First Impressions of the Beats Studio Buds +: Don’t Believe the Hype

Apple’s new Beats Studio Buds + earbuds are out now, and the buzz from Apple stans (a clear case! better battery life! improved ANC!) is everywhere—even on Cardi B’s Instagram.

I got my hands on a pair and have been testing them for the past week. Though I haven’t taken the Studio Buds + through our usual extensive testing yet, my first impression is that all the gushing is a touch excessive. These earbuds are good, but depending on your needs, you could do better.

They’re good earbuds if you’re an Apple fan—just not the best

Apple makes devices that work seamlessly with other Apple products, and the new Beats Studio Buds + wireless earbuds are no exception.

If you’re an Apple fan looking for the best combination of ecosystem-specific features, performance, and price, the Beats Studio Buds + pair is worthy of your consideration.

We still think the Beats Fit Pro earbuds are better

The Studio Buds + pair shares a lot of iOS-friendly features (“Hey Siri” activation, Find My compatibility, seamless pairing to iCloud-connected devices) with Beats’s other noise-cancelling earbuds, the Fit Pro set, one of our picks for the best wireless earbuds. They cost $200, so they’re $30 more than the Studio Buds + set, but we like the Fit Pro earbuds better because they’re more secure in the ears, they offer better adaptive noise cancellation, and their button design is more ergonomic. For us, all of that is worth the extra cost.

Aside from those key differences, the experience of using the two pairs is similar. The Studio Buds + set even beats the Fit Pro pair in battery life, as the new set gives you two more hours, which may be important to folks who use their earbuds all day long.

If you don’t use Apple, the flaws of the Studio Buds + are more apparent

For people who aren’t tied to the Apple ecosystem, the benefits of the Studio Buds + pair start to diminish. The sound is quite good, but you can’t adjust it to your personal tastes using EQ controls, as you can with many competitors these days. The active noise cancellation is above average but still bested by that of our top earbuds pick, the Soundcore Space A40 pair, which is regularly priced under $100. This Beats pair lacks wireless charging, its IPX4 water resistance is the bare minimum required for use at the gym, and its controls force you to choose between digital assistant call-up and volume.

The lack of volume or assistant controls isn’t as big of a deal if you have an Apple Watch or use Siri, but if you don’t, those limitations can be a serious inconvenience. The Studio Buds + pair also lacks dual-device connectivity, which again isn’t a problem if you’re solely switching between Apple devices—but for any other Bluetooth devices, you have to manually disconnect and reconnect to switch audio sources.

The Studio Buds + earbuds do have flair—and a few good features

This isn’t to say that the Beats Studio Buds + set lacks charm. We have encountered a few elements that are worth shouting out:

• The charging features: A lot of folks will appreciate the small charging case, the nine hours of battery life per charge, and a rapid-charge feature that provides an hour of use from five minutes of charging.
• The controls:The physical buttons here are less likely to be inadvertently activated in comparison with the squeeze system of the AirPods or a set of touch controls. And the microphones are clear, so you’ll sound great to callers.
• The see-through design: People are making a lot of fuss over the earbuds’ transparent design, which is nostalgic but purely a matter of taste. And clear-plastic devices have a history of yellowing over time, so we’re unsure how well this set will age.

• The fit: The earbud size and shape should fit most small to large ears, though people with very large or very small ear canals may find that the included tips don’t keep the buds stable when you're in motion. The buttons require that you depress them at the top to activate, which can pivot the tips out of alignment in your ear easier than with the Fit Pro’s bottom-activated buttons. So wearers who skip tracks a lot may find that they need to adjust these earbuds more frequently than they would a design that has stabilizing wings.

The bottom line

If you like Apple stuff and don’t mind paying the extra costs associated with it, the Beats Studio Buds + set is a perfectly recommendable pair of true wireless earbuds. But if that compatibility is not your priority, there are plenty of other earbuds that we recommend instead.

This article was edited by Adrienne Maxwell, Grant Clauser, and Catherine Kast.