What are cheap and super-cheap wireless earbuds getting wrong – and how they can fix it

It can't be easy to make an affordable pair of wireless earbuds. You're working with a limited budget, you need to keep costs down, and you've got a customer base that, increasingly, has come to expect the moon on a platter when it comes to wire-free sound.

Features, sound quality, convenience, fancy tech and tricks, a sleek design, seamless app support; we're a very demanding bunch, and that's becoming only more apparent as time goes on.

Little wonder then that, with standards being so high and resources potentially getting stretched, cheap and super-cheap earbuds often end up missing the mark.

Some manufacturers within what we'd call the 'cheap' or 'affordable' realm manage to pull it off – the excellent Sony WF-C510 are at the bottom end of this particular tranche – but so many alternatives struggle to achieve similar success.

The LG Xboom Buds, for instance, which are already dropping to around £90 on Amazon, missed the mark thanks to their flat, uninspiring sound and rather utilitarian build. Sound quality is the thing that matters most, of course, but there wasn't much to set our hearts aflame no matter how we judged the Xboom Buds.

Earfun blew us away with its big performance, small cost Earfun Air buds in 2020, but since then, the Chinese brand has been on something of a downward trajectory. The company's most recently reviewed pair, the Earfun Air Pro 3, will currently set you back just £50 on Amazon, but their middling sound means, for us, that they are to be avoided.

Then, we have the recently reviewed JLab Go Pop+. These really are cheap earbuds – £25 / $30 / AU$50 is mere pocket change in tech terms – yet a three-star review made them tough to recommend. Again, sonic issues raised their ugly head, and we advised forking out a tad more for the C510 instead.

So what's going on here, and is there any advice we can give to manufacturers trying to tackle an admittedly tricky brief? And no, saying "make your earbuds sound better" isn't really going to cut it.

Well, let's say that, first off, we understand that part of the problem lies with modern customer expectations. When making a new pair of buds, whether they cost £50 or £250, customers want a raft of features, meaning that more purist options can often fall by the wayside.

If you want people to buy your product, you’re going to have to sell more than the rather ephemeral and ill-defined promise of “great sound”. Tangible talents, be they noise cancelling, large battery life or even solid Bluetooth codec support, are often the first things prospective buyers look at.

That can lead to manufacturers scrambling to pack their products with as many features as possible, a desire that can distract from the core goal of making them sound as good as they can.

For us, they have to sound the part, at least for our purposes, and that's been a stumbling block for many of the aforementioned contenders. They don't necessarily all sound the same, but we do generally detect the same issues regarding the lack of dynamic prowess and rhythmic integrity cropping up time and again.

This is especially true for super-cheap earbuds such as the JLab Go Pop+. While the clarity on display isn't terrible, it's the buds’ complete lack of musicality elsewhere, from their flattened dynamics to their poor feel for rhythms, that really undermine their credentials.

As we say in our review: “If you’re expecting any feeling of punch or weight to your music, not to mention a talent for dynamics or genuine drama, you’ll be left wanting.”

We’re not asking a pair of super-cheap buds to be replete with detail – that's just not a realistic expectation. What we want to hear is the essence or feel of the music to keep us entertained as we listen.

You’re never going to get the sort of pristine sound that audiophiles crave – what we expect, instead, is a general musical understanding that makes pop songs sounds fun or slow ballads sound sombre.

Just look at the Sony WF-C510, the benchmark for cheap buds everywhere. They’re not unbelievably clear or stunningly detailed, but they give us all of the elements we want at this level. Our review sums it up perfectly: “The key at this price point is to be fun, engaging and musical, and the Sony WF-C510 deliver all of this and more.”

Think of the goal, then, as like trying to emulate an Impressionist painter – less concerned with the minutiae and details that you might find in a photograph, and instead capturing the spirit of the music with broad, bold brushstrokes.

Sometimes, you have to work within the constraints of the your budget, and part of that is making sonic decisions, even compromises, to get a sound that suits the level at which you’re operating. If that also means kicking a few features to the curb in pursuit of better sound then, frankly, so be it – whether brands would be willing to take such a risk, however, is another matter entirely.

Shooting for hi-fi levels of detail and clarity may not be realistic, but producing a product that can handle the fundamentals of what makes music musical – energy, dynamics, rhythms, emotional engagement – is a more attainable aim.

Get those elements right, and you may be onto a low-cost winner.

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