Unauthoritative Pronouncements

Years ago, I bought my first Beats product, Beats X bluetooth headphones. They’re the kind that are earbuds linked together with a piece of linguine and two pill-shaped plastic bits that sit around your collarbone when you’re wearing them. Those house the battery, lightning charging port, microphone, and play/pause button. They also had magnets in the ends of the earbuds so they’d snap together when you took them off making a closed loop instead of just a floppy noodle.

There’s a lot of disagreement about that style of headphone being bad, or compromised, but I’ve never really agreed with that. I’ve felt like they’re the most convenient form factor in many situations because there’s no case to deal with, and you’re not left holding something in your hands if you need to take one or both earbuds out. To each their own.

The battery eventually swelled and crapped out, but I really liked the form factor. Prior to owning them, my headphone cord was always getting caught on things, like the arms on my office chair, or cabinet knobs when I was in the kitchen. This felt freeing, but at the same time I didn’t have to worry about where to put the earbuds if I needed to take them out for a second, they’d just dangle and snap together.

The next model I got was the Beats Flex, which was the evolution of Beats X, but with USB-C for charging instead of lightning, better battery performance, and other little tweaks. It’s still on the market, and it’s price keeps dropping every year. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with my pair except the comically small USB-C cable they pack in the box. Including chargers is wasteful, but including an 8.5” charging cable is also wasteful.

The cable was more of an issue when the product launched, since I couldn’t share my lightning charging cable with it, and needed a separate USB-C cable, but it’s easy enough to solve, and the Beats Flex requires charging less often than the Beats X.

I really wish they refreshed this style of headphones with active noise cancellation, but I get the sense that it’s more important to Beats (and Apple) to have a low-price, entry-level bluetooth headphone. They retail for $79.99 but are almost always on sale for less than $50.

I’ve been interested in AirPods Pro since they were announced, but always shied away from pulling the trigger because they’re quite expensive, and they wouldn’t really replace my Beats Flex for certain tasks where I don’t want to fumble around with a case so I couldn’t really say it was “worth it” as it would do everything. The design didn’t really appeal to me either, with the white stems poking down like upside down Shrek ears.

Then, last year, I saw the Beats Studio Buds+ with its transparent 90s iMac plastic case and I was smitten. One of my old bosses, VFX Supervisor Dan Kramer made an app called DropScout for iOS that does Amazon price tracking. He invited me to the TestFlight and I loaded it up with some stuff to monitor, including those transparent Beats Studio Buds+. They retail for $169.99 through Apple or Beats, but they’d been on sale every now and then through other retailers —like almost every other Apple product.

Once DropScout notified me that the buds hit $129.99 the other week I took out a gift card, and decided to treat myself for this craptacular year.

Transparency in Audio and Plastic

I really like the design of the charging case. The rounded corners make it slipperier than a bar of soap, but I have yet to drop it (knock on wood). The one bummer is that you can see the transparent blobs of glue through the plastic case. We all know from the teardowns of all of these kinds of devices that things are full of glue, but you don’t ordinarily get to look at how unevenly it has been applied. Unfortunately, the most blobs you’ll see the most are the ones on the latch right above the product logo.

Sure, I would love it if it was all perfectly fit together with expertly crafted joinery, but realistically, I’m satisfied that it doesn’t creak or wobble. I don’t stare a the case, but I do know it’s there, so in a sense it will always be a little thing I don’t like about it. I would still rather have the transparent case and buds than solid colors that wouldn’t show the glue.

The other design issue is that the buds are difficult to hold. There are very strong magnets that hold the buds in the case, so you need a firm grip to pull them. However, when you pinch them between your thumb and forefinger they do slide against the teardrop shape of the device. There’s a flat plateau on the teardrop, where the controls are, but it pretty smoothly transitions from that teardrop to the flat side and doesn’t provide much purchase for your fingers.

When you’re just getting used to them you’re left wondering if you put them in the correct ear. With AirPods there’s a very clear direction for them because the stem of them needs to point toward your jaw. With these buds the best way to determine orientation is the lightly engraved “b” logo, which looks like a “6” when you’re holding them because they’re supposed to sit in your ear at an angle, and the logo is applied to look straight when it’s at that angle, not when it’s being viewed “straight” in your fingertips.

There is a very faint “L” and “R” on the part of the teardrop face that rests in your ears, but the lettering is applied to the transparent plastic so it blends in with the look of the other lines in low lighting.

The fit, once they’re properly in your ear, is great, which I suppose is the trade-off for the teardrop shape, and no dangling stem. There’s no sense of discomfort or pressure. The ear tip seal is more important on these to make sure they don’t fall out, and provide the appropriate ANC effect. For some reason I needed the medium tip in one ear, and the small tip in the other ear, so now I’m body conscious about my asymmetrical ear canals.

The control scheme is decent, and I have no real complaints about that at all. That flat surface of the bud is a big button, and each bud has one. You don’t do a light, capacitive touch, you do give it a firm press. One push for play/pause, and a longpress for switching between active noise cancellation and transparency mode. The button can be customized to cycle through ANC, transparency, and off, but it doesn’t ship with that as the default and I see no particular reason to change it. You can’t customize each ear independently so the same choice will for both. You can change the behavior on one, or both, to trigger Siri, but I’m not going to ever do that.

There are no volume controls on the buds, or the case, and all volume adjustment needs to happen via the connected device. That’s fine for every context in which I would use these, but it’s certainly not what people might expect, or want to deal with.

Speaking of expectations, there’s no in-ear detection either, so if you take them out they’ll keep playing until they’re dropped into the case. Personal preference will differ on how big of a deal that is, but as someone used to listening with one Beats Flex earbud in it’s not abnormal.

There’s also no head tracking, so there’s no dynamic head tracking spatial audio, just regular spatial audio, but that works fine for me.

The battery life of these things is great. 36 hours of case charge, and up to nine hours of charge for each bud. That’s better than the stated life of the AirPods Pro that retail for more. You do loose out on wireless charging though.

I haven’t found myself struggling with charging, though I do wish there was a way to know what the charge status of the case is. The reported status to the iPhone is just the buds.

When I first set these up I had some flaky connectivity problems and strange behavior, but I’m guessing it received a firmware update or something once it connected and charged because it’s been on its best behavior since then. There’s no real version history or anything in the Settings app, so I couldn’t say for certain.

It connects to my MacBook Pro faster than my Beats Flex, and it handles going back and forth between my devices better than the Beats Flex. There was one time where I tried to connect it to the Apple TV and it decided it didn’t want to do it, but after messing with a couple things it suddenly worked fine. There’s no perceptible lag or latency with anything I’ve tried to play back.

The thing I do really care about is that ANC. My last experience with noise cancellation was with a very old pair of Sony wired earbuds where you had to put a AAA battery in a big plastic box on the cable, and it provided a constant white noise hum under everything. This is, as you might expect, way better.

The ANC has helped when running fans, air filters (which are also fans), air conditioners, the noise of a refrigerator compressor — everything. It’s been great to focus. Sometimes I find that I’ve paused the audio and I’m just using them as earplugs. I like being able to hear the environment around me when I have Beats Flex on, because it’s important to keep me from getting hit by a car, but I don’t need to hear fans —unless those fans are you, dear readers.

As far as the sound goes: I’m not an audiophile, but I’m quite pleased with the sound from these buds for both podcasts and music. Beats has a reputation for being bass heavy, but I haven’t found that to be the case in my own subjective experience. The audio has greater clarity in the Beats Studio Buds+ over the Beats Flex, of course, but I don’t comparison shop things that people put inside of ear canals.

I did consult some YouTuber reviews where they do compare this stuff, but there were a few comparison videos I watched where some people preferred the Buds+ to the AirPods Pro, and some where they did not. Like this one. For the money, I can’t complain.

Absolutely Recced

I do recommend these, if only because they look pretty, have excellent noise canceling, and sound good. Do I care if you buy them? No, I absolutely do not, and I earn no commission if you do. This isn’t a blog where I post about daily deals, or write up when a product reaches the lowest price ever for a second time.

If you are interested in deals, it’s more satisfying to use something like DropScout, Camelcamelcamel, or other price trackers to keep an eye on things you’re pretty sure you’d like to buy. Especially when there isn’t a tremendous amount of innovation in the wireless earbud space in the last couple years.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll put these buds in and go back to having a brat summer.