Build & comfort

We’re reviewing the Final ZE8000 audiophile true wireless earbuds today and when it comes to design, the Japanese know a thing or two. This isn’t our first Final and the previous Final ZE3000’s design elements come back in the ZE8000. Particularly the texture of the case and buds. A very satisfying paper-like feel. Another similarity is the colors it comes in; black and white. It’s built with all plastic, the case is a bit slippery and very light weight. So light that it borders the ‘cheap’ feeling category.

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Don’t get us wrong – there are no creaks here. Or poor construction, it’s just literally the weight we’re talking about. The case might be a lightweight but the way it looks is definitely Mike Tyson. It big and bulky! The way you open up this big boi is by a satisfying solid sliding mechanism. And sweet mother of wireless audio! The buds are massive! And it’s not just the stem either – once you put them in your ear they stick out so far you might injure passerbyers? Now to be fair, these are supposed to pack some serious audio hardware – so we’ll leave judgement on that for the sound section of this video.

In terms of accessories, you get 5 pairs of silicone tips in total. And the tips themselves are very grippy and help ensure a good seal and secure fit. There’s a slight catch – these are tips for the ear holes as well as the bit that rests on your concha. Which means you won’t get third party tips for these. So make sure you keep the ones that come in the box safe. The comfort on the other hand was less great for us. It’s ok for about an hour, but after that you start feeling discomfort in your ear canal due to that tight seal. But it’s very reminiscent of some IEMs we’ve had. So if you’re ok with IEMs that fill your concha out, this gives you the same experience.

The buds are IPX4, and they probably will stay in your ear for the heaviest workouts possible – if you can bear to keep them in for that long. Back to accessories. Ah yes – you get dust filters and a tool to replace the dust filter at the end of the nozzle. Nothing says audiophile like replaceable dust filters. And finally you get a USB A to Type C cable for charging. Speaking of charging, there is no wireless charging on board. The battery life is average on the buds at 5 hours with ANC on and a meagre 10 hours from the case. Not great for a case with a footprint of this magnitude. There are 4 LEDs on the case to signify battery level – we like this. Very colorblind friendly.

ANC & transparency

We were pretty stoked to see that Final included ANC since their previous ZE3000 didn’t have it. But that stokedness? was short lived. The ANC is honestly poor – and for us came in at Tier D. It was worse than the budget Edifier W240TN which is Tier C and retails for $60. The Final lets in more low end than the Edifier – despite that excellent passive seal! The level of ANC might be enough if you’ve never had ANC which is likely if you’re only looking at these kinds of audiophile grade earbuds.

Then there’s transparency. Again, Tier D. It performed worse than the SoundPeats Capsule3 Pro and the 1More Evo. The voices didn’t sound all too clear and were somewhat suppressed. The low end is very much still cancelled. It’s good enough to go for a walk outdoors and be aware of your surroundings, but don’t expect a very natural ambient experience. Or even thinking you can walk around the office or at home talking to people with the buds in your ears. You know Japan is a beautiful country filled with all kinds of waterfalls, so Final decided to include those relaxing waterfall sounds in transparency mode. You’ll also notice some white noise. Very disturbing… er… I mean relaxing.

And since these are audiophile buds, we’ve gotta say this – you can NOT turn ANC off. IT’s either ANC or transparency.

The upside is the controls. You can cycle between ANC and Transparency by single tapping the left bud. By long pressing the left bud you can enable wind noise reduction – which is very cool for us biking all over the place here in the Netherlands. But… you’re going to need the wind noise reduction because even a little bit of wind caused crazy whooshing to be piped into our ears. Not a comfortable experience. The wind noise reduction helped for sure, but at the same time it made the ambient awareness worse than it already was. If you long press the right bud you can enable Voice-through mode which drops the audio volume and enables ambient mode in case you need to hear your surroundings or talk to someone. Voice through also has these unintended waterfall sounds as a bonus feature. But in our opinion, it’s always quicker, more effective and polite to just pull out. When in doubt, pull out.

Phone calls

But don’t you just love it when we pop popsicles, ice icicles and test testic…

CLICK HERE to listen to the mic test.

Phone calls on the Final ZE8000 should be fine in quiet conditions. But that’s not hard to do. Outdoors we see that the wind and background noise is very audible and takes away from the speaker’s voice. It lowers and cuts the voice making it hard to understand at certain times. If the wind is bearable and you don’t have much background noise, using it for calls outside shouldn’t be a problem. But we wouldn’t buy these specifically for the microphones.

A couple things to mention for the vakman. You can change ANC mode while on a call. As well as turning on the wind reduction mode. Nice. But that’s where it ends apart from answering and hanging up a call. Even though the ZE8000 has volume controls they only apply to music, not to calls. And there’s no muting on the buds themselves, you’ll need to grab your phone for that.

In our day to day, we used the ZE8000 for Teams calls. No complaints from fellow colleagues. But two issues to note. One: after being on a call for a while the right bud sometimes stopped working. Two: after we finished one call and wanted to hop onto another, the buds wouldn’t work for calls. We could select it as a device, but others couldn’t hear us and our mic didn’t work either. The only way we could solve both of these was by putting both buds into the case and taking them out again. Very annoying. So unless you make many calls – you’ll be fine.

Connectivity & app

But if you don’t make many calls, and you do own many devices, then you’re in trouble again. The ZE8000 is monogamous and will only stay connected to a single device – no multipoint here. Neither is there support for pulling a connection from a previously paired device. No Google Fast Pair either and you can forget about seeing a device list in the app. The only way to quickly connect to another device is by opening the case with the buds in it and clicking the pairing button two times. It will disconnect from the paired device and enter pairing mode. Definitely not ideal.

Connectivity in general has been stable, no issues. But something we’ve experienced with the ZE3000 after we published our review is that one of the samples broke on us. The right earbud would have intermittent connectivity. We haven’t had anything like that on the ZE8000 yet, except for the right bud occasionally not working on calls. But that was fixed after putting it in the case. We didn’t face such issues when listening to music though.

Then we’ve got the app called Final Connect. Very minimalistic. And very sound focussed as you’d come to expect from such a product. Apart from an ANC toggle to switch between the four modes: ANC, Ambient, Wind-cut and Voice through, the rest has all got to do with sound. Let’s talk about that in the next section.

Sound quality

So to begin with – to get the best sound out of these, you will need a Snapdragon sound enabled phone. Man I think we should start up a channel just to talk about other topics like codec fragmentation. Leave a comment if you think that would be a good idea?

Anyway – we tested this with the Asus Zenfone 9 that El Jefe himself recommended to to us. Shout out to him. And you know what – these are very different on regular APTX on a Samsung phone for example compared to a Snapdragon Sound phone. Also on iPhone, the volume was low. Just to be clear, for regular listening, we could reach comfortable volumes, but it just doesn’t ever get LOUD. We could go almost maximum volume on the Samsung phone and the iPhone while there was way more headroom on a Snapdragon Sound phone. This might hurt our video’s retention guys, but our point of view is – if you’re getting these without a SnapDragon Sound phone… just don’t! Not only is the volume not great, but in general we thought these really SHONE on a Snapdragon Sound enabled phone. THAT’s when you get the best out of these and that extra doekoe is put to good use.

So – about how these sound in the best possible conditions – on a Snapdragon Sound enabled device. Well these are flat as f***! They’re made for critical listening rather than for a fun sound. I mean we’re not kidding about the flatness – check out this frequency response chart we generated. Surprisingly despite the flat character they sound pretty decent at low volumes too, but at higher volumes, these really open up. The bass is very restrained, timbres are nice. The one ‘flaw’, if anything, is the treble. It’s very much on the ‘light’ side, especially the lower treble and especially at lower volumes. To be honest, that is kinda my personal preference. There’s a bit of a spike in the upper treble, but that only came in to play in VERY rare cases.

Especially for vocals – these were really very enjoyable. The soundstage is pretty decent too and you know what – for all the genres we listened to – from Nat King Cole to Slipknot – we didn’t feel that there was anything really lacking when using APTX Adaptive.

You can of course tweak the EQ, but the Final Connect app’s ‘Pro’ EQ is… limited. First off – it looks parametric, but isn’t, because there’s no Q factor to play with. You can only adjust 4 bands at any given time. This is a bit weird – you choose between 14 frequencies, but at any given time, you can only adjust 4 of them. You get a choice between one of 4 bass frequencies, one of 3 low mid frequencies, one of 4 higher mid frequencies and one of 3 treble frequencies. And one of 2 DHRME’s hosts.

Final is also touting an ‘8K sound’ feature and we didn’t see any significant difference enabling or disabling this, so we ended up just leaving it on. We thought that this might be similar to Sony’s digital upscaling DSEE feature, but after testing with a low quality file, it was really zero difference.

A really nice touch that Final has added is the ability to really fine tune your volume control. For someone who really likes dialling in their volume just exactly right – this is a game changer! No other earbuds or headphones we’ve seen do this. And it’s a small, but very important feature to get those volume micro adjustments.

And if you’re wondering – the ZE8000 sounds different from the Final ZE3000, which was also pretty good, but had more pronounced mid bass and slightly sharper higher frequencies.

Comparing these to the something like the Sennheiser IE200, these sound much wider, less intimate, bassier, quieter in the low treble, but in general, despite the two different stock tunings – you could very easily pick these over the Senneheisers – and those are audiophile earbuds that are only about sound! For longer listening sessions especially, the Final gets the win due to its less fatiguing nature.

Should you buy the Final ZE8000

So – you may say great sound quality is worth a lot of money. And you know what it probably is. But it’s pretty simple for us – if you’re looking for excellent sounding wireless earbuds that lean more towards flat rather than V shaped – these are the buds for you – if your phone can support Snapdragon Sound. For every other case – there are better buds out there.

You’ve reached the Final stages of this video … and we’ve been DHRME. Namaste.