
At the end of day, the Anker Buds 2 are good overall, but they do not beat my other earphones in sound or features, and they fail to deliver vocal clarity on phone calls under normal conditions, which I would have thought would be great with their phone tech, but it is not. It is merely better noise-canceling tech for eliminating background noise on phone calls. We still have a ways to go regarding voice clarity with the Thus chip, and most people are not mentioning that fact. Again, I still recommend them for those of you looking to spend less on good earphones. They just aren’t something I have room for with all my other options.
