Guys – so many audiophile companies try to make wireless earbuds, but they just fail at the basics – and often even on their core competence – sound. So how does BeyerDynamic do? Because these byrds – they ain’t free.

All right guys – before you Pay-Yer Dinaros to BeyerDynamic for the Free Byrd… What does the $200 get you in the box?

Build, Design and Comfort

The box itself is very nicely packaged and presents in a nice plasticless shell. And inside – there’s a lot. To start off with – you get a ton of tip options. Three sizes of foam tips and five sizes of silicone tips. The foam tips are nicer than what you get with the Sony too – very pliable once you squeeze them with some force. The silicone tips do well too. They come with an oval shape that prioritizes comfort. For a solid seal, go for the foam tips. Nice to have that choice in the box – very few companies do this. And also a shoutout to that orange color. We’re all about it.

If you like it comfortable in bed, you don’t wanna wear too much, and that includes these earbuds, since they stick out a little bit and we don’t think they’ll work for side sleepers.

Staying on the superficial, these buds look kinda nifty with that band running across the face of the earbuds and the LED indicators add a nice design element. The buds are IPX4, so you can feel fairly confident of using these to work out in liquid-ful, but dust free zones, since the X means Extra Useless at Resisting Dust.

And speaking of the face of these buds – that’s where the touch controls are housed. Let’s start with the basics – the touch controls are very responsive and we think that the hardware is quite good. But what good is hardware without good software – and here we think that BeyerDynamic could have done better. To begin with they seem to like this gesture of tapping once and then holding. It’s how you control volume and how you pair the buds once they’re in the case. Pretty non-standard and takes some getting used to. The touch controls are not individually customisable, but BeyerDynamic has made the choice to give you 2 sets of controls. ‘Complete’ and ‘Focus’. One with volume and one without. Not quite sure what that’s about. Oh – and speaking of volume, one notch of volume adjustment is like 2-3 clicks on a phone – not great. And from an audio company, we would have expected more finesse here.

The case is a bit bigger than the average case but still quite pocketable. It also supports wireless charging, which is always great for topping up that battery.

What’s also great – is that battery life. In our battery rundown test, we hit just under 8 hours with ANC on AND APTX Adaptive enabled. Now those are solid numbers! The most real-life example of this was we were using these buds with 5-10% battery remaining at a cafe. And you know what – the Lex Fridman podcast ran for a good one hour. Incredible. I mean overall sure, BeyerDynamic advertises 11 hours, but credit where it’s due – a real-life 8 hours is better than an advertised 11 hours. WHAT did I just say?

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Active Noise Cancelling

When it comes to active noise cancelling – these buds are a bit of a mixed bag. I mean – the good news is that the ANC does well with low end noise. It eliminates more noise than the Sony LinkBuds S – when it comes to low level engine rumble etc. However ANC lets in a bit too much of the mids and almost accentuates the higher frequencies. So the final effect is almost like a kind of transparency mode for certain sounds.

When it came to using these buds in windy conditions – nothing really seemed to counter the wind. We even tried changing the mode to off, rather than ANC, but still there was plenty of wind being piped in. If that’s your use case, then it might be good to look at something else. Overall we put it in Tier B.

Transparency

And B stands for BeyerDynamic also in terms of transparency for us. Because even though the clarity was very good, the overall volume levels were lower than many other buds we’ve tried. We put it at about the same level as the SoundCore Liberty 4 – very much a Tier B. You did feel like the outside world was being let in, but much softer. To the extent that this was fine for maybe listening to loud announcements, but not necessarily to have a conversation comfortably. It’s by no means bad. Just not stellar.

And just to note: you don’t get any sorts of controls or adjustments to the level of ANC and Transparency. What you hear is what you get.

Connectivity and Extras

Where audiophile companies have failed us in the past when it comes to true wireless earbuds has been reliability. Now – this is also a very difficult thing to test, in general. Because the day after our review of the Technics AZ80 dropped, the buds started acting a bit weird. But in our time with the Free Byrd – we’ve had VERY solid connectivity with the app. No dropouts, even when switching between devices.

Speaking of switching devices, there’s no multipoint on this, but you guys know our position on this. If you have exactly two devices, multipoint is useful. But if you’re living that multi-device life, having a ‘pull connection’ feature, where you select the earbuds from the Bluetooth device list to immediately connect – that is infinitely more valuable. BeyerDynamic is a bit funny about this. They’ve even branded it calling it ‘Barge In Dynamic Connect’. Must we brand everything guys? Really? In that case we’re calling you guys the DHRME Army. Thank you for your service!

But still, that’s a feature we love and these buds come with it. You also get Google fast pair on board and there’s a wear sensor that you can use to play or pause your music based on if these buds are in your ears. It worked pretty reliably for us.

There are some more extras – like Amazon Alexa ‘built in’. Sure. There’s also a low latency mode for you gamers out there, but in general use like watching videos on YouTube, we didn’t notice any latency. Oh – and the voice prompts are either in English or German. JAWOHL!

The only – little – but we have is that the app doesn’t show up as ‘beyerdynamic’ or ‘free byrd’, but ‘Miy’. Why!

Calls

The BeyerDynamic actually did fairly all right for calls in a noisy situation. The noise suppression is decent and it isolates the voice pretty well. In wind, it struggled though. Admittedly, we put it up against a heavy hitter – the Sony LinkBuds S. A gentle breeze should still be alright as our full samples for our icicle and tested members and patrons show. In terms of vakman controls – BeyerDynamic’s giving us the byrd. On the buds, you can only accept, reject, cycle and end calls. No mute controls. Volume controls do work on calls though if you’re using the ‘complete’ set of controls.

CLICK HERE to listen to the call test.

Sound

So sound – this is what you came here for, right?

In terms of sound – these bring BIG sound! My God! That bass – I was really not expecting that! As a recording company – I’d expected a more neutral tuning, but that sub bass is BOOM BOOM IN YOUR FACE! Did it affect the overall sound signature? Well, not really. You know one of our very favourite sounding earbuds in terms of true wireless is the Sony WF 1000 XM4 – and these really rival those. While maybe boosting up some treble frequencies a bit. I do slightly prefer the timbre on the Sony’s though and the Beyers can – I can’t believe I’m saying this – come across more bass heavy!

On a non-Snapdragon sound Android phone using just APTX they do sound pretty decent too, but the max volume is a bit lower than on APTX Adaptive. Overall these are pretty loud, but not the loudest and most of the Sony wireless buds for example or the Status Between 3 ANC deliver much higher peak volume. But again – fair warning – these are plenty loud if you’re not hard of hearing or don’t have very quiet recordings.

The soundstage is pretty wide and overall these buds sound great. Albeit sometimes at lower volumes, they tended to sound a bit bland. The EQ shift while moving from normal to ANC definitely adds some more low end, but otherwise the sound character stays pretty much unchanged.

So if you’re someone who likes a slight V shape in their sound, these are a very good choice. And for an even more V shape, there’s a preset – literally called V shape – that pimps up the two edges of the V. Sure the mids get a bit scooped out, but yeah – that’s what a V shape is. Or maybe we’re just getting old and can’t hear the treble frequencies as well anymore.

Oh – and speaking of compensating for your hearing or lack thereof – there’s ‘sound profile’ – a hearing assessment that makes you listen to a beep through the sounds of crickets mating in the jungle and determines how well you hear. And here we were SUPER happy with the results! You can even choose how much of the adjustment you can apply. Even using the maximum ‘richer’ setting, stuff sounded good! The only shame is that to save your results you have to sign up with a Mimi account. Mimi not signing up. And what this means is – if you switch to another phone without logging into Mimi – the hearing adjustment changes are not transferred over, only EQ changes are.

And that’s the last downside of the BeyerDynamic in terms of sound. There IS not custom EQ, just presets. Good ones, but still limited if you’re a tweaker.

Conclusion

So guys, we won’t compare these buds to any other we have because we’re working on a premium wireless earbuds video. So – yeah stay subscribed and if you want that video, comment below ‘I have come. I want some premium.’ But let’s go back to the question at the beginning of this video. Has BeyerDynamic failed at making wireless earbuds? Has another audiophile company run up against DHRME? Well – unlike some others, we’re happy to report – absolutely not. These buds sound good, and are surprisingly feature-rich. They have a bug-free app and top of the line battery life. Unless you want the best ANC and transparency and make calls in very challenging conditions, we don’t think you can really go wrong with these buds. But whether these are the best true wireless earbuds money can buy? That’s a story for another video.

Buying these premium buds is great for content, but terrible for our wallets, but that’s what we did for this video. We try to keep it honest and we don’t accept money from the companies whose products we review. So thanks for continuing to support the channel as YouTube members and Patrons. And tested tier members – you’re in for a giveaway. So get in on that giveaway by becoming a Tested-tier patron or YouTube member!

You might become a buyer of the Beyer…and we’ve been DHRME… Namaste!