Shootout: The best totally wireless earbuds compared

This article first appeared in the April 2017 issue of HWM.

Totally wireless earphones (or earbuds as might be more accurate) have gone from Kickstarter novelties to a serious category in its own right, with offerings from both established names like Apple and Samsung to newer companies like Bragi and Erato. To start, here's a table to show how the newest wireless earbud offerings in the market stack up:-

Apple AirPods

First introduced in September last year, the Apple AirPods are in a sense, Apple’s proposed solution for their decision to remove the headphone jack from their iPhone – a wireless alternative for a future without cables. These come in their own carrying case that acts as both protective storage and charging base.

The case has been cleverly built to initiate pairing with Apple products – simply lifting the cover starts the pairing process, making it a real no-brainer. A button on the back of the case does the same task for non-Apple devices, and the execution overall is typical Apple – slick and efficient.

This case also acts as an external battery pack, charging the AirPods for up to 24 hours listening time, with a quick charging feature that gives you three more hours with just 15 minutes of charging. On top of that, there’s also a custom W1 chip in the AirPods that helps to manage battery life, giving the set a good five hours of wireless listening per charge. It also uses optical sensors and a motion accelerator to detect when they’re in your ears, disengaging to save battery life once they’re out.

Despite the slightly odd looking design – the AirPods have extended ends that make them look more like candy canes than earphones – the AirPods did give me a fairly comfortable fit. However this didn’t translate to a good seal, as I could very much still hear everything that was going on around me, forcing me to raise the volume to block it out. My colleague Kenny however, had a very good fit while testing the AirPods and thus he had a better experience. This goes to show that expectations of these earbuds or any set of earphones/earbuds is highly dependent on your personal fit and comfort.

As for myself, in terms of audio quality observed, the AirPods delivered audio performance consistent to their wired counterparts, which is to say – pretty average. The headphones have a very flat sound signature, with little in terms of dynamics. It does do a decent job on vocal-heavy tracks, so people who listen predominantly to pop should be fine. However the bass response is lacking, so on a groovy piece like 24K Magic by Bruno Mars, what gets you moving is more Bruno’s vocals than the lush bass beat. This is again reflected with our formal test tracks, where the headphones performed best with Hotel California by The Eagles, a piece that’s more heavy on the highs.

Bragi The Headphone

Bragi's very first offering – The Dash – was waterproof, could do activity tracking, and ran all controls via touch, but sometimes suffered from connection issues. Fast forward just under a year and Bragi is back with their second product – a stripped down version simply called "The Headphone" that does nothing but its core promise - play music wirelessly.

Unlike any of the other headphones in this shootout (or even The Dash), the carrying case for The Headphone does not act as a spare power source. It simply keeps the unit safe. That may be because The Headphones alone are rated for a solid six hours of playback on a single charge; almost twice the battery life of any other wireless earbuds in our comparison pool.

And there are no touch controls here either, only three simple buttons for volume control and power on/off on the right earbud. Pairing is a an easy affair, simply hold down the power button to put the earphones in pairing mode and connect with your phone. We personally found the control buttons a bit awkward to use as pressing down on any button means you're effectively pressing the ear bud deeper into your ear; sometimes uncomfortably so. That said, we must say Bragi The Headphone gives pretty good passive noise isolation because of the tight fit.

In terms of audio performance, we were pleasantly surprised to hear the range of its audio reproduction. While most of the sets in this shootout promised a frequency response of 20Hz to 20kHz, none of the other headphones produced bass with body like the Bragi did, so that certainly made it stand out. For example, Rebecca Pidgeon’s Spanish Harlem starts off with an inviting bass line that draws the listener in to the track. On all the other headphones this is barely audible at best, leaving you feel wanting, but with Bragi The Headphone, this not only has weight, it also has enough decay to make it sound more natural.

That's probably why it performed best on Hotel California by The Eagles on our formal test suite. The track is led by a steady bass beat, and gives the headphones a chance to show off their musicality, as it features a multitude of musical instruments that The Headphone renders with aplomb.

Erato Muse 5

Like Bragi, Erato has previously released a set of truly wireless earbuds – the Apollo 7 – and now they’re following it up with the Muse 5. Unlike the Apollo 7, the Muse 5 has a more conventional design, giving it a bigger surface area for touch controls perhaps. A set of nine ear tips of different sizes and shapes are provided so you can easily get a good fit.

The Muse 5 manages only about four hours of music playback, but the provided carrying case gives you two full charges extra, bringing your total listening session up to 12 hours. That’s certainly decent for such a small package, and should easily take you through your workout for the day.

Pairing is a slightly more complicated affair with this set. The Muse 5 allows you to have just the left earphone active, so the initial pairing is first the left earpiece to the phone, then the right to the left. You'll need to press and hold on both earpieces simultaneously to get both working together.

The Muse 5 lets you take calls and control playback via a series of presses on the appropriate earpiece. For example, double pressing on the right earpiece increases the volume, while double pressing on the left decreases it. Likewise, you can skip tracks by using either side alternately. We found there was a slight bit of lag when using the controls though, so you may find yourself using the controls on your player anyway.

In terms of music, we much preferred the audio from the Muse 5 mode with their 3D Wide mode enabled (Four rapid presses on the left earbud). This added not only a wider soundstage, but just a bit more body to the overall sound. On a recording of Virtual Insanity by Jamiroquai, we found that the Muse 5 rendered the vocals with a nice warm tone, and did a great job of picking out the individual musical instruments used.

That's something that was again reflected on our official test tracks, where the headphones performed best on Buckethead's Sail On Soothsayer, an alternative metal track that features heavily in the mids and the highs.  Clearly, this portion of the audio range is its strength.

Jabra Elite Sport

The Jabra Elite Sport is easily the most expensive pair of headphones in this shootout, but also the most fully-featured. You see, Jabra wasn’t content with merely providing a set of headphones for audio, adding a clinical grade in-ear heart rate monitor and tri-axis accelerometer to the mix.

The headphones are also IP67 rated, meaning they’re dust-tight and can be submerged in up to 1m of water for 30 minutes. Not enough for a swim, but certainly enough for runs in the rain. There’s also a companion app you can download to use for more fully-featured fitness tracking, hence the "Sport" designation. However, all these added features place a toll on battery life. The Elite Sports only manages three hours of playback per charge, so it's good that the carrying case doubles up as a battery pack, giving you two more full charges.

Like the Bragi earbuds, the Elite Sport uses physical buttons to let you skip tracks and adjust playback volume. Thankfully though, Jabra splits this across both sides so you only have the top and the bottom of each earpiece to feel for. Like the Muse 5, the Elite Sport's single earbud acts as the main controller– the right earpiece. However, you don't have to power on and off the earbuds separately to get both to play together. Simply opening the case powers them on, and placing the earbuds back in the case and closing the cover shuts them off.

In terms of audio performance, we thought the Elite Sport had good attack with a good sense of pace and dynamics, great for the faster moving tracks that people tend to use for working out. Listening to Johnny Frigo’s I Love Paris, the earbuds did a good job of keeping up with the drums and strings in the piece, injecting a sense of energy that befits the track.

The problem with the Elite Sport is that they can sometimes sound a little too artificially boosted. On Elements of Life by Tiesto for example, the highs sounded a little screechy and the mids bloated. The same effect doesn’t occur on acoustic pieces like Hotel California by The Eagles though, so perhaps it's just Jabra's way of injecting excitement to your workout.

Samsung Gear IconX

Samsung’s answer to Apple's AirPods, the Gear IconX is a stylish, modern looking set of wireless earbuds that also function as a fitness tracker. Like the Jabra Elite Sport, it comes with an accelerometer and a heart rate sensor for tracking your activities, however these features only work on Android, so iOS users will only be able to use these for listening to music.

One thing the Gear IconX offers that none of the others do is 4GB of onboard storage (listed as less than 3.5GB usable) that you can use it to store music tracks in MP3, M4A, AAC, WAV and WMA v9. This means that you can use the earphones without your phone, albeit without app support, which can be tricky as the headphones use only touch controls. Going through a playlist with some 40 songs in it without visual support? Not easy.

Still, that would be the recommended way to go for audio, as streaming audio from your phone gives you a mere 1.6 hours of playtime! That’s hardly enough to get you to the gym and back, much less through a full workout. The fact that the earphones activate automatically once the case is opened also means that you could quite easily arrive at the gym only to find out that the batteries of your earphones are flat.

When it comes to audio quality, it's really a tale of two modes. Streaming audio from your phone gives you tinny audio with performance tilted towards the high trebles. For example, listening to Heaven by John Legend via streaming leaves you with only the vocals; the piano accompaniment is muted at best and you can barely hear the other backing instruments.

Take the time to transfer the audio files to the internal storage twice (the same song has to be on both earbuds to play), and the mids and lows are somewhat restored, only the mids are unnecessarily boosted on playback. For example, on Adele’s Melt my Heart to Stone, her vocals are presented so forward that it completely overwhelms the backing instruments. The headphones do perform reasonably well on faster moving dance tracks, but overall the excessively bright sound signature means we’d stay away from pieces that have high mids and trebles.

And the best totally wireless earbuds is... 

Bragi’s The Headphone

Other than the name, there's a lot to like about Bragi The Headphone. It fits well, gives you good passive noise isolation, and offers solid performance throughout the audio spectrum, making it great for all genres of music. While it certainly lacks the bells and whistles of some of the other contenders in this category, it makes up for this by being easy to charge (the carry case charges via USB so you can use the same external battery pack you use for your phone), and by costing less. At S$248.00, The Headphone is also the second cheapest headphone in the group, so there's certainly plenty of leeway to play with if you want to pick up a battery pack for longer listening.  Less electronics also meant a better connection and better battery life, so in this case, less certainly is more, and Bragi The Headphone is certainly a very worthy winner.

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