Better than AirPods NeoBuds Pro 2

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enyou always know that you have a good product in your hands when the manufacturer has released a new generation and they haven't felt the need to make huge changes and that's very much the case with edifier's excellent neuds Pro 2 they still sound great they're still really comfortable and they're still some of the best value premium wireless earbuds on the market the RRP for these neuds Pro 2 is £1 130 or $130 but at time of recording you can pick them up from Amazon for £104 or $103 and compared to similar quality buds from Big Brands like Sony and apple that's a steal so what's changed from these original version one neuds pro to the version two well we do have some minor design changes the charging case is a bit wider and a bit flatter and the red Night Rider style LED on the original is now a white LED or you can choose from a selection of eight different colors to suit your preference I've gone with pink there's not a huge difference in the appearance or the shape of the buds themselves and I have to say I'm really pleased about that I used to have some Sony wireless buds and they just wouldn't stay snug in my ears no matter which of the silicone tips that I used and I found they'd irritate my skin after about 30 minutes the Apple air pods just don't suit my ear shape and they fall out all the time for me but neuds they stay in place and offer all day Comfort the Aesthetics of these buds is always a sub objective matter but personally I really like the design and we've got the black ones here to have a look at but they're also available in white I quite like the silver finish on the original neuds Pro but that's not an option on the new ones according to edifier Specs with noise cancellation on you get 4 hours from the earbuds and 12 hours from the charging case you just put the buds back in the charging case and they'll charge up again three more times uh in practice I've never had them in for as long as 4 hours and I always put them back in the case so they're good for all day use if you switch noise cancellation off you'll be up to 5 and 1/2 hours on the earbuds with 16 1/2 hours in the charging case and to recharge the case takes just an hour over USBC and the earbuds themselves just take an hour as well and I'd imagine that's fine for the vast majority of people and it's good to know that a quick 15minute charge will give you 2 hours of playback time so the main area of improvement over the original neuds Pro is in the area of noise cancellation where the original buds could achieve a noise reduction of 42 DB the new buds can reduce Noise by 50 DB and that is a noticeable Improvement Plus the noise cancellation is now described as multi-channel which I assume means that it's working across more frequencies you do need to moderate your expectations here it's not like you're going to pop these things in and experience total silence if you're used to having good over thee noise cancelling headphones don't expect the same level of noise reduction with earbuds a a lot of the effect that you get in over the ear headphones is due to the seal between the ear cups and your head I thought I'd try out the noise reduction in a couple of different scenarios firstly mowing the grass in our Orchard which is a job I usually do whilst listening to music on my Sony over thee headphones could the neuds Pro 2 cut out enough of the mowing noise to allow me to enjoy my music actually yes I was really impressed and I found it to be a good balance between having noise reduction but still being aware of the noise of the mower which is probably a good thing I also tried the buds out on a train journey and again I found the results were good they cut out enough of the noise to enhance the enjoyment of what I was listening to but I was still aware of the station announcements coming through the PA system ideal there are of course different levels of noise cancellation available and I'll talk about those in a moment but first of all let's just cover off the other spec differences over the first generation neuds Pro we have spatial audio and head tracking and it works too it keeps the direction of sound sources constant whilst you move your head around which is a really interesting effect now I confess I'm mainly interested in just enjoying music in conventional stereo but if you're into spatial audio these might be worth a look the audio codec support has been updated to now include AAC and lhdc 5.0 if you have a streaming source that supports lhdc 5.0 you can stream highres audio up to 192 khz and 20 4bit I've not been able to try this out yet but I think whilst it's nice to have the best quality stream possible the quality that you hear in your ears is always going to be governed by the drivers in the earbuds and I have to say these earbuds sound really good if though you're a real audio file looking for the best in highres acoustic Fidelity you're probably going to spend a little more on a set of wired earbuds the neob buts Pro to now have wearing detection so when you take them out of your ears they'll pause whatever you're listening to we also use these kind of earbuds for making calls on our phone and we do now have an additional microphone in each earbud so you get a total of four on each side and these are combined with AI or machine learning to filter out things like background noise and wind noise and that helps to improve the overall quality of the call in any conditions I thought I'd test this so I popped outside by the main road here near the office where there's a bit of traffic and some wind noise and first of all I just did a test phone call to Ben who said that I sounded very clear but we wanted to capture that so I also recorded a quick video so I've just brought myself up here by the main road where we've got traffic coming past and I'm using the Blackmagic camera app on my iPhone which allows me to select the neuds as an audio Source uh hopefully it's uh doing a reasonable job of uh cutting down the background noise of the traffic and the wind where I am as far as quality goes for phone calls I think this is absolutely fine there were quite a few cars going past me and they don't really come out that loud in the recording so I'll call that a win so those are the main differences over the original neuds Pro let's now talk about the overall features of these Buds and we'll start with the sound quality each earbud has got two drivers there's a traditional Dynamic driver which works like any other speaker it moves air to reproduce sound and this takes care of a wide range of frequencies and really ensures you get a decent bass response but the neuds pro also use a NS balanced armature driver and this type of driver works by sending a signal to vibrate a tiny read That's balanced between two magnets and then the motion of this read is transferred to a stiff aluminium diaphragm the result is excellent Clarity especially in those higher frequencies the setup is completed with the use of an active crossover and what that does is splits the frequencies so it sends lower and middle frequencies to the dynamic driver and the high frequencies to the armature driver it's clever stuff and the net result is frankly lovely audio quality is of course somewhat subjective but I think a key decider for me is just whether or not I'm enjoying the music I'm listening to and with neuds Pro 2 I do enjoy what I listen to I've listened to a lot of my favorite albums and a wide variety of different styles of music and I've enjoyed it all and I've never found myself feeling like I'm missing something in the music I always like to put on a mark noler album to test any new headphones or speakers because I find his music is always immaculately mixed mixed and it's a great test of the quality of your listening equipment and to my ear these earbuds pass that test with flying colors particularly given the price point pairing the buds with your device is really easy there's a little button here on the charging case so with the buds in the case you just hold that down and it goes into pairing mode uh then you connect to it on your device you can only pair to one device at once but if say you're using your computer and your phone you don't need to delete the pairing from those devices just put the buds back into pairing mode and hit connect on your device there's also support for Google Fast pair if your device supports that now we mentioned Comfort earlier for me this is one of the biggest selling points of these earbuds so it's worth saying again that they are really comfortable of course we all have different shape ears so what works for one may not suit another but I suspect this design would suit most people an edifier provides seven different sizes of ear tips so you can find the size that suits you I found that some earbuds just won't sit in the ears tightly and you might have experienced this as well where you're listening to some music as you're walking along and you find they're slowly coming loose and what that does is reduce the bass quality and it lets in more environment noise but in all of my time wearing these earbuds that hasn't happened due to years of muscle memory with earbuds I do occasionally find myself reaching up to push them in tighter but each time I'm pleasantly surprised to find I didn't need to and this also extends to exercising at least they work great whilst I was on my trainer bike the flywheel makes a bit of a noise and that was nicely filtered out by the noise cancellation and the buds stayed in firmly for the whole workout even when I got a bit sweaty at the end obviously you don't move your head around too much on a bike and I'm no Runner so I can't tell you how secure they are in that scenario I can tell you that they're ip54 rated for dust Splash and of course sweat resistance there is a partner app for your phone that allows you to access all of the features of the earbuds you don't have to download the app in order to use the earbuds but I would recommend installing it as you'll see there are quite a few additional features first of all the app shows you the charge state of the buds and the case if the buds are in the case and then we've got the noise cancellation options there are three basic levels high medium and low so depending on the noisiness of your environment you can adapt the level to suit no matter how good any noise cancellation algorithm is you're always going to lose a little of the original Sound Source so turning down the noise cancellation can improve the quality you'll also find an Ambient sound mode which uses the microphones on the earbuds to pipe in some Ambient sound and then you've got three choices on how it does that you can have it Focus specifically on background noise now that might be useful for example for hearing traffic or you can have it focus on voices so that you can hear conversation around you or there's a blend of the two if you're outdoors in a windy environment you'll also appreciate the wind reduction mode which of course is for being outdoors not just sitting next to someone with flatulence now presumably this mode is focusing on some specific lower frequencies to counteract wind noise and that seems to work pretty well uh finally we also have the option to switch off noise cancellation completely on the next screen we've got our three listening modes youve got music for yeah music uh then there's a game mode which prioritizes speed of response over Fidelity in order to reduce latency I can't see any specific figures in the specs for that but Gamers will no doubt appreciate having option and then we've got the spatial audio mode with the movement detection what you do is hold your head still whilst looking straight ahead and you tap the calibrating button it calibrates and in a moment you're ready to listen to spatial audio next we've got the EQ screen which has got a quick setting for classical music and another for what it calls Dynamic Sound but I prefer to set my own custom EQ and you can do that too I found that adding a little base and some high mids made the earbuds a little closer to my taste the four band e Q is surprisingly versatile you can adjust the target frequency and the Q factor which determines how much effect your change has on the surrounding frequencies in the settings menu we've got quick access to the online manual there is a small printed copy in the Box as well and it's simple to follow it just describes the key features one of which is the touch controls the buds will respond to a double or triple tap and you can completely customize how this works for each earbud you'll notice there's also a fine my buds feature which plays a repeating tone through the earbuds to help you find them but obviously they need to be charged and they would need to be within Bluetooth range for this to work but it could be a useful function if you've dropped one on the floor so I think edifier have done a really great job on these and as a brand they seem to be continuing to improve their products whereas some of these new audio brands hereit in the market seem solely focused on targeting price points with no consistency to their product designs and it ations edifier seems instead to be trying to establish itself as a serious audio brand we were impressed with the progress of their over-ear headphones and I'm impressed again with these neuds Pro 2 now full disclosure edifier sent these for review without charge and I don't have to return them but edifier don't get to see this video before it's published and I've given you my honest opinion would I spend £130 of my own money to buy a pair of these in a heartbeat could edifier make them many better well personally I hope they don't make any wholesale changes this is a proven formula after all so it should just be a case of small refinements but perhaps it would be nice for this uh charging case to have wireless charging capability In fairness though I've got so many USBC devices at this point it's not really a problem to plug them in for an hour so if you're in the market for some premium noise cancelling earbuds that aren't going to break the bank and that punch well above their price point the neuds pro two are well worth checking out and if you want even more value for money and the new features here aren't as important to you look around for some discounts on the original neuds Pro they sound just as good we'll put some links in the description as always it costs you nothing extra to use the links but if you do buy anything at all the channel earns a small commission so thank you so much for your support and speaking of support please consider subscribing and leaving us a thumbs up or a thumbs down if you prefer I'll see you again soon for some more geekyou always know that you have a good product in your hands when the manufacturer has released a new generation and they haven't felt the need to make huge changes and that's very much the case with edifier's excellent neuds Pro 2 they still sound great they're still really comfortable and they're still some of the best value premium wireless earbuds on the market the RRP for these neuds Pro 2 is £1 130 or $130 but at time of recording you can pick them up from Amazon for £104 or $103 and compared to similar quality buds from Big Brands like Sony and apple that's a steal so what's changed from these original version one neuds pro to the version two well we do have some minor design changes the charging case is a bit wider and a bit flatter and the red Night Rider style LED on the original is now a white LED or you can choose from a selection of eight different colors to suit your preference I've gone with pink there's not a huge difference in the appearance or the shape of the buds themselves and I have to say I'm really pleased about that I used to have some Sony wireless buds and they just wouldn't stay snug in my ears no matter which of the silicone tips that I used and I found they'd irritate my skin after about 30 minutes the Apple air pods just don't suit my ear shape and they fall out all the time for me but neuds they stay in place and offer all day Comfort the Aesthetics of these buds is always a sub objective matter but personally I really like the design and we've got the black ones here to have a look at but they're also available in white I quite like the silver finish on the original neuds Pro but that's not an option on the new ones according to edifier Specs with noise cancellation on you get 4 hours from the earbuds and 12 hours from the charging case you just put the buds back in the charging case and they'll charge up again three more times uh in practice I've never had them in for as long as 4 hours and I always put them back in the case so they're good for all day use if you switch noise cancellation off you'll be up to 5 and 1/2 hours on the earbuds with 16 1/2 hours in the charging case and to recharge the case takes just an hour over USBC and the earbuds themselves just take an hour as well and I'd imagine that's fine for the vast majority of people and it's good to know that a quick 15minute charge will give you 2 hours of playback time so the main area of improvement over the original neuds Pro is in the area of noise cancellation where the original buds could achieve a noise reduction of 42 DB the new buds can reduce Noise by 50 DB and that is a noticeable Improvement Plus the noise cancellation is now described as multi-channel which I assume means that it's working across more frequencies you do need to moderate your expectations here it's not like you're going to pop these things in and experience total silence if you're used to having good over thee noise cancelling headphones don't expect the same level of noise reduction with earbuds a a lot of the effect that you get in over the ear headphones is due to the seal between the ear cups and your head I thought I'd try out the noise reduction in a couple of different scenarios firstly mowing the grass in our Orchard which is a job I usually do whilst listening to music on my Sony over thee headphones could the neuds Pro 2 cut out enough of the mowing noise to allow me to enjoy my music actually yes I was really impressed and I found it to be a good balance between having noise reduction but still being aware of the noise of the mower which is probably a good thing I also tried the buds out on a train journey and again I found the results were good they cut out enough of the noise to enhance the enjoyment of what I was listening to but I was still aware of the station announcements coming through the PA system ideal there are of course different levels of noise cancellation available and I'll talk about those in a moment but first of all let's just cover off the other spec differences over the first generation neuds Pro we have spatial audio and head tracking and it works too it keeps the direction of sound sources constant whilst you move your head around which is a really interesting effect now I confess I'm mainly interested in just enjoying music in conventional stereo but if you're into spatial audio these might be worth a look the audio codec support has been updated to now include AAC and lhdc 5.0 if you have a streaming source that supports lhdc 5.0 you can stream highres audio up to 192 khz and 20 4bit I've not been able to try this out yet but I think whilst it's nice to have the best quality stream possible the quality that you hear in your ears is always going to be governed by the drivers in the earbuds and I have to say these earbuds sound really good if though you're a real audio file looking for the best in highres acoustic Fidelity you're probably going to spend a little more on a set of wired earbuds the neob buts Pro to now have wearing detection so when you take them out of your ears they'll pause whatever you're listening to we also use these kind of earbuds for making calls on our phone and we do now have an additional microphone in each earbud so you get a total of four on each side and these are combined with AI or machine learning to filter out things like background noise and wind noise and that helps to improve the overall quality of the call in any conditions I thought I'd test this so I popped outside by the main road here near the office where there's a bit of traffic and some wind noise and first of all I just did a test phone call to Ben who said that I sounded very clear but we wanted to capture that so I also recorded a quick video so I've just brought myself up here by the main road where we've got traffic coming past and I'm using the Blackmagic camera app on my iPhone which allows me to select the neuds as an audio Source uh hopefully it's uh doing a reasonable job of uh cutting down the background noise of the traffic and the wind where I am as far as quality goes for phone calls I think this is absolutely fine there were quite a few cars going past me and they don't really come out that loud in the recording so I'll call that a win so those are the main differences over the original neuds Pro let's now talk about the overall features of these Buds and we'll start with the sound quality each earbud has got two drivers there's a traditional Dynamic driver which works like any other speaker it moves air to reproduce sound and this takes care of a wide range of frequencies and really ensures you get a decent bass response but the neuds pro also use a NS balanced armature driver and this type of driver works by sending a signal to vibrate a tiny read That's balanced between two magnets and then the motion of this read is transferred to a stiff aluminium diaphragm the result is excellent Clarity especially in those higher frequencies the setup is completed with the use of an active crossover and what that does is splits the frequencies so it sends lower and middle frequencies to the dynamic driver and the high frequencies to the armature driver it's clever stuff and the net result is frankly lovely audio quality is of course somewhat subjective but I think a key decider for me is just whether or not I'm enjoying the music I'm listening to and with neuds Pro 2 I do enjoy what I listen to I've listened to a lot of my favorite albums and a wide variety of different styles of music and I've enjoyed it all and I've never found myself feeling like I'm missing something in the music I always like to put on a mark noler album to test any new headphones or speakers because I find his music is always immaculately mixed mixed and it's a great test of the quality of your listening equipment and to my ear these earbuds pass that test with flying colors particularly given the price point pairing the buds with your device is really easy there's a little button here on the charging case so with the buds in the case you just hold that down and it goes into pairing mode uh then you connect to it on your device you can only pair to one device at once but if say you're using your computer and your phone you don't need to delete the pairing from those devices just put the buds back into pairing mode and hit connect on your device there's also support for Google Fast pair if your device supports that now we mentioned Comfort earlier for me this is one of the biggest selling points of these earbuds so it's worth saying again that they are really comfortable of course we all have different shape ears so what works for one may not suit another but I suspect this design would suit most people an edifier provides seven different sizes of ear tips so you can find the size that suits you I found that some earbuds just won't sit in the ears tightly and you might have experienced this as well where you're listening to some music as you're walking along and you find they're slowly coming loose and what that does is reduce the bass quality and it lets in more environment noise but in all of my time wearing these earbuds that hasn't happened due to years of muscle memory with earbuds I do occasionally find myself reaching up to push them in tighter but each time I'm pleasantly surprised to find I didn't need to and this also extends to exercising at least they work great whilst I was on my trainer bike the flywheel makes a bit of a noise and that was nicely filtered out by the noise cancellation and the buds stayed in firmly for the whole workout even when I got a bit sweaty at the end obviously you don't move your head around too much on a bike and I'm no Runner so I can't tell you how secure they are in that scenario I can tell you that they're ip54 rated for dust Splash and of course sweat resistance there is a partner app for your phone that allows you to access all of the features of the earbuds you don't have to download the app in order to use the earbuds but I would recommend installing it as you'll see there are quite a few additional features first of all the app shows you the charge state of the buds and the case if the buds are in the case and then we've got the noise cancellation options there are three basic levels high medium and low so depending on the noisiness of your environment you can adapt the level to suit no matter how good any noise cancellation algorithm is you're always going to lose a little of the original Sound Source so turning down the noise cancellation can improve the quality you'll also find an Ambient sound mode which uses the microphones on the earbuds to pipe in some Ambient sound and then you've got three choices on how it does that you can have it Focus specifically on background noise now that might be useful for example for hearing traffic or you can have it focus on voices so that you can hear conversation around you or there's a blend of the two if you're outdoors in a windy environment you'll also appreciate the wind reduction mode which of course is for being outdoors not just sitting next to someone with flatulence now presumably this mode is focusing on some specific lower frequencies to counteract wind noise and that seems to work pretty well uh finally we also have the option to switch off noise cancellation completely on the next screen we've got our three listening modes youve got music for yeah music uh then there's a game mode which prioritizes speed of response over Fidelity in order to reduce latency I can't see any specific figures in the specs for that but Gamers will no doubt appreciate having option and then we've got the spatial audio mode with the movement detection what you do is hold your head still whilst looking straight ahead and you tap the calibrating button it calibrates and in a moment you're ready to listen to spatial audio next we've got the EQ screen which has got a quick setting for classical music and another for what it calls Dynamic Sound but I prefer to set my own custom EQ and you can do that too I found that adding a little base and some high mids made the earbuds a little closer to my taste the four band e Q is surprisingly versatile you can adjust the target frequency and the Q factor which determines how much effect your change has on the surrounding frequencies in the settings menu we've got quick access to the online manual there is a small printed copy in the Box as well and it's simple to follow it just describes the key features one of which is the touch controls the buds will respond to a double or triple tap and you can completely customize how this works for each earbud you'll notice there's also a fine my buds feature which plays a repeating tone through the earbuds to help you find them but obviously they need to be charged and they would need to be within Bluetooth range for this to work but it could be a useful function if you've dropped one on the floor so I think edifier have done a really great job on these and as a brand they seem to be continuing to improve their products whereas some of these new audio brands hereit in the market seem solely focused on targeting price points with no consistency to their product designs and it ations edifier seems instead to be trying to establish itself as a serious audio brand we were impressed with the progress of their over-ear headphones and I'm impressed again with these neuds Pro 2 now full disclosure edifier sent these for review without charge and I don't have to return them but edifier don't get to see this video before it's published and I've given you my honest opinion would I spend £130 of my own money to buy a pair of these in a heartbeat could edifier make them many better well personally I hope they don't make any wholesale changes this is a proven formula after all so it should just be a case of small refinements but perhaps it would be nice for this uh charging case to have wireless charging capability In fairness though I've got so many USBC devices at this point it's not really a problem to plug them in for an hour so if you're in the market for some premium noise cancelling earbuds that aren't going to break the bank and that punch well above their price point the neuds pro two are well worth checking out and if you want even more value for money and the new features here aren't as important to you look around for some discounts on the original neuds Pro they sound just as good we'll put some links in the description as always it costs you nothing extra to use the links but if you do buy anything at all the channel earns a small commission so thank you so much for your support and speaking of support please consider subscribing and leaving us a thumbs up or a thumbs down if you prefer I'll see you again soon for some more geek\n"