Premium and portable audio: Edifier NeoBuds Pro 2 review

It wasn’t that long ago that I reviewed another Edifier audio product - the company’s WH950NB over-ear headphones. As it happens, they turned out to be fantastic all-round performers, up there with some of the best headphones we've tested. Also with a similarly comprehensive range of advanced features like ANC and Hi-res sound, when the Edifier NeoBuds Pro 2 came along I jumped at the chance to review them.

At first glance - at least on a tech-specs level - they appear to be the compact in-ear cousins of those Edifier WH950NB headphones I mentioned. Edifier boasts that its NeoBuds Pro 2 pack the same wide-band multi-channel Active Noise Cancellation, Hi-Res Audio and LDAC codec for lossless playback, and more. But I was curious - with so many technical similarities, how would the NeoBuds sound compared to the over-ear version? And could they compete with similarly-specced models from other established brands?

So, I hung up my over-ear cans, got the Edifier NeoBuds Pro 2 charging up in their case, and set about some serious testing. As earbuds go, the £100 - £150 price bracket can often deliver a mixed bag of half-delivered promises and lacklustre performance.  Would Edifier deliver an experience worthy of the Hi-Res Audio label and live up to those sizable ANC claims?

Setting up the Edifier NeoBuds Pro 2

The included instructions are nice and succinct. In just three short pages I knew how to power these on, pair them for the first time, and charge and control them.

Although the NeoBuds Pro 2 do come pre-charged, I still plugged the case into a USB adapter via the supplied USB-C cable and watched the front of it light up. It’s a matt-black case with a premium feel to it. Style-wise, there’s something of the business end of a modern muscle car about it. I’d later find that the Edifier Connect app lets you change the colour of the LED light on the front. Being a little bit of a geek (with a gift for understatement) I went for the KITT from Knight Rider look.

Pairing with the iPhone

Pairing the NeoBuds Pro 2 genuinely took me by surprise. They go into first-pair mode the moment you open the case. I just had to grab the iPhone and select them from the Bluetooth options. That said, if you do need to pair them with something else later on, there’s a button inside the case itself to re-enter this mode. As wireless headphones go, connecting these was an absolute cinch.

Connecting to other devices

Whereas the over-ear Edifier WH950NB headphones do support dual-device connections via Bluetooth for seamless use across two devices, the NeoBuds don’t. That’s why you might just be reaching for that in-case pairing button a few times. But, once paired, the NeoBuds will always re-connect without any user input with previously paired devices.

I noticed that Edifier’s spec sheet lists a couple of Bluetooth codecs not included in the larger WH950NB headphones - and that makes these even more compatible with a range of devices. The NeoBuds have LDAC and SBC (the latter being standard, lossy Bluetooth connections) but also LHDC, and AAC. All in all, that means these should pair with quite a lot of compatible devices, from TVs to laptops.

Design and build

The case

I’ve briefly covered the case above, but it’s worth mentioning that the sculpt of the inside is just as well-designed as the outside. Unlike other earbuds I’ve tried, there’s a large opening for the driver section and each bud will snap reliably into their cradles thanks to the magnetics. The lid has a satisfying softly sprung action to it too, so you can be sure it won’t open by accident inside a bag or pocket.

Edifier states that the fast charging time of this case is 15 minutes for up to two hours of playback. This is almost the same as the WH950NB over-ear headphones, and I can confirm this is about right - depending on whether you use high ANC or not.

The buds

This is, of course, all personal preferences, but I really appreciate the shape and materials used on these NeoBuds Pro 2 earbuds. Not only do they come with seven pairs of silicone ear tips to choose from, but the rest of the driver section is a smoothly rounded glossy plastic that sits well in the ear.

The control stem of the buds is where the premium design really makes itself known. Some users might not like the slightly squared-off rectangle approach - but I found that this increased usability when it came to handling and control (more on that, later). The front face of this section is a matt-black tactile finish, much like the case, emblazoned with the gold Edifier logo.

The fit

Personally, I found the fit to be very comfortable - partly due to the organic shape of the driver section, but also due to those ear tips. If, like me, you need to mix and match these things to get a snug but comfortable fit, you absolutely can. However, I do think that any sporty types would be better going for the ear-hook type. You could wear the NeoBuds for lighter activities, like walking and cycling, but you’d need to like a tight in-ear fit if you wanted these for jogging and so on.

Controls and settings

Edifier NeoBuds Pro 2 Earbud controls

I have to say that, when I first read about the Edifier NeoBuds Pro 2, I breathed a sigh of relief that they don’t use capacitive touch controls. I’ve worn plenty of those and cursed myself for being clumsy as I’d reach for my glasses and accidentally turn the volume up, and so on. But, to be fair, capacitive touch can be great for comfort - as there’s literally no hard pressing of buttons. However, the NeoBuds instead go for tap-based sensors. For me, that’s the best of both worlds.

As the manual sets out, here you get a set of pre-defined functions out of the box - each bud has its own set of controls -  mapped to a two-tap or three-tap combo. When listening to music, two taps on the right bud will toggle play or pause, and answer or drop a phone call. While three taps will skip to the next track.

The left bud uses two taps to toggle between ANC modes, plus the same phone call functions. But here, three taps will cycle between the three onboard EQ settings - music, game, or voice.

So, if that sounds ‘okay’ but you still find yourself wishing you could customise these functions, you’re in for a treat.

The Edifier Connect app

Unlike the Denon AH-C830NCW Wireless Earbuds I reviewed earlier in the year, the Edifier Connect companion app lets you customise quite a few things. And thankfully that includes those tap control functions. I set mine up so that I could control the ANC level from the right bud instead.

It’s an unimportant addition on the scale of things, but I love the ability to choose a few colours for that case LED. After all, if it’s going to be sat on your desk or shelf in plain view, why not have it glow in a pleasing shade of KITT-scanner red?

Intelligent wearing detection

Although this is a feature that many listeners will love, it’s not one that I’ve ever been particularly bothered with - until now. I’ve had other sets of earbuds that would allow long presses for powering on and off, and that’s really the most manual (but reassuring) way of managing your battery life.

However, the NeoBuds Pro 2 has sensors that detect whether they’re being worn and pause and resume the playback for you. If nothing is played back for long enough, they’ll shut down (another setting you can control via the app).

Battery life

Edifier’s claim that these will last for about 4 hours with full ANC on is about right. Although, I did find that this would vary depending on how many times I’d paused to take a call or just to take a quick break.  If you add the power from a fully charged case to the total, you get around 12 hours of additional playtime. With ANC off, Edifier says that you’ll get 5.5 hours, plus 16.5 hours from the charging case. For some reason, I seemed to get slightly more than that between charges.

All in all, there are headphones out there that will outdo the NeoBuds Pro 2 for longevity (without factoring in the charging case), so that’s worth thinking about if you’re looking for something that will last 7 hours or more without a charge.

Sound and performance

All charged up and with the EQ and controls all customised, it was time to hit the road with my Edifier NeoBuds Pro 2. Over the last three weeks, I’ve worn these in the office, to the supermarket, at home for listening sessions and out and about in the countryside walking the dog. But, how did they sound?

Music

My streaming player of choice is Spotify Premium with its improved bitrate. As a rock and metal fan, I have a pretty lengthy set of playlists to choose from here. So, this time I went for some classic rock. Hearing the NeoBuds belt out vintage KISS with Doctor Love actually took me by surprise. That track is one of their more melodic tracks with plenty of vocal harmonies, loads of range and of course some killer guitar riffs. The NeoBuds Pro 2 earbuds really did deliver a nice wide soundstage - nicely defined at the high end, smooth mids for those vocals and plenty of bass (after I’d tweaked my custom EQ in the app…).

A change of gear, and next up was some classic Ibiza tunes from Café Del Mar. There’d be some bass to throw at the NeoBuds, but I wanted to see how forgiving they would be with the broad frequencies of electronic music. Beautiful Strange by Bedrock quietly blew my mind, beginning with those lone electronic pulses and whispered vocals and building to rhythmic bass lines and crisp synth highs. Here I did find the NeoBuds would elevate the mids and, having brought those forward, the very low end could have been a little more powerful. But, again, you can tweak this in the app depending on your choice of genre.

Lossless and Hi-Res audio

Just like the Edifier WH950NB headphones, the NeoBuds Pro 2 are packing Hi-Res audio via the LDAC codec. They also support other (lossy) Bluetooth codecs like SBC. But, just as I found with the over-ear Edifiers, Apple devices don’t support the LDAC (or LHDC) codec. So, there’d be no high-res audio streams via my iPhone on the NeoBuds.

Once again, I managed to snag someone’s Google Pixel 3XL to test LDAC, I connected to Apple Music and there was something of a difference. Given that Spotify Premium is a higher bitrate than free streaming apps, it’s still not close to being lossless. But enjoying Tears for Fears’ Songs From the Big Chair courtesy of LDAC was a clearly superior experience. The NeoBuds Pro 2 just had something more to them, a little wider in response, over my Spotify content. However they’ve done it, by cramming Hi-Res audio with LDAC inside these diminutive buds, Edifier has given you 192kHz/24bit sound that’s truly as portable as you can get.

Voice quality and calls

In another of the few relatively minor differences between these and the larger Edifier WH950NBs, the NeoBuds Pro 2 are actually sporting double the number of mics. With 4 on each bud, all backed up by a beam-forming algorithm for clearer speech, the NeoBuds perform excellently. They were reportedly fantastic at cutting our wind noise - a testament to that fine beam forming and AI voice enhancement tech.

Using the Edifier NeoBuds Pro 2 on a laptop and PC

As you’d expect from earbuds that support a raft of Bluetooth codecs, pairing the Edifier NeoBuds Pro 2 to other devices was seamlessly easy. I used mine on both a laptop and a desktop PC. My voice via  Microsoft Teams meetings was reportedly better than the laptop’s built-in mic and on par with most mobile phone mics.

As for the PC, some light gaming via my Valve Steam account was a pleasant surprise. I’d expected this to really show up the difference in bass levels between the NeoBuds and the over-ear headphones I normally use. Yes, the buds were less bassy, but with ANC set to high, this only got better and was, overall, a solid low-latency experience.

Active Noise Cancellation

Expectedly, the noise cancellation here comes in a few flavours: High, medium and low; plus extras like Wind Reduction and Ambient Sound. I found that, despite the availability of the Wind Reduction setting, my go-to was High ANC. After all, who doesn’t want the cleanest audio possible? I also found that High ANC made my music (and particularly bass frequencies) sound just a bit punchier - despite that things are, in fact, being heavily filtered. Amazing, considering that this ANC is highly active - it’ll defeat up to -50dB of unwanted sound.

But, this feature itself is middling-to-good compared to other (more expensive…) wireless noise-cancelling headphone options out there. Many of those alternatives will be using the more advanced Adaptive Noise Cancellation. For the NeoBuds Pro 2, close voices, traffic and mid to low frequencies did bleed through a little at times, but the rushing winter wind that blasted me as I walked my dog through the local fields was effectively reduced to a whisper at most.

Spatial audio

I’m going out on a limb here, but I think that Spatial Audio is a fad. An impressive fad, but a fad nonetheless. Here, it works just as promised though, with an extremely accurate depiction of being stood in a room with a much bigger soundstage. It definitely delivers, if you do want that illusion of a live performance in a 3D space. But, ultimately, I find it a little disorientating. If I’m listening to music I really don’t want the acoustics to change just because I’ve turned my head to speak to someone. But, I can’t fault Edifier for its technological achievement here.

Custom EQ settings

Again via the app, it’s possible to heavily tweak the sound to suit your tastes. That’s where the real usefulness and power of the app really comes in. For any app-adverse headphone users out there - I totally recommend getting this one.

Here, the app is going to give you the usual simple 4-band frequency control over bass, mids, treble and so on - but the beauty lies in the ‘Q Factor’. No, it’s not another tiresome TV talent show - it’s Edifier’s ‘Quality Factor’ settings for each set of frequencies. Simply put, you can balance your EQ frequencies the way you like them, but then also fine-tune how much of the available bandwidth the centre of each frequency will take up. Tweaking the centre bandwidth for your bass, for instance, will give it an extra kick.

In the end, it was super easy to listen to one of my go-to tracks and listen while I adjusted my EQ settings to suit. And, having done that, those settings were relayed and stored on each earbud - so this is thankfully totally independent from the app.

Using the Edifier NeoBuds Pro 2 - with just one bud

One slight oddity here is with the custom EQ presets that you can set up via the app. This will only affect someone who chooses to use one bud while leaving the other in the case, but doing that will block the app’s custom EQ settings altogether. So, if you do grab one while you’re working and have a phone call on it, just be aware that you won’t be able to tweak your custom EQ in the app.

Perhaps more importantly, if you are using one bud with the other one docked, you won’t get both channels. Even if you have your phone’s audio output set to mono, I found the sound quality to be slightly different - it sounds fuller and louder through one bud when both are not in the case.

Both of these limitations are going to be useful for anyone with unilateral hearing loss too of course. The obvious workaround for these is to take the other bud out of the charging case.

Any downsides?

Considering the overall quality and price point of the NeoBuds Pro 2, this is much more of a nice-to-have than a criticism. But, I’d have loved to have had many more customisable multi-tap options. For instance, one tap for volume up or down on the left and right bud respectively. Or four taps for lesser-used functions like ANC modes, which would free up the three-tap option for something like volume down. All that means that you could adjust the volume in both directions and play or pause (or whatever functions you wanted, via the app) all with one hand.

Despite my relief that the Edifier NeoBuds Pro 2 uses tap sensors over capacitive touch, I still found myself accidentally hanging up a call or pausing my music just because I’d moved the bud for comfort. I actually found myself using the app to adjust the tap sensitivity a few times, and that was because I was trying to tap through a winter hoodie or because I’d paused my music one too many times by accident.

All that said, like all small gadgetry, there’s an adjustment period while you get used to handling it. So, this is more of an observation about tap-sensor technology than a direct criticism of the NeoBuds Pro 2. I’d still much rather have accelerometer-based tap sensors than the easily mis-triggered capacitive type. Likewise, the lack of LDAC support on the iPhone at present is clearly a downside for Apple users - but not at all the fault of the Edifier NeoBuds.

Price and competition

If you don’t want the premium look, feel and build of the Edifier NeoBuds Pro 2, and want to save £50, we think the Soundcore Liberty 4 NC Wireless Noise Cancelling Earbuds are a great low-price option. They come with impressive Adaptive Noise Cancelling technology, as well as Hi-Res Audio. Our reviewer, Kyle Purves, did find the fit a little challenging comfort-wise, however.

On par in terms of cost and build is the Sony WF-1000XM4 wireless earbuds that we reviewed. At £150 you get a similarly high Sony build quality and flagship noise cancellation. You will, though, have to be a fan of touch-based controls and a slightly heavier in-ear feel.

Verdict: Edifier NeoBuds Pro 2

If you’re looking for a balance of style and substance  - but not so much of either that you’ll need a second mortgage - the NeoBuds Pro 2 earbuds are for you. The wide yet balanced 20Hz - 40KHz frequency response on offer here is largely down to the pairing of Knowles Balanced Armature Driver and 10mm Dynamic Driver in each bud. Custom EQ settings aside, right out of the case these things are in perfect balance for most music types.

Personally, I like it when headphones deliver a vanilla starting point from which to tweak things. And that’s where the other half of this partnership comes in - the Edifier Connect App. The ability to change the EQ and customise those tap controls elevates these earbuds way beyond the sum of their parts. Not all headphone manufacturers have this kind of functional synergy between app and hardware, but here Edifier has done just that.

If you like a premium feel, great usability and balanced but refined sound, these are hard to resist. While their overall sound profile is neutral, it is easy to refine the sound to suit. So, all in all, if you don’t mind a slightly less effective ANC than more costly alternatives, and an average but still practical battery life, the Edifier NeoBuds Pro 2 is an excellent option for music, voice calls, gaming and more.

More items to consider

How this product was tested

I spent just over three weeks testing the Edifier NeoBuds Pro 2. They were used daily, connected to an iPhone, iPad, Dell Laptop, and a desktop PC. Streaming audio sources included Spotify Premium, Apple Music, YouTube, and online gaming via PC. They were also used to take and make voice calls via mobile and Microsoft Teams. Listening was tested in an office environment, at home, outside in (poor) winter weather, and while shopping. The NeoBuds Pro 2 were allowed to run flat between charges, as well as topped up mid-charge.

Chris Duffill is a Tech Product Writer for What's The Best and Yours. His background includes writing, editorial, marketing, design, video production and photography.

He specialises in home entertainment and audiovisual tech, including speakers, amplifiers, turntables, streaming media players, and TVs. He is also one of our resident experts in computing (PCs, tablets, smartphones, smartwatches), DSLR photography and all kinds of digital cameras. He also writes about retro gaming, game consoles and various electronic gadgets. If it plugs in, lights up or makes a noise, he’ll write about it.

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