Tips on Tips: How to Shop for Replacement Earbud Tips

Have you ever found yourself the frustrated owner of earbuds that are too tight, too loose, or just plain uncomfortable? Although most earbuds come with multiple tips, there are bound to be ears that the included tips don’t fit. If those ears belong to you, purchasing the right third-party replacement tips can improve comfort and performance and save your audio investment from becoming junk-drawer flotsam.

Google “replacement earbud tips,” and you may be astonished by the number of companies selling these things. Some, such as Comply and SpinFit, have been at it for a while. Others appear to be temporary brands created purely to sell off overstock from manufacturers that didn’t sell as many tips as they made. How do you even begin to narrow down the options and find the right tips for your earbuds and ears? We’re here to help.

To find the best earbud tips, you need to ask three questions. First, do the tips fit your earbuds? Second, do they fit your ears? And third, how do they affect the sound?

Step one: Make sure the tips fit your earbuds

With the exception of Comply, which has a “Find tips for your earphone” search tool right on its homepage, most earbud-tip companies offer a mishmash of sizes and shapes, and it’s largely up to you to figure out what will work.

Many tips are listed by their bore size (the diameter of the small hole in the tip’s center) or by their compatibility with a specific sound-tube diameter (in millimeters). The sound tube is the stem part of the earbud that holds the tip. Unless you happen to have your own calipers, we recommend searching for earbud tips using your earbud model name on Google, Amazon, Walmart.com, and the like, and then checking the product description to make sure that the tips will fit your exact earbud model. For earbuds from popular brands like Apple, Bose, and Jabra, it’s usually pretty easy to track down a match. But for lesser-known brands, don’t be afraid to contact the earbud-tip company and ask questions. Usually you can’t return eartips once you’ve opened the packaging, so do the legwork to ensure you don’t end up wasting money.

The good news is that, for the most part, if a tip company says that a certain tip will fit a specific earbud, it will. The bad news is that, if you own earbuds with unusually shaped sound tubes—such as the oval 1More True Wireless ANC or an all-in-one wing-and-tip style like the Jaybird Tarah Pro—it will be much harder to use a third-party replacement tip. In these instances, you may have to stick with the original manufacturer’s tips. If your ear size is outside the standard small, medium, and large sizes, contact the company and ask if it has tips that are smaller or larger than what it includes in the box.

Step two: Find the right fit and feel for your ears

Once you’ve found a set of tips that will fit your earbuds, you need to make sure they’ll also fit (and feel good in) your ears. You have three things to consider here: material, shape, and size. Most replacement tips are made from silicone, which is great because it holds its shape well, it’s washable, and it lasts a long time. However, it can’t accommodate all ear shapes. If your ear canal is an oval and the tip is round, you’ll likely struggle with getting a proper seal.

The other major material for earbud tips is foam. This material is great because it is soft and capable of expanding and adjusting to any ear shape, so it often holds earbuds in place better, especially for folks with smaller ear canals. Getting a better seal with foam can be easier than doing so with silicone, and a better seal can help with noise isolation and bass performance. However, foam is harder to keep clean (some brands can tolerate washing, and some can’t), and it loses its springiness over time. In fact, foam-tip manufacturers recommend that, with daily use, you should replace your foam ear tips every few months. But they’re often sold in multi-packs, so you can buy a year’s worth of tips at a time.

As for shape, most ear tips you’ll encounter are round, but there is variance. Some are fuller and more bulbous, and some are shallow dishes. Larger ear canals tend to be better served by the more bulbous round tips, and smaller ear canals often find comfort in the more shallow shapes. Silicone tips also are available in a “multi-flange” style, which resembles a pine tree or a stack of open umbrellas. Multi-flange tips usually provide a good seal for folks who have difficulty with the round tip style, but if you aren’t accustomed to a tip that extends deeper into your ear, it can initially feel invasive to wear. Foam tips are typically round these days, but you may occasionally come across some that look like cylindrical earplugs, which are usually designed to block the maximum amount of external noise. For larger ears, the cylinder-shaped foam can be effective, but smaller ears may find that all that foam starts to expand too much and slowly make an escape.

Last but not least is size. Unfortunately, it’s tricky to figure out what size tip will fit your ears. If you’re wondering how to tell whether a tip fits you, we have a video on how to get a great headphone fit. But just because you usually wear a large tip, that doesn’t mean large is the proper size in a certain third-party replacement. It’s a little like clothing sizes: Until you know what size you are in a certain brand, you may need to endure a little trial and error. This is especially true for brands that offer tips of in-between sizes (XS, S, S/M, M, M/L, L, XL). More-expensive foam tips often come in a multi-size pack, which is a good place to start. For cheaper buds, we suggest that you buy a few sizes around your usual size to make sure that you find a set that gives you a proper seal.

If this all sounds like too much, and you’re willing to pay any price to get earbud tips that fit you perfectly, Snugs makes custom-fit eartips for nearly every popular set of earbuds. The problem is, these tips can cost as much as the earbuds themselves.

Step three: Learn how replacement tips can affect the sound, for better and for worse

You might wonder (as we did) if using third-party tips affects what you hear. The short answer is yes, but you may not care. We bought replacement tips from ALXCD, AZLA, Comply, Dekoni, Final Audio, and SpinFit, and we measured both their ability to isolate you from noise and their impact on the earbuds’ frequency response (that is, how evenly they reproduced sounds across the low, mid, and high frequencies). We used the same methodology to measure these tips that we use for our guides to the best noise-cancelling headphones and the best audiophile headphones for everyday use.

We found that, when it comes to blocking out noise, the seal is more important than the material. We originally thought, based on foam’s reputation, that foam would block external sound better than silicone. It turns out this is the case only because of how well foam conforms to the shape of the ear canal. Silicone tips performed equally well when they completely closed off the simulated ear canal. However, if the tip in any way folded or bent away from the internal edges of our ear simulator, the material’s density didn’t matter. (You can see our results in the charts below.)

Our measurements also showed that ear-tip shape and material can change the sound of your earbuds. Using JVC’s HA-FW01 earbuds, we compared frequency-response measurements of the original included silicone tips against those of the third-party tips we purchased, plus some generic multi-flange tips we had on hand. For the most part, the variations in frequency response occurred above 5 kHz, where many unvoiced consonants (f, s, and t) reside. Depending on your hearing health in that range, these changes could be noticeable. The exception to this was the multi-flange tips, which affected the frequency response down into the midrange, around 800 Hz and up (it’s generally easier to hear differences in this lower range). These variations in response went in both directions—sometimes reducing a given frequency, sometimes emphasizing it. However, the variance was very slight and didn’t diverge more than a few decibels until above 2 kHz. (Again, you can see our results in the charts below.)

Overall, in our tests the differences in sound were mostly small, so you may not notice or mind such changes. If you are particularly sensitive to high frequencies and own a pair of earbuds with a piercing high-end spike, a reduction of a few decibels might be welcome. And if your earbuds have equalization controls through an app, you can easily adjust their tuning. But if you adore the sound of your current in-ear headphones and prefer not to alter a single soundwave, your best choice may be replacement tips offered by your earbuds’ manufacturer.

Of course that option works only if the original tips fit you in the first place. No matter how third-party tips alter the sound or isolation, if the original tips were so ill-fitting or uncomfortable that you couldn’t wear your earbuds, it’s far better to buy a third-party pair that fits you properly.

When we review earbuds or in-ear monitors, sometimes we dismiss a pair based purely on its poor tip options. We believe that companies should be doing their absolute best to make earbuds fit as many people as possible, and frankly it’s irritating how many companies include only two pairs of tips in the box—especially when there are others (such as 1More and RHA) that include an abundance of tips, even with their inexpensive earbuds. These things aren’t costly to make, and because fit can make such a massive difference in the performance and user experience, it’s baffling that companies are leaving the burden on the person who purchased their headphones. We hope that the growing market for replacement earbud tips will signal to earbud companies that they can, and should, do better. Until then, don’t be afraid to contact the manufacturers, try more tips, and—if necessary—return earbuds that clearly don’t fit you.