Quick review
The good
The not-so-good
Every company makes a pair of noise cancelling earbuds, but some excel above others. With its own custom hardware, the Anker Soundcore Liberty 5 Pro is a perfect example, and it’s not even that expensive, either.
Finding the right pair of earphones or headphones is rarely easy, partly because there’s just so much to choose from and a variety of price points to spend in. For instance, do you spend up and get something top of the line, or do you choose to save some money and get something a little less up there.
It is definitely a choice, though it’s one being helped in part by something called the “democratisation of technology”, a concept that essentially finds a way to cut back on costs by trickling technological advancements through to more price points. It’s one of the reasons why great TV technology doesn’t require the proverbial arm and leg, and also why so many earphones and headphones also have noise cancellation, as well.
As high-end technology starts to become normalised, those advances can make their way to more products, more price points, and ultimately more people. In headphones, for instance, chip makers building noise cancellation and sound processing in the one place can mean even smaller brands have a shot at making a pair of competitive earphones by providing access to similar approaches the big brands invest in heavily.
Yet there is still clearly a difference between what’s expensive and what’s not, because the best tech tends to be in that first one.
But it doesn’t have to be. Device makers are beginning to push back, building their own approaches that not only deliver a different approach, but a potentially better one, too.
We’ve seen some of that from Anker’s Soundcore brand in the past, a division of the company that specialises in sound, covering earphones, headphones, and even speakers, often developing products that aim to bring high-end tech at more affordable price points.
In the company’s latest earphones, the Liberty 5 Pro, it’s another take on exactly that, with a pair of truly wireless earbuds and earphones aimed at cancelling the noise by doing something a little more like what the big brands do: using custom technology.
Instead of using an off-the-shelf approach, Soundcore’s AI-focused noise cancellation hardware could give it an edge, and all without spending the same sort of dollars as the big brands.
Is the Soundcore Liberty 5 Pro the perfect compromise?
Design and features
Slightly elongated almost as if the earbuds were little metallic bananas for your ears, the Soundcore Liberty 5 Pro aren’t quite what we’ve seen from the Liberty range prior.
Granted, it’s been a good three years since we saw the Liberty 4 NC, but they were almost AirPod-styled earphones, complete with an obvious stem. These are not styled in quite the same way.
Rather, they’re more curved and unique, like a small arc that wraps into the ear, and a moulded tip designed to sit inside. You’ll find an assortment on ear-tips in the box, while the inside houses things you can’t see, such as a 9.2mm wool-paper driver on each side, four microphones per ear, processing tech, and an AI chip specifically built for noise cancellation.
This clearly isn’t the same pair we checked out a few years ago, and not just because the number has jumped up a full digit.
In-use
Find the right tip and load the earbuds in, and you’ll find they fit comfortably with little to no trouble.
While some earbuds require extra time to get the right tip or angle, these don’t. They fit, sit, and you can simply get on with your listening.
Touch controls are part of the package, configurable using the Soundcore app, but essentially a combination of swipes and taps. You’ll find a swipe up and down handles volume changes, while taps are set for pause and playback control.
Curiously, most of the tap combinations aren’t set natively, so at least you know the app will be used early on. A single tap would have normally been pause and play on each bud, but a fresh install had it missing on the left earbud. Fortunately you can bring it back, and you have options.
Performance
When you finally get control, it’s time to get stuck into the sound, and that’s where we bring out our regular playlist.
Yes, it’s time to pit the Liberty 5 Pro against the Pickr Sound Test, a list of tracks that you can experience for yourself.
That all starts with electronic, where the sounds of Tycho and Daft Punk give us an idea of what to expect: solid bass and warm mids, all while the highs kind of feel like they’re slightly reduced.
You can tell from the offset this is likely to make the earbuds warm, and it’s definitely giving off shades of that. Daft Punk’s “Contact” offers a solid thump, and the sound is warm in Soundcore’s signature profile, while balanced gives you a little less from the bass. There are definite options, thanks in part to the app.
For the most part, we left the Liberty 5 in signature, and the delivery was largely as expected: warm.
Take R&B and soul, where we found a good snap of bass and a rounded sound to the mids, with the lows earthier than you may expect. By comparison, the highs could feel restrained, almost as if the soundstage was smaller.
Into rock, and you’ll find the bass and drums punches back, with some great low warble in the likes of Muse, as well as some lovely detailed drums in some of those well-engineered tracks from the 60s and 70s, such as from David Bowie and The Beatles.
It’s not a guttural bass like you might want, though; our typical hefty test track of FKA Twigs “Two Weeks” didn’t shake our eardrums the way a deep bass likes to hit, but it is a good sound with a lot of punch.
If anything, the highs can come off feeling a little retrained. This signature sound is clearly focused on recreating warmth, and it’s not bad and only a little flat.
The more acoustic sound of jazz and classical is where the bass can become too heavy at times, and may push you back to the app and its profile changes. Alternatively, you can try out the “HearID” feature, which is designed to map your hearing to how the earbuds work with a profile made for your ears.
Noise cancellation
One of the major features going into the Liberty 5 was what Anker called out as some of the best noise cancellation technology in the world. To do this, the company has actually designed and built its own noise cancellation processor, a deviation from what smaller brands typically do.
It means Anker and Soundcore have effectively done what other bigger brands do, arming consumers with research and development built specifically to cut back on noise.
Officially, Anker says its system uses on-device AI (none of that cloud and connected stuff we normally use) to process noise, essentially isolating sound from the noise and spitting out a render that can be heard sans-extra-sounds, processing up to 384,000 times per second.
While these numbers can feel largely academic, it essentially means there’s a little more going on in the active noise cancellation department with some specific research and computational modelling focused on it, resulting in what should be some of the best AI Soundcore has ever had, and competing with brands bigger than itself.
In practice, those claims appear warranted. No one is more surprised than this reviewer.
It’s not that Anker’s sound technology has ever been bad, either. Far from it. Soundcore has long represented value, providing a solid entry-to-mid price point with better than expected technology. But the Liberty 5 Pro does appear to offer better noise cancellation than some other high-end hearable makers.
Testing on a crowded Sydney train — where you are basically going to end up getting some noise leakage from humans and transport alike — the Liberty 5 Pro did a stunning job keeping most of both away from the front of mind.
Some sounds get in — you can still hear a little bit of treble and voices leaking in, and it’s not quite up to where either the top-ranked earbuds from Apple or Bose hit — but it’s also not bad. Not just for the price, either.
Spatial audio
A degree of spatial audio can also be found, albeit not quite as cleverly as other earphones manage.
Officially, Anker has integrated “Dolby Audio” in the system, as well. It’s more that the audio is “optimised for Dolby Atmos”, which is to say the soundstage widens and the system lets you choose fixed or head-tracking, though neither does a tremendous job.
The sound using Dolby in the Liberty 5 Pro comes off shallow by comparison, almost as if the stage became too wide, and that’s your only way through to head-tracked audio. Basically an effect layered over the top of your sound.
You can’t simply have head-tracking for what you hear in the Liberty 5 Pro; it’s merely just head-tracking with a wider stage and a split between the sound spectrums that almost sounds silly. Mids take a backseat, bass is hard to find, and treble is front of mind, almost in your face completely. It doesn’t work very well.
Some people won’t care. While it’s clearly not on the same page as Bose’s head-tracking tech, or even what Sennheiser delivers in its headphones, it is that sense of interactive audio spatial has become known for.
But it’s not a great incarnation here. Other brands do spatial a lot better than what Anker is showing in the Soundcore Liberty 5 Pro.
A best case scenario
You also get a little bit extra in the Liberty 5 Pro, which can end up being part of the lure.
Take the case, because it has a screen attached to let you access controls. It’s a cute addition, albeit not the first time we’ve seen this; JBL has offered this in colour for its earbuds, complete with the ability to change wallpaper.
Soundcore’s approach is a little different: no customisation, and a focus more on quick information, almost like the Android power control dropdown. At a glance you can see power levels and controls, with shortcuts for cancellation modes, finding a device, pairing, and even snapping a picture using the earphones.
The catch might be that the screen on the case isn’t fantastic, and so navigating using it can feel cumbersome at times. The inclusion is great, the practical reality of the mediocre controls, less so.
We’d just lean on the controls on the actual earphones. They’ll be a lot more reliable, and they can even be customised. The screen on your case is more if you need them in a pinch.
Depending on how much extra you want to spend, Anker also makes a slightly more advanced version with a bigger screen and a recorder built into the design, though this version will be plenty for most.
Battery
As will the battery life, which delivers around six hours of listening with noise cancellation and none of the spatial stuff, or closer to four hours per charge if you want the extra features.
Like all truly wireless earbuds, the case acts as a charger for the earbuds, offering roughly four charges depending on the mode you’re in. Because the feature set can eat into the battery life, it means you should see around 20 to 24 hours worth of recharging, which also means the Liberty 5 are likely to last you a few days of intermittent use.
Fortunately, you can recharge the case and earphones easily enough using either the USB-C port on the back, or by sticking the whole thing on top of a wireless charger. It’s not magnetic, but it will charge over Qi wireless all the same.
Value
The price also delivers a lot of value, with the $270 noise cancelling earbuds providing the sort of ANC tech you’d expect on something more costly, even if the spatial performance isn’t quite there.
For under $300, you are definitely getting noise cancellation performance that we’d normally expect on a pair of earphones for over that price, even if the Dolby Audio side of things isn’t quite in line with headphones priced around the same.
Mind you, good value is something Anker’s Soundcore brand has been known for, so this hardly surprises.
What needs work?
What does is the sound, which dependent on what you listen to and the level of features you dive into can sound shallow or bass heavy, and there doesn’t seem to be much of a middle ground.
Anker tries to fix aspects of this by providing sound profiles to tweak and change the impact your earbuds get. Profiles aren’t exactly new to earbuds, and they can definitely colour the sound, but the Soundcore Liberty 5 doesn’t appear to offer a standard sound sans-colour.
You’ll find signature settings which tries to impart warmth, and you’ll find balanced which actually manages to come off bassier than what we would consider “balanced”. And then you’ll even find a mode that can conform to what your ears like, and in a custom profile made for your ears.
If that sounds a little like what Nura did for its earbuds, the idea is similar, just not the execution. In fact, the changes to the soundstage and deliver found in the AI profile just made us want to turn it off, and it’s also incompatible with the Dolby feature, making you pick between one or the other.
That makes the audio a bit of a mixed bag, a surprise given just how strong the noise cancellation is.
It’s a marginally more annoying niggle than the touchscreen on the case, which doesn’t always respond to touches and swipes, and can sometimes feel like it’s a lot slower than it needs to be. At times, you might just find it’s easier to simply press a button or use your phone.
What we love
The thing is we can live with those niggles because of what the Liberty 5 Pro excels at: dealing with noise.
At the launch, Anker and Soundcore were adamant that it offered some of the best noise cancellation around.
After testing the best two in the AirPods Pro 3 and Bose QC Ultra 2nd-gen, the Soundcore Liberty 5 Pro aren’t quite in the same category, but they’re also a fair sight better than almost every pair in its price range.
Sub-$300 earbuds are never this good at dealing with noise.
Liberty 5 Pro vs the competition
Comparatively, that can put Soundcore’s earbuds in a league of their own. Sure, the sound has its niggles, with a dance between bassy, balanced, warm, and shallow — a real combination to choose from — but once you find the sweet spot, you’ll be happy, and the ANC is top notch.
Because of that last point, the Liberty 5 Pro doesn’t have a lot of competition. Lots of earbuds across an assortment of price points offer noise cancellation, but few earbuds below $300 are actually game-changing in dealing with noise. These are.
They do a better job with noise than the AirPods 4 with ANC, a pair priced between $238 and $299 depending on where you look, and they’re also roughly as adept as the Bose QuietComfort Earbuds, which tend to be found for a little more, priced at $290 in Australia.
If you can shell out a little more, you may be able to find one of the best pairs anywhere, the Bose QC Ultra Earbuds 2nd-gen, found for between $359 and $449.
But beyond this, very little actually competes.
There are plenty of earbud offerings for lower than the Liberty 5 Pro’s $269 price point, but good luck getting truly capable noise cancellation out of it.
This is the standout reason to consider the Liberty 5 Pro: the ANC is surprisingly solid.
Final thoughts (TLDR)
We probably shouldn’t be as surprised as we are. Ever since the Soundcore name first popped up, it has largely represented value and capability, so it makes sense that these would be built on the same principle.
And yet there are still things that do surprise. That’s nice to see.
At under $300, the Soundcore Liberty 5 Pro are an easy recommendation to make for anyone looking for noise cancellation first and foremost. While true that the earbuds aren’t quite the same level of performance as what either Bose or Apple produces, the tech is up there where it matters.
This is cost-effective cancellation, and for most people, that’s the winning argument. Recommended.
