Really think. So let’s talk about it and its competition in $100 ANC earbuds space. I might actually get philosophical on this one! You know we made a video just about a year ago on the best sub $100 earbuds and almost none of those buds except one could do multipoint. Fast forward to 2022 and you get features like multipoint, wireless charging and an in-ear sensor at this price point. After the SoundCore Space A40, the 1More Aero joins the group to be the most full-featured wireless earbuds at this price.
Dual Device
So 1MORE yet again lists the dual device as an experimental feature. How does it work? Pairing a second device can be annoying to start with. You have to first pair a device, then unpair it. Then pair a second device. And then from the Bluetooth menu of the first device connect to the second device! But once you actually got it paired, you could play music on either device after pausing on the first. The funny thing was that resuming music on Android always took a second or two more than resuming music on an iPhone.
Comfort
Based on the 1More Comfobuds design, these are designed to be a shallow insertion style in-ear and that makes them fairly fatigue free for longer periods of time. However the same quality also makes it that these would not be our first pick for vigorous exercise or exercise where you move your heads too much. The video above shows a banana test to see how securely these fit. That should give you guys some degree of confidence.
⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯🛒 Links For Latest Prices⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯
🎧 Buy the SoundCore Space A40
🎧 Buy the Lypertek Z5
🎧 Buy the 1More Aero
🎧 Buy the Samsung Galaxy Buds
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Build
And you can take that confidence further. These are IPX5 rated So if they stay in your ear then they’re certainly better than a lot of other buds out there that are rated at just IPX4. And some that aren’t even rated at launch.
The case has an interesting design and has a small lip but you can flip open the lid. The flip buds go nicely with this flip phone. However all those smooth curves on the case and the buds makes it such that extricating a earbud single handedly is a messy affair with the lid trying to close on your hand. It’s a bit more trouble than it’s worth.
These look – mmm a bit big? The stems are kinda long and in this white color here they’re not trying to hide. Even Apple is trying to shorten its stems these days and we’d have liked a smaller footprint, but these aren’t ugly by any means.
The touch area is controlled with double, long and triple taps with only the double and triple taps being customizable. So we changed the triple tap to volume and it was ok. It’s not our favourite set of touch controls ever. But here we would like to complement the 1More Aero for at least trying to look original with its case design. It looks really nice and the shape and size of the case is very pocketable. It has USB C charging and fast charging is on board with 15 minutes of charge giving you 3 hours of use. Interestingly, wireless charging is also on board. Hello Bose – you listening? Battery life is about average with 5 hours and 20 hours from the case, so nothing to write home about there.
Sound
The Aero is bassy out of the box. I had to bring down the low end considerably to get it to my taste, but you bass heads are definitely gonna love this thing. There is definitely a bit of smoothing in the mid and treble that leads to distortion or overdrive on rock and metal sounding a bit smoothed out. While it’s pleasant, the guitar tone wasn’t faithfully represented. There is also a significant emphasis on the treble, but nothing crazy and we didn’t think it got sibilant at any stage. Due to the fact that AAC is the codec, resolution at the top end is also slightly compromised. There’s also a clear EQ shift between full ANC off and we did prefer the off setting, but we understand the bass emphasis in the ANC mode.
What was a bit underwhelming was the instrument separation. Especially in a busy song like Porcupine Tree’s Dead wing instrument’s seemed a bit congested. The spatial audio helped with that a bit but it’s doing head tracking which is annoying while listening to music. There’s also a significant EQ shift with spatial audio – towards a warmer sound signature. The Aero sound pretty great but did not blow us away like the Edifier W.. or impress us as much as the Liberty 4s.
The gyroscopes built on work very well for head tracking. The spatial audio works quite well.
Sound on Android and iPhone is comparable. Sometimes the iPhone appeared to resolve the highs a bit better but it was splitting hairs. Android max volume was a little louder.
One good thing is that 1More provides decent EQ presets as well as a 10 band custom EQ in the app. There’s also smart loudness on board that adjusts the amount of bass – or so it seems – at different volumes. It’s a bit confusing to us and we wish that they just made this choice for us like the AirPods do. I mean it’s a choice you can turn off or on if you dislike or like it. So that’s good I guess.
ANC
While on ANC, let’s talk about transparency because we’re upside down like that. The transparent mode is fairly transparent, but so is the white noise when you’re in a quiet place. The noise floor is very audible and makes it not a very pleasant experience. But the transparency actually sounds a bit louder than having no buds in your ears – which is great. The higher end is a bit muted and lower end sounds like bus engines are more audible. Would not necessarily use this in a moving vehicle, but for a home, office environment these are very good. There’s no adjustment possible in the app.
ANC is pretty good for this price class. You get a bunch of noise cancelling modes including an adaptive one, wind noise reduction, strong and mild. The mild mode has the least amount of white noise. The adaptive noise cancelling worked well and we thought switched quite well between mild and strong, which minimizes the white noise problem. However the adaptive mode appeared to only switch between mild and strong, and did not switch the wind when we were in windy conditions.
And talking about the wind, noise reduction mode, it really works well. It reduces the strength of the noise cancelling for sure, but no longer is the wind interfering with your music. Ideal for us while cycling around here in the Netherlands!
When on strong, it cuts out the low end sound, but you can still hear voices and higher frequencies, albeit at a lower volume. The overall volume drop is also noticeable. It’s very close to the ANC on the Edifier W240TN and both do a great job of cutting out low end sound. In our testing it fares better than the Lypertek Z5 and the Space A40.
Microphones
Let’s talk about the call quality, but the video above has some microphone samples. Make up your own mind and then we’ll tell you what we thought.
Noisy
SoundCore Space A40 – cuts out noise, voice gets processed Lypertek Z5 sounds more natural – also amplifies the overall volume. Also goes for the noise reduction approach.
Edifier – voice is a bit more muffles, higher frequencies are a bit more muffled. Also goes for the noise reduction approach. 1More – very narrow band of frequencies audible – also noise reduction. But overall not the most pleasant.
Windy
1More Aero – heavy winds, still quite pleasant to hear. Voice does get cut out now and then. Very usable in winds
SoundCore Space A40 – still clear with wind. Probably had the best balance of noise reduction and focusing on voice.
Edifier – Approach is to cut out if there’s too much wind and in heavy wind struggles to focus on the voice.
Lypertek Z5 – probably the best since it’s not doing too much to hide the wind. But on the other hand you hear the wind.
So should you buy the Aero?
At a launch price of $80, but for a full price of $100, we find that the 1More as some serious competition to contend with. Sure it sounds good and they’re doing the whole head tracking spatial audio thingy, but let’s just take a look at the others!
Now we looked at a bunch of other earbuds:
The Edifier W240TN at $79 sounds pretty darn great with a great bass punch. And it has very decent noise cancelling as well as transparency. The app isn’t as great though and it has no dual device connection or fancy codecs. It also doesn’t have an in-ear sensor to automatically pause your music. It also has the best IP rating at IP54.
The Soundcore Space A40 gives you every bell and every whistle. It has a very good app and has multipoint as well and can give you slightly better resolution with LDAC. We think they sound about a bit better, but the ANC was a bit worse.
Lypertek’s Z5 gives you a lot – and has been permanently priced down to 99 euros or dollars or pounds now. They take another approach for sound – with 3 different types of eartips giving you three different types of sound. It still doesn’t do multipoint though and lacks an in-ear sensor. Very much like the Edifier – we think that these sound great too.
And you can find Samsung’s sassy soundsters – the OG Galaxy Buds Pro or the Buds 2 – which both sound great. We aren’t fans of their touch controls and unnecessary bias towards Samsung devices. But they probably are the best on this list and have a better waterproofing rating at probably the same price, if not cheaper.
Other things you might consider for your purchase decision are sustainability and repairability – which these buds don’t really have. But also the fact that buying from a smaller company can have an effect on what kind of after-sales service you receive.
So should you buy the Aero? At this price class? Sure! It’s a very solid product. The stuff you can get for a $100 today is what was reserved for the premium models back in the day and that’s a win for all of us!
You’ve been going Aeroborne and we’ve been DHRME. Namaste.