Sound
Depending on how your ear is shaped, and how far you’re willing to jam them in you’re likely to experience two very different Aerobuds. If you want the advertised Vivid Bass (TM), you’ll need to get a nice, tight, fit. For me, that means smaller ear pads and an extra couple of pushes. Aerobuds are light but by no means tiny. There’s plenty of husk to grip for jamming them right in there. And wow, does jamming them in there make a difference.
A light jam-in reveals a pretty neutral sound signature with decent out-of-head staging and slightly subdued highs. Bass is light, but reaches low enough. Sure, you’ll not get anywhere near to hearing the opening seconds of Markus Schulz’s Mainstage yawn to life, but you’ll get solid, non-intrusive, and fast-decaying bass that keeps up with the fastest of trance, outputs decent texture, and maintains good to great stereo detail.
Mids are dry and stage-expansive, taking up the greatest real-estate, but not with a lot of sound pressure but with air and stage detail of the three frequency bands. It’s a good, solid sound, but nothing to write home about.
Push them in and you lose a bit of stage and out-of-head feel, but gain intimate evangelistic bass that gains on the mids. No matter how far you push Aerobuds in, the overall impression is just this side of subdued, meaning you won’t be bothered by pesky or sibilant highs and upper mids. But pushed in, you’ll be tapping your feet.
Aerobuds’s bass is great. It never blooms, is plenty strong, and, with the buds pushed fully in, really moves the music.
Perhaps it’s Aerobuds’s fully sealed design; whatever the case, percussion and other upper-mid/lower-high instruments are slightly dull. Sure, sibilance isn’t something that will worry your, but especially if you’re into female vocals, chimes, and the delicate stage cues of live trance, I suggest looking elsewhere.
If your music lives in the lower and mid mids and bass, Aerobuds may well cover all your bases.
It is superior in every way to FiiO’s FB1. Thanks to subdued highs, it is an easier listen for long jaunts than the Nuforce BE6i. But, what really bit the BE6i was its bitey highs. A bit of that bite would have redeemed Aerobuds’s several faults and made them sound like a million bucks.
End words
Four hours of playback between charges. Generic design. Good fit. Robust body. Great bass. Decent mids. So-so highs. Aerobuds is priced well, sounds pretty good, and does everything at a B to B- level. It’s not an earphone engineered to genius standards. It doesn’t sound or function as well as Apple’s AirPods. And I have no idea what LiteXim mean by oriental aesthetic.
What I do know is that I like Aerobuds, just not enough to keep me from my AirPods.
