- Samsung unveils its first open-ear buds
- Galaxy Buds Open feature twin drivers for open adaptive listening
- 9.5 hours of battery life
Staying connected to the real world is the hot new thing, or so it seems if you’ve been paying attention to the parade of new clip-on (or cuff-style) open earbuds arriving from Sony, Anker, and Bose, to name a few. The solution is so good when done well that you’ll regularly see these buds occupying a healthy chunk of our best open earbuds buying guide. And now Samsung is joining the trend with its first pair: Galaxy Buds Open.
Unlike over-the-ear headphones or in-ear buds, open-ear options must deliver quality sound without the benefit of an audio seal betwixt your ear canal and the buds’ driver housings, and all while not making you feel like you’re wearing too-heavy ear cuffs (each earpiece here weighs 6.65g). As a Samsung exec told us, “Designing these buds is a complex challenge because of the unique anatomy of ears and the difficulty to find the perfect balance between a secure fit and a comfortable fit.”
Part of that is acknowledging that every ear is different. Samsung told us it used AI and “analyzed 119 million ear data points to find the optimal fit for the widest range of users possible.” Engineers used that information to optimize the components, including wire length, weight, bridge length, battery, speaker placement, and to select an alloy that flexes for the clip-on components but also stays secure. Samsung claims you could almost forget you’re wearing them.
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(Image credit: Samsung)
The sound of things
Samsung sounds confident in the fit, but it also had to do some fairly complex audio engineering to make these open earbuds capable of delivering high-quality audio that doesn’t leak out to the person next to you.
One of the most interesting aspects of this audio design is the TwinBoost drivers that can be used to both enhance the open-ear audio quality and cut down on audio leakage. The way it works is the open earbuds project “matching reverse soundwaves” from the rear of the speaker, which could cancel out some of the escaping audio. It’s a claim we obviously can’t confirm until we test the Galaxy Buds Open. This is essentially like active noise cancellation, which these buds lack, but instead of the buds creating antiphase sound waves to counteract the noise leaking into your ears, it uses counteracting sounds to cut down on noise leaking from the speakers near your ears.
(Image credit: Samsung)
Galaxy Buds Open can’t seal you off from outside sounds; in fact, they’re designed not to, but they can help keep your calls clear. To manage call quality, the earbuds include three mics and a “voice pickup unit”. Samsung claims the Galaxy Buds Open capture your voice through the mics and even “jaw movement” to help isolate your voice from other external noises. For those sounds that are not blocked by these audio features, Samsung added some machine learning to automatically cancel out recognized noises such as car horns and construction work.
The buds also support head gestures for accepting and rejecting calls, Gemini access, and Quick Voice Memos. More impressively, Samsung is rating the Galaxy Buds Open for 9.5 hours of audio playback and, with the charge case, a total of 38 hours of battery life. Battery life with calls is 5.5 hours and 25 hours with the charging cradle.
Galaxy Buds Open, which are only available in black, list for $229 (AU and UK pricing were unavailable at the time of writing) and in early November. That price puts them a touch cheaper than the excellent (and also noise-reducing) Shokz Openfit Pro, at $249, and makes them quite a bit more affordable than Bose Ultra Open ($299).
We’ll have more to say about the actual fit, audio quality, external noise cancellation, and battery life when we get a chance to test out the new Galaxy Buds Open. But things are looking good on paper.
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lance.ulanoff@futurenet.com (Lance Ulanoff)
