Soundcore Liberty Air 2 Pro
Pros
- Great ANC for this price
- Great Sound Quality
- Very Good Battery
- Customizable Controls
- Great App Support
Cons
- IPX4 Rating
Hey Lovely Peoples, Soundcore launched their new ANC earbuds Anker Soundcore Liberty Air 2 Pro, which I think is one of the top ANC earbuds I’ve used and tested so far. I’ve only recently tested the Bose QC Earbuds, and I think this will give it a run for its money.
We’re taking a look at one of soundcore’s latest hybrid ANC earbuds to see if this is truly a great pair of AirPods Pro style ANC earbuds.
Discussed Topics
Overview
Let’s get on with the review of the Soundcore Liberty Air 2 Pro. These earbuds retail for about $130 honestly for premium ANC earbuds I think this is well justified.
Considering its performance rivals the Bose QC earbuds as well as the AirPods Pro. With the Soundcore by Anker, you’ll always be getting an amazing unboxing experience.
Soundcore Liberty Air 2 Pro : Design and Build
The box of their premium devices is just amazing and flipping it open, you also get a quick illustration of their latest tech that they are promoting. In this case, it is the targeted ANC capability of these earbuds.
The liberty Air 2 Pro is the successor of the original liberty air 2, and soundcore has made various impressive tweaks for this to be amazing earbuds. With most soundcore products, you’ll be getting amazing materials throughout the case. It has this classy gradient shine to it that makes it look absolutely fantastic.
At the top of the case, you get the soundcore logo there and flipping it to the back, you get a nice USB Type-C charging port, and on the side of it, you get a button to check the battery percentage of the case pressing this button you will get three led indicators at the front to tell you the battery percentage of the case.
The flat bottom of this case also hides a wireless charging coil so that you can slap it onto any Qi-certified wireless charger, and you’re good to go.
The lid itself, like most soundcore earbuds, slide up elegantly, and inside, it reveals the air 2 Pro, and it simply looks gorgeous, and the entire earbuds are made of a matte plastic, nothing glossy here.
So it does not pick up your fingerprints, and on the stem itself, you get a nice sound core branding there. The led indicator is subtly hidden on the top of the earbuds, and the Liberty Air 2 Pro comes with six microphones in total, so three on each side to help with that ANC and call quality.
The top of the earbuds is shaped like the AirPods pro, and personally, these are better because they are matte finish, which means it doesn’t slide around when it gets oily, unlike the AirPods Pro. Inside the tip is a cleverly hidden sensor that also detects if the earbuds are inside your ears or not.
If you looked at any soundcore earbuds before, they all look amazing, and they look perfect, and the Liberty Air 2 Pro is no different. Soundcore also gives you a total of 9 different ear tips, so you definitely find the right fit for the ANC to work.
Soundcore Liberty Air 2 Pro : Features
The Liberty Air 2 Pro is a very well spec earbuds with the latest technology built into it. Earbuds come with a decent Bluetooth 5.0 chipset supporting both the AAC and SBC audio codec for all your music and movie enjoyment needs.
The earbuds come with an ipx4 water resistANCe rating, which should protect them from light rain and accidental splashes. This meets what I would call the minimum standard for good true wireless earbuds and should protect them from everyday use though the rating isn’t quite as high as the regular air 2’s. I expected a better rating for an earbud of this caliber.
The Soundcore Liberty Air 2 Pro also comes support with super seamless mono and stereo switching mode so that you can use either side of the earbuds independently, and it’s also on par with some of the flagship earbuds.
You can turn off the in-ear detection sensor inside the app, and when you take either side off and put it back into the case, it will not stop playing on the other side.
Lastly, the air 2 pro still doesn’t support multi-point connectivity, so you can still connect them to multiple devices but not at the same time
Soundcore Liberty Air 2 Pro : Controls
You can customize the controls, and so it depends on what you’re comfortable with. If you go into the top here, you can also control whether or not you want wearing detection so that you can turn this on and off.
Lastly, you can also update your firmware and also view some of the user manuals in the app itself, so very convenient stuff there.
Soundcore Liberty Air 2 Pro : App
The Soundcore Liberty Air 2 Pro app allows you to do various things and allow you to customize your earbuds to your liking.
When you first go into the app, you can check the earbuds’ battery percentage on both the left and the right. Earbud so you will get ANC control, so inside here, you can click on ambient sound, and here you can choose between normal transparency mode or noise cancellation.
A good thing about how soundcore built this is that everything here is customizable, so if you go into transparency mode, you can either go full transparency so you can hear everything around you, or you can go solely vocal mode so it will still cancel out a lot of that background noise but will emphasize more on vocal.
If you go into noise cancellation, you will have various modes, so this is like the intelligent way of trying to understand how it should best cancel certain things, so if you’re in transport mode, you can use transport indoor-outdoor or custom. Hence, you have various types of controls for your noise cancelation, so you’re not just stuck with one noise cancelling mode.
If you go back, the next thing you can do is adjust the Hear ID or EQ. In the App, based on my ear age and whether or not I can hear a certain frequency, it will map out what is the best sound signature for me, and it will personalize the eq settings to my liking.
That’s a convenient feature, or if you don’t want Hear ID, you can also go into an equalizer, and you can choose from the various types of EQ settings they already have.
Soundcore has a sound cross signature one as well, or you can go custom and inside here.
You can play around with the different EQs you’d like, and it will play it according to the EQ setting, so there’s very convenient stuff there.
Active Noise Cancelling
Let’s check about the ANC on these earbuds because they are honestly amazing for this price. I’ve used this alongside the Bose QC earbuds and the AirPods Pro, and many other ANC earbuds, and honestly, this comes up on top second only to the Bose QC earbuds.
The Soundocre Liberty Air 2 Pro comes with soundcore’s targeted ENC technology that listens to prominent sound in the environment. Specifically, it works to cancel out as much of that sound pollution as possible.
The Bose still does the best in cutting down on build noise, and the second is definitely the Soundcore Liberty Air 2 Pro. The ambient mode on these earbuds is also very subtle and doesn’t amplify the surroundings too much, but inside the app, you can toggle between full-on ANC, transparency mode, and normal mode.
So to summarize, if Bose manages to cut out about 90% of ambient noise, the Liberty Air 2 Pro manages to cut down about 85% of ambient noise, followed only by the Sony and the AirPods Pro at about 80%, so from an ANC perspective, these are truly amazing.
Battery
About Soundcore Liberty Air 2 Pro Battery, without ANC The Soundcore Liberty Air 2 Pro gives you a total of 7 hours of continuous playback time and 26 hours with the charging case.
And with ANC, it drops to about 6 hours of continuous playback time and a total of 21 hours, with the case pretty good for ANC earbuds.
The case in the earbuds takes about one and a half hours to charge fully. The Liberty Air 2 Pro also comes equipped with quick charging where 5 minutes on the charger will give you an impressive 2 hours of playback time.
Soundcore Liberty Air 2 Pro : Call Quality
The air 2 pro’s call quality is also super impressive, giving you crisp call quality in both quiet and noisy environments. You can hear how the 6 mics intelligent noise cancelling comes into play. The earbuds cut almost everything out in environment background noise, and you still hear faint background noise, and it’s cutting it about 95% away.
These earbuds give you a very good call experience, and it won’t disappoint you in everyday usage.
Soundcore Liberty Air 2 Pro : Latency
Watching videos and movies on the Liberty Air 2 Pro is really enjoyable, and you generally don’t experience any lag with Youtube or Netflix. With games, though there is still a minor delay, so for casual gaming, these are great for anything competitive wired options are still the best anyway
Sound
What soundcore has built into this, I think it’s really fantastic, and if you’ve never heard of soundcore sound signature before, I think you’re truly missing out. Let’s put EQ inside the app aside because you get to play around with it.
Inside the app, you choose something that fits your listening style, but we must check the sound signature out of the box.
If I would say that the liberty air 2 pro has the perfectly tuned sound signature out of the box, these are phenomenal, which is just the right amount of kick and gives you the bone chilling bass thumb that you want from earbuds.
The mids and highs vocals all come into play harmoniously without any one of them being washed out. This is truly an amazing sounding earbuds; no wonder it’s recommended by 10 grammy winning artists and musicians.
The technology that soundcore uses is a pure node technology meaning the drivers are coated with 10 hardened nanolayers. This helps it generate that accurate, crisp, and bassy sound signature. I really love the sound signature of the Soundcore Liberty Air 2 Pro, and it even beats the sound quality of the Bose, and the AirPods Pro doesn’t even come close.
The step up in quality from the air 2’s is massive. The mid-range is well defined and allows you to identify individual instruments clearly. This is complemented with detailed highs and, most obviously, a full body to low end. You can hear how switching from 6mm to these new 11 mm drivers has substantially improved the bass response.
Which I actually find lacking in the air 2’s. The air 2 sound signature has a brighter tone, and even cranking up the custom eq, they still don’t have enough bass. Still, the bass is punchy and much deeper on the new pro model, but it doesn’t muddy the audio. This makes for a far richer and warmer tone resulting in a much more pleasing and immersive experience, especially with ANC.
Soundcore Liberty Air 2 Pro vs. Apple AirPods Pro
When you compare them to apple’s AirPods Pro, the Soundcore Liberty Air 2 Pro sound quality is better in every single way. They blow them out of the water when it comes to bass, which is really lacking in AirPods and AirPods Pro, but the highs sound more crisp and detailed, too, so the audio is just more exciting.
Conclusion
I felt the lack of Bluetooth 5.2 and IPX4 are the small cons I felt here. Bluetooth 5.2 is the latest tech and has seen much less priced earbuds these days. Inclusion of this will be future-proofed and a nice addition to these already awesome earbuds.
Overall I’m thrilled with the performance and the design of the soundcore liberty air 2 pro and thinking of getting the AirPods Pro, which costs more than two times the price. I definitely recommend you going with this unless you really want that status of the AirPods pro, but to me, these are the new king of AirPods pro alternative.
