I buy wired earbuds like some people buy toilet paper. They need to be replaced so often, I should add earbuds to my family’s weekly grocery list. At this point, it’s become a running joke between my wife and I every time a pair goes bad.
Naturally, it’s never my fault — something always happens to them that’s out of my control. My kids will borrow them for a weekend and they disappear. The vacuum devours the cord rendering them useless. My dog swallows one of the rubber tips (don’t ask how I find it later — yes I throw it away). The list goes on.
The problem with wired earbuds is — they are wired and wires go bad. Recently, I’ve begun using the Cleer Audio Ally Plus True Wireless Earbuds, and have since waved goodbye to my wired woes.
I use these headphones almost daily. They are the best sounding true wireless earbuds I have tried. One handy feature is that both earbuds work independently of each other. Since I tend to fall asleep to audiobooks, this feature allows me to use one earbud at a time when I lay on my side.
They stay in my ears during jogs and mild exercise, and call quality is excellent. Callers never have trouble hearing my voice and can’t tell a difference when I switch back to my phone.
I’m no audiophile but am fairly picky about sound quality. Overall, these earbuds handle low and high ends well though I’ve noticed some muddier sound during bass-driven songs.
Another great feature of these earbuds is the charge time. A five-minute charge gives you an hour of use. It’s impressive, but somewhat undone when considering there’s no way to turn the earbuds off to conserve power. I don’t plan to take the charging case with me everywhere I go. Cleer claims a ten-hour battery life on a full charge (which I’ve found delightfully accurate), but it is annoying that I can’t turn them off to save battery life. The case itself stays charged for 18-20 hours.
Similar to Apple Airpods, Cleer implemented touch controls as opposed to buttons. This alleviates pressure when adjusting volume and noise cancellation features.
The controls are intuitive. A swipe up or down adjusts volume, and single presses activate ambient or active noise canceling modes. In ambient mode, I can still answer my wife when she needs something. If I can’t hear her, I remove one earbud to pause the music and replace it to resume. A double-tap on either earbud pauses music or answers calls.
The Active Noise Cancellation (ANC) does a relatively good job. However, I won’t be replacing my over-ear noise-canceling headphones with these. I like to use ANC when I need to focus, but I still get traces of background noise that a pair of Sony, Bose, or PSB active noise cancellers would eliminate.
If looking for a versatile pair of true wireless earbuds, consider purchasing these. They look great, function surprisingly well with intuitive controls, and sound better than other earbuds in the same price range. They are more comfortable than competing models. Are they good? Really good. Are they great? Nearly. The only thing holding me back from declaring them great is the comfort. Although my ears have yet to find the perfectly fitting wireless earbuds, Cleer Ally Plus’ are the best I’ve found to date.
Thanks for the excellent article Tom! For your over the ear Active Noise Cancelling Headphones, you need to add our Flow II to your mix as well. You won’t be disappointed.
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