Samsung Galaxy Buds Pro is the best true wireless earbuds that the company has made yet. For their $200 asking price, you get a comfortable fit, effective active noise cancellation, and good, punchy sound quality. These earbuds improve on Samsung’s prior efforts with clever features like a speech detection mode that automatically lowers your music and lets you hear the outside world as soon as you start talking.
Samsung Galaxy Buds Pro Review
Design & Build Quality
The Samsung Galaxy Buds Pro is available in three colors: Phantom Black, Phantom Silver, and Phantom Violet to match the new Samsung Galaxy S21, and the color of the Buds will match the color of the charging case that comes along with them.
Speaking of the case, it’s sort of shaped like a little treasure chest – there’s a concave lid that unhinges in the middle and flips up. It’s fairly compact, which is nice when you want to slip it into your pocket, and has a status LED on both the inside and outside of the case that turns green, yellow, and red depending on how much battery is left in the case itself.
As for the Buds themselves, they’re a far cry from their bean-shaped predecessors. The Samsung Galaxy Buds Pro are back to their usual form as eartip-equipped funnels of sound.
Funnel is probably the appropriate word to describe them as they’re fairly long for earbuds, measuring in at just under an inch (20.8mm) long. The Buds need all that real estate however for their bevy of sensors, pogo pins, and microphones.
The outside of the Buds has a glossy, reflective plastic coating that is touch-capacitive and two more microphones with a wind guard that reduces ambient noise when walking outside. All of that houses the 11mm woofer and 6.5mm tweeter that we’ll talk about more in the performance section down below.
Overall, they’re surprisingly comfortable to wear for extended periods of time and don’t suffer from pressure build-up thanks to the external vent, but because of the way they jut out of your ear, they aren’t the most attractive-looking earbuds or very comfortable to wear in bed.
Sound Quality
Samsung’s large two-way speakers pump out deep bass and clear mids. And though the audio is scaled up on Galaxy smartphones, thanks to the brand’s proprietary Scalable Codec, you can still enjoy lively music on non-Samsung devices despite the minimal loss in quality.
The thumping low end on A Tribe Called Quest’s “Bonita Applebaum” was turned up to 11 when listening on our Galaxy Note 20 Ultra 5G, which was shocking at first, then stimulated rhythmic head-nods as the record played out. It was impressive to hear how well-balanced the bass was, along with Q-Tip’s soft-spoken vocals sounding more pronounced. Those same sentiments were shared when vibing out to Bob Marley & The Wailer’s “Could You Be Loved”; chills went down our spine once hearing that infectious bassline at the top.
To get a feel for the Galaxy Buds Pro’s frequency range, We indulged in some Jazz classics and the results were serene. From the impactful double bass to the steady hi-hats, every instrument played on Ahmad Jamal’s “The Awakening” had a distinctiveness to it and blended beautifully over the melodic composition. Clarity was slightly diminished on our Google Pixel 3 XL, but We believe that hardcore audiophiles would be the only ones to notice any differences when switching to non-Samsung devices.
What We can say is that the audio quality on video and podcasts is just as amazing. Watching now-President Joe Biden’s Inauguration ceremony was fun, with every political speaker and musical performance sounding transparent.
Battery Life
On its website, Samsung claims these earbuds will last up to 5 hours on a single charge, with about 13 hours of additional charge in the case, and in our testing, we found that wasn’t far off. At a consistent output of ~75 dB, the Samsung Galaxy Buds Pro can last up to 4 hours, 48 minutes with ANC turned on, which is pretty close to the estimate. The case also definitely has enough juice for a few charge cycles.
Microphone
The Samsung Galaxy Buds Pro features a very good microphone for a pair of truly wireless earbuds. From a frequency response perspective, the mic is very accurate, offering neutral-leaning output across the vocal range. There’s still a little bit of muffling due to it being an embedded microphone, but not nearly as bad as many other options on the market. Additionally, the microphone actually does a pretty good job cutting background noise out if you’re far enough away.
In conclusion, The Galaxy Buds Pro faces stiff competition everywhere you look, and you can find superior ANC and sound quality elsewhere. But with these latest earbuds, Samsung has blended much of what worked best about Buds Plus and Buds Live. Battery life is merely average, but that’s the only real gripe we’ve got. They don’t necessarily win at any one category, but the Galaxy Buds Pro strike an excellent all-around balance. And you can clearly see Samsung trying to recreate some of the ecosystem “magic” that AirPods owners are now used to.
The Buds Pro feels great in your ears, sounds better than any Samsung earbuds to date, and has convenient tricks to complement their decent noise cancellation. There’s still a place for the Galaxy Buds Plus if all you want are wireless earbuds with a battery that just goes and goes, and the Buds Live remains the better pick if you need environmental awareness at all times. But if you’re nabbing the Buds Pro as a preorder bonus for a new Galaxy S21, you should be more than satisfied.
