Along with the launch of the Soundcore Space Q45 Soundcore also launched their latest Space series ANC in-ear earbuds which is the Space A40.
Soundcore aim to smoke their competitors in every aspect of this earbuds.
Let’s see if these are indeed one of the best you could buy. The Space A40 ANC earbuds retails for a mid-range price of $99 with this price Soundcore is staying really competitive with their competitors and i think that would really give them an edge.
Discussed Topics
Design and Build
Similar to the Q45 the A40 that we have here is extremely well built very typical to Soundcore’s effort of premium high quality build that doesn’t hurt your wallet and the material used with the a40 is exactly the same that is found on the Q45.
Which is a nice smooth plastic that has a very high end feel to it. At the top here you’re gonna get that glossy Soundcore logo which looks really nice.
At the back of the case is a Type-C charging port when you plug it in there is a nice gloss black panel at the front here that hides the three LED’s and tells you the battery life of the case.
Behind the case is also a pairing button and you need to press it for three seconds with the lid open and to put the earbuds into pairing mode.
This earbuds doesn’t start going into pairing mode when you take them out of the case and partly because this earbud supports multi-point connectivity.
The bottom of the case is nice and flat and hides a wireless charger. You can pop this onto any wireless charger and it will charge up the case and the earbuds.
The lid opens up smooth and uses a nice hinge to snap the lid. You’re going to get rubber lining to protect your earbuds from scratches and also pushes down the earbuds to ensure that it charges. Inside you’re gonna see a plastic gloss black cradle which looks really nice.
Inside you’re also going to see the earbuds and taking them out you realize how small they actually are for an ANC earbuds. I must applaud Soundcore for making it this small.
Earbuds look simple with a nice Soundcore branding at the front and nice materials all around it. There is no in-ear sensor found in these earbuds.
Features
Like its bigger brother the A40 is extremely well spec and comes with a Bluetooth 5.2 with LDAC, AAC and SBC support. These earbuds are high-res audio wireless certified, giving you a stream rate of 990 kbps at 32 bits but do take note that you need to have a player with LDAC support in order for this to work.
The earbuds also comes with an IPX4 water resistant rating. It’s not waterproof but it’s definitely sweat and splash proof. It still will survive the elements with no problem.
The space A40 also comes with Soundcore’s 10mm double layer diaphragm driver which they are marketing together with their Space series headphones and earbuds. It gives you a very tight very accurate sound signature since it has a better flex and strength it give you a better and stronger bass response.
These earbuds also support the seamless left and right playback, you can pick up either side and use them seamlessly without any connection break.
Finally these earbuds also comes with multi-point support which is very rare in today’s market at this price point.
This earbud size I definitely don’t know what sorcery is Soundcore doing which is amazing. The amp with the Space A40 is also slightly different compared to the Q45 but it’s largely the same with a few differences here and there.
Battery
Soundcore did an amazing job with the battery life here and without ANC these earbuds gives you a great 10 hour of battery life with 50 additional hours in the case. And with anc and you’re going to get about 8 hours of juice and 40 additional hours with the case.
This is already better than most earbuds in the market with Active Noise Cancelation.
I’m definitely impressed, do take note that these are rated at a medium volume using AAC as a codec and if you use LDAC most of the time it’s going to drain the battery even faster.
The earbuds also supports quick charging 10 minutes of charge will give you four hours without ANC. That’s definitely a very handy feature.
Sound Quality
I much prefer the sound signature of the A40 over the Q45 although the Q45 is also really good but the depth of each frequency on the A40. I personally feel it hits harder and stronger so the bass on this earbuds is very tame and not like extremely bassy.
But using the EQ it gives you a very nice thumb and you can hear them really well. Moving up the volume range to about 70% you start to feel more of the sub bass creeping in but that only happens at louder volumes. Vocals here is also very good with sufficiently good sounding vocals giving both male and female artists very good vocals reproduction.
You don’t get a wide sound stage with these earbuds so it just feels like the artist is mostly singing in your head. Highs here is also really good and i think these produce sufficiently bright high.
You get a nice well-rounded balanced sound signature with this earbuds.
The A40 has a very linear volume and gives you exactly the volume range you need at each percentage level similar to the way of the Q45 and how it works.
A comfortable listening volume for me starts at around 30% and around 50% this earbuds already feel very loud and you can hear that there’s still a lot of potential with them around 75%. These earbuds are very loud but still very enjoyable and anything above that is too loud for me.
I usually won’t hover around that volume, if you like your earbuds loud then these earbuds definitely is for you.
ANC
The ANC here is one of the industry-leading ANC performance and just to reiterate Soundcore did not pay me to say this, My opinion is from my own experience just like how i feel with the ANC on the q45 which isn’t as strong as I hoped.
This is all my own opinion, the earbuds does exceptionally well with low humming noise and with road noise tests and the airplane cabin noise they both perform extremely well to the point when i have soft music playing and i swap between the two noise tests i can’t even hear it.
I thought I did not play the music so when I remove the earbuds from my ears they are actually pretty loud so this is definitely better than the Q45 thanks to the in-ear seal as well.
These earbuds could do better with the mid-range frequencies vocals and also crowd noise because they are not as good as the Q45. With the same volume level of music i can still hear quite a bit of noise coming through in terms of crowd chatters and human talking.
The passive noise isolation here of this earbuds is very good and gives me a very good seal and you should do a fit test using the app so you can choose which ear tips which seals better for you.
Finally wind noise reduction is very good and gives you very good protection from wind noise even without the wind noise reduction algorithm turn on in the rare case you get wind buffering you can just turn it on.
Overall i would rate the space Soundcore A40 to have a very good ANC performance of 9.5 out of 10 and it’s only 0.3 points away from the very good Liberty 3 Pro.
Features
The Q45 really comes with a whole set of features that more than justifies its price and i think many companies should take note and following Soundcore’s concept.
To start with you’re going to get the latest Bluetooth 5.3, so you know you have a headphone that is future proof and since it’s a high-res wireless certified headphones.
You’re going to get LDAC codec as well as AAC and SBC so you can stream music at very high resolution at about 990 kbps at 32 bits.
Like most headphones in this class there is no water resistant rating but then again we’re not bringing these headphones to the gym or run with them so they don’t necessarily require a water resistant design.
Soundcore provides you with a 40mm dynamic driver which Soundcore markets them as double layer metal ceramic diaphragm which seems like a fancy driver and in practice it really does sound pretty nice.
Also this headphone supports multi-point support as well so you can conveniently connect two devices together and swap between them seamlessly.
Latency
The latency on this earbuds is very good with the gaming mode turned on and with games like PUBG you actually don’t see the lag and it feels something like about 60 ms or less but this is not claimed by Soundcore and either way it performs really well with games movies and videos.
Final Thoughts
This is definitely a very strong offering from Soundcore and i’m really happy that they have this new Space series of headphones and earbuds coming out.
Soundcore Space A40
Soundcore has been great with their ANC Earbuds.
They have built their version of Sony ANC Earbuds for their followers.
