We’ve never seen earbuds so tiny that can have noise cancelling, an in-ear sensor, wireless charging and app support. Easily the smallest earbud we’ve seen to date. But it’s not without its quirks.
Build and Comfort
So we gotta start with that size – right? These buds are tiny, miniscule, diminutive… I mean just look at them in Rohan’s big ears! And while we’ve had tiny buds before all the features you get with these really make it something special! The sound… well… we’ll talk about all that in a bit. But this hardware miniaturisation is quite an achievement from 1More. And it’s not just subtle, stealth stealthy looks, these buds might be the best buds to sleep in that we’ve worn. Look we don’t sleep with earbuds in, but if we did we’d sleep with these. That’s what we said. The app also alludes to this by giving you built in ‘soothing sounds’. The size can also be a downside though because if you have fat fingers, you may have trouble taking them out and they get stuck the wrong way when you put them back in. That’s what she said. The touch surface on both buds worked very reliably for us and we didn’t have any issues with errors. Unfortunately, the controls out of the box aren’t the best and we had to go into the app to enable volume control.
🎧 Buy the 1More ComfoBuds Mini: https://geni.us/1MoreComfoBudsMini
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🎧 Buy the Samsung Galaxy Buds 2: https://geni.us/SamsungGalaxyBuds2
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Now here’s a counterintuitive thing – these buds are small, but the transducer that sits under the tip is bigger than most buds. It’s not a huge difference, but every millimetre matters when we’re talking about ear hole size. I mean – everyone has different ears and maybe this is comfortable for a lot of you, but I have medium sized ears and even I find it hard to use for more than 30 minutes due to the outward pressure it applies to the entrance of the ear canal. Again – this subject is subjective, but for us we think that that diameter could have been a bit smaller. But the size of this object –points to case— is just fine. The case is very portable, but isn’t as small as the earbuds and looks rather unoriginal *cough Pixel buds cough*. It comes with all the goods though – USB Type C, wireless charging and fast charging. These buds also have a respectable IPX5 water resistance for light workouts and splashes. And given their size, these buds have impressive battery life – 5 hours with ANC on and an additional 15 hours from the case. Oh and let’s talk about that ANC.
Audio – ANC
That -40 DB ANC that 1More advertises is no joke. In the chart here – you can see that lower and mid sounds are clearly attenuated looking at the blue dashed line. When you wear these you really get the sense of all that noise being eliminated, which again is excellent for this size! Surprisingly – the transparency is also good. We could hear voices clearly while the lower end rumble was clearly eliminated. The downside on the transparency is that there is a lot of white noise that’s audible, especially if you’re in a very quiet environment, but in even a moderately noisy environment or with music on, you’re not gonna notice. This might not be a deal breaker but if you’re sensitive to that, good to know.
1More ComfoBuds Mini ANC and Transparency Performance Graph
What was also killer was the wind noise reduction – it definitely makes a difference in wind – you can hear your music clearly, so if you’re on a bike or walking outside, this mode makes these earbuds VERY useful! Now here’s a thing 1More could work on – these buds always reset to ‘normal’ when you take them out of the case, which is a shame – it doesn’t remember your last used setting. But when you switch to noise cancelling, it does remember if you last used full, mild or wind noise reduction. So say you’re on a bike or a run and you used wind noise reduction last time, you can go back to it just using the touch surface on the buds. That’s a relief. It would also be a big relief if you could hit that subscribe button. But don’t hit that notification bell though. In fact, turn off all notifications and take control of your life!
Audio – Sound Quality
1More doesn’t let you take control of the sound though. Before digging into the sound, we want to say that we didn’t use SoundID at all – the last time we did use it we got very variable results. SoundID is a system that tries to customize the sound based on a number of tests. It plays a bunch of sounds, you choose the ones your prefer and based on your selections, it tries to guess your preference and to be honest, we prefer to keep things simple. So while that’s a big selling point for these buds, what would have helped is if SoundID spat out some parameters we could actually see and play with. You know – maybe an EQ setting, a soundstage slider… something! That way we would know what SoundID was thinking we liked.
The one thing we’ve always said about 1More buds is that they have a significant EQ shift when you toggle noise cancelling. And that’s true with the ComfoBuds mini as well. It’s enough to say that they sound like completely different buds! This graph illustrates it so clearly that we’re almost proud that our ears detected the change before we had the tools to show them to you. There are 3 things to notice here: the clear spike between 1-2k, the dip at 700k and the bass boost at 20-40 k. So you basically get two different sound profiles here. The off and ANC. Off is closer to neutral, but leans a bit towards the darker end for our taste. Whereas with full ANC – 1More goes for a more dynamic V shape. Unfortunately that ANC sound is a bit boomy and the bass sounds woolly for its price class. This overpowers everything else and alongwith the other two graph irregularities leads to a much darker, boomier sound that to be honest just doesn’t do these drivers justice. I suppose the assumption is that if you need ANC, you’re in a very noisy environment and then this will compensate for that. So in a way, I think it does make sense. But just for sound, the normal mode is much better – and probably what we would choose, especially in a quieter environment. Better mids representation and more of a neutral sound, but with a darker treble. The fact that these buds only support AAC also means that they aren’t going to be the best in terms of resolution. Sometimes this weakness can be compensated with good tuning, but not in this case. So when it comes to sound – they’re ok – but not in the top tier for us. Sad because they have so much promise. We’d highly recommend you use a third party app like Wavelet to EQ these, but third party apps aren’t without their risks. So 1More – please get away from SoundID and go back to EQ or even well-tuned EQ presets!
Extras and Microphones
And you know you can do EQ presets because – there’s an app. It’s a very basic app with the ability to see battery status on the case and buds, switching to different ANC levels – more on that in a bit, change what the touch controls do – you can customise just two things – double tap and triple tap. There’s that annoying SoundID, firmware upgrade and soothing sounds you can play that we mentioned before. And if that wasn’t enough, 1More’s managed to cram an in-ear sensor on this thing to automatically play and pause music when you take it out of your ears – so you big boys making those phat buds – you’ve got no excuse! And while on extras – you get a good selection of 4 silicone tip sizes in the box. It doesn’t come with dual-device support though. There are also no additional settings for phone calls. And while on phone calls – why don’t you listen to them for yourselves? We’ve compared them to an industry standard – the Samsing Galaxy Buds 2. Skip the test and jump ahead to the conclusion if you want!
In quiet conditions, the ComfoBuds Mini sounds better, and even louder than the Galaxy Buds 2. But when it comes to background noise, the 1More ComfoBuds Mini takes an approach that might make it uneven and less reliable. You see, in the tests the voice was well isolated and the noise very well suppressed. So it seems like the 1More won out right? Well – in this condition maybe. But we’ve seen time and again that when earbuds choose to go for this approach, it becomes less reliable when the background gets louder. So sure in quiet or moderately loud environments, this works well. But in louder environments, this will almost certainly result in the speaker being harder to understand. The same is true for windy conditions – the Galaxy Buds 2 kinda lets in everything and the 1More really tries to isolate the voice. This can result in certain frequencies or even words completely being absent. So while on calls – remember, if it’s getting too loud or windy, you may not wanna use these buds.
Making the decision and alternatives
So are the 1More ComfoBuds Mini worth the money? Look – these buds are not perfect and we think 1More made an error of judgment by choosing to exclude EQ in favor of SoundID. But – they have something going for them that no other buds do – a tiny footprint, very effective ANC and transparency, decent microphones and a very reasonable price. What are some alternatives at this price point? We’d consider the Samsung Galaxy Buds Pro or Buds 2 or the Edifier NeoBuds Pro. The latter ticks a lot of boxes for us and the Samsung is a very solid offering. For something more stylish – the Nothing Ear (1) is also a decent choice. Hey, maybe we should make a video for best ANC buds around a 100 dollars? Hmm..
You’ve been getting Comfo with your minis and we’ve been DHRME! Namaste!