LG Xboom Buds (2025) review

Your reaction to hearing that will.i.am had a hand (and ear) in helping to tune LG’s latest pair of affordable wireless earbuds might vary depending on your attitude to the former Black Eyed Peas stalwart.

If your childhood was soundtracked by the likes of Boom Boom Pow and Pump It, the prospect of such musical talents bleeding into your in-ear listening might fill you with gleeful anticipation. If hearing Where Is The Love? and Let’s Get It Started had you taking a sledgehammer to your iPod, the idea might not fill you with such enthusiasm.

Whether you listen to will.i.am or Stevie Wonder, though, LG will need all of the help it can get if its Xboom Buds (2025) are going to muscle into some decidedly tricky territory. The outstanding Sony WF-C710N are currently occupying the Xboom Buds’ chosen spot at the sonic watering hole, offering decent noise cancelling and excellent sound at a supremely competitive price. Toppling Sony these days is like taking on an apex predator, and sheer ‘will’-power isn’t going to be enough…

Price

The LG Xboom Buds 2025 are priced at £119 / $99. At this level, their main competitors are the superb Sony WF-C710N (£100 / $120 / AU$189), and if you want to go cheaper, the non-ANC Sony WF-C510 (£55 / $60 / AU$110) are also a five-star buy.

If you’re an Apple fan and want to spend a bit more, the AirPods 4 with ANC will set you back around £179 / $179 / AU$299 at the time of writing.

Build & comfort

To hold or to observe, nothing about the LG Xboom Buds does a great amount to set the heart aflutter. Not that these are badly made or tacky earbuds, mind, there’s just little about them that we can point to as aesthetically interesting.

Considering some of the more outlandish outfits we’ve seen will.i.am sporting over the years, it’s hard not to be a touch disappointed. Perhaps LG didn’t consult him when it came to the buds’ styling.

When daubed in a matte black finish, our test pair are functional, utilitarian operators through and through. Perhaps the only evidence of any design flair comes from a small, fin-like ridge at each unit’s top to improve in-ear stability – we appreciate the idea, but you’ll feel far more security from the more prominent flap sported by the likes of the Bose QuietComfort Ultra Earbuds. Those cost a good deal more, mind, currently selling for £300 / $299 / AU$450.

The Xboom Buds are furnished with a choice of small, medium and large silicone ear tip options, a disappointingly modest number even at this budget-to-mid-range price point. Some of our wearers on the review team don’t have an issue with getting the tips to nestle neatly into their lugholes, while others are hamstrung by the modest number of options available.

The stabilising ridge does offer a bit of security, but it isn’t enough to negate a poor fit if the tips themselves don’t want to stay in your ears.

The Xboom Buds offer on-bud touch controls and, to their credit, it’s a commendably well-implemented system. You can customise things to your liking with real depth and clarity via the app, letting you assign each earbud with single, double and triple tap commands alongside a long-press on both sides.

We didn’t have any issues during our tests, either – whether it was a single press to play/pause a track or a triple tap to change the ANC mode, the buds’ response was fast, clear and always corresponded to our chosen input.

Features

Once you’ve nabbed a pair of LG Xboom Buds, you’ll want app support to get the full experience. Be warned, however, that you’ll need to download the correct one. Avoid LG Tone Free (that’s for completely different earbuds) and the LG Xboom app (that’s for Xboom speakers, not earbuds), and make sure you seek out the red ‘LG Xboom Buds’ icon when perusing your chosen app store.

Once you’ve downloaded the right app, you’ll be treated to a clean and clear support platform which lets you customise your active noise cancelling (ANC), delve deeper into tweaking your touch controls, adjust your sound profile and toggle your buds’ general settings.

In a bid to move with the times, the Xboom Buds support Auracast, meaning that they can receive audio transmissions from compatible broadcast sources such as airport announcements and compatible TV screens. We’ve seen Auracast implemented in various recent JBL and Bowers & Wilkins headphones, so maybe the audio sharing technology is set to become a much bigger deal over the next couple of years – a handy bonus from LG if it does take off, then.

Battery life figures are strong. With ANC turned on, the Xboom Buds will eke out 10 hours from the earbuds themselves and a further 20 hours with the case when noise cancelling is switched off. If you want to bump those numbers further, turning noise cancelling off will furnish you with 7.5 hours of continuous listening and a further 16.5 hours from the case.

For comparison, the five star Sony WF-C710N boast 8.5 hours of in-ear time with ANC switched on and 30 hours of total playtime with the charging case.

Noise-cancelling & call quality

We’ve been enjoying an unexpected spate of sunshine in the UK recently, giving us an excuse to pop on a pair of sliders and see how the LG Xboom Buds perform when charged with blocking out noise in the great outdoors.

And they do this really rather well. Standing next to a busy road might make you appear a little strange to motorists and passers-by, but it gives us a chance to assess how the LG buds handle the rumble and swoosh of traffic as it whizzes past.

We’re pleased with the results, noting how those lower-end sounds in particular are softened to near-insignificance. Higher frequencies, such as the chirp and chatter of small birds, will penetrate through more easily, but not so much that it begins to feel like the Xbooms’ Achilles heel.

While we’re outside, we also test how voice calls are handled. It’s a similarly solid showing, and while we find that the Sony WF-C710N grant a fuller, richer tone to human speech, the Xboom Buds offer enough clarity for us to conduct calls relatively easily. Again, higher-frequency noises do penetrate (those pesky birds!), but we’re still able to conduct our conversations without resorting to a confused shouting match.

Sound

You might have been expecting us to pull out nothing but tracks from will.i.am and The Black Eyed Peas’ extensive back catalogue to probe the Xboom Buds’ capabilities, but that’s a little too obvious for our tastes. It also feels like giving the LG in-ears some kind of home turf advantage, and we’re not letting them have such an easy ride.

Given that we’re certain Thom Yorke didn’t have a hand in tuning the Xboom, it’ll be perennial favourites Radiohead to kick off our testing. We seek out Decks Dark from the oft-overlooked A Moon Shaped Pool and note how weighty and full the buds make the track sound. Detail levels aren’t disgraceful, so that glistening tones, insistent bass plucks and Yorke’s inimitable falsetto have enough authenticity to make the entire ensemble seem reasonably immersive. A solid start.

Solid is the word. The Xboom Buds take the ‘boom’ aspect of their name rather literally, suffusing songs with a rounded aspect that occasionally strays into muddiness. We appreciate the muscle the LG bring, especially at their ample lower-end, but we do begin to wonder if such qualities have come at the expense of overall clarity. That round, full sound threatens to give tracks a slightly stodgy feeling, undermining the propulsiveness of their rhythmic capabilities.

The LG Xboom Buds sound somewhat claustrophobic to our ears, and while switching to a more bass-light EQ setting takes the edge off, it isn’t enough to rectify the issue. The wireless earbuds don’t necessarily over-emphasise any aspect of their delivery, but we wish that they had a bit more drive and spark, not to mention greater spaciousness, to give our tunes a more lively or large-scale aspect. We get the impression that these are buds playing it safe, and we struggle to find a given aspect of their sound that sticks out as remarkable.

We want to discover how the LG stack up against their rivals, so we switch over to the class-leading Sony WF-C710N to see exactly where the sonic bar should be. The C710N confirm our reservations, granting greater clarity and revealing more sonic layers to music in the process, all while exposing far more appreciable swings in dynamics as we listen to what is clearly a more competent alternative.

The budget Sonys are more versatile, too, making a recording of Pearl Jam’s Wreckage sound appropriately lean before latching onto the industrial heft of Slipknot’s Left Behind. In this regard, the rival LG buds can tend to paint everything with the same brush, a characteristic which you’ll find frustrating if you want tracks to feel distinct as you bounce from genre to genre.

That approach can work to the Xbooms’ favour, however, as their safe sonic nature tends to disguise the flaws in poor quality recordings – the C710N, by contrast, will shine a spotlight on such imperfections.

Verdict

Being a pair of noise-cancelling buds at a reasonable price could have made the LG Xboom Buds 2025 a tempting proposition, but their lack of any standout sonic qualities makes them hard to recommend.

If performance is paramount, you’re better off picking up a pair of the Sony WF-C710N for similar money at this affordable end.

First reviewed: May 2025

SCORES

• Sound 3
• Features 5
• Comfort 4

MORE:

Read our review of the Sony WF-C710N

Also consider the cheaper Sony WF-C510

Read our Apple AirPods 4 with ANC review

Best wireless earbuds: top pairs tested by our reviewers