soundcore Liberty 4 Pro
The Earbuds
The soundcore Liberty 4 Pro’s are a nice sized pair of earbuds, especially considering the features that are packed inside these. They come in 3 different colors. A black, a blue and a white. Both the black and blue are ‘glossy’ colors. Personally I prefer a matte finish to my earbuds, but the colors are understated and not garish.
They also come with six different sized silicone ear tips, from extra extra small through to extra large. So you’re pretty much guaranteed to find the right size that fits you best.
Each earbuds weigh approximately 5.5g, which makes them about the same weight as the Apple Airpods Pro 2. So with a lightweight design, and a custom fit, you’ll gbe able to wear these for hours at a time without any discomfort.
Controlling these earbuds are done through a combination of squeezing and stroking the earbuds themselves. Very similar to how the Apple Airpods Pro work.
Squeezing the stem of the earbuds either once, twice, thrice, or a long press, all trigger various actions such as play/pause music, skip tracks forwards and backwards, and changing ANC modes. You can also change what each action does from within the soundcore mobile app. So you can make your controls as verbose, or as simple, as you like.
It also has an indented slot on the front of the earbuds from where you slide you finger up and down to change the volume.
The controls work well and are far less prone to accidental triggering such as you can get with touch controls on other earbuds.
The Case
The case comes with a sliding lid that makes it easy to access the earbuds. It’s a design that soundcore have been doing for a while now and it works well.
The case, whilst fairly compact, is bigger than soundcore’s cases for some of their earlier earbuds, like the Liberty 4 NC’s. This isn’t any ordinary case though. There’s a lot of tech in it!
The case comes with a touch bar and display that lets you change various settings on the earbuds without having to use the soundcore mobile app. From change ANC modes and levels through to enabling spatial audio. You can even use the case to find your earbuds if you lose one, and even use the case as a remote trigger for the camera on your phone! Even just a simple double tap of the touch bar will instantly display how charged your earbuds, and the case, are. It’s super easy, and convenient.
It isn’t a super bright screen though so whilst it’s easily visible on a dimly lit day, or indoors, you will struggle to see it clearly in direct sunlight.
The Sound
The soundcore Liberty 4 Pro earbuds come equipped with two drivers. A 10.5mm bass driver is dedicated to the lower frequencies, with a titanium coated tweeter dedicated to the higher frequencies. They is also Hi-res LDAC support if you happen to have hi-res audio, and an Android phone. As always, iPhones don’t support LDAC.
There are few earbuds that are close in price to the soundcore Liberty 4 Pro’s that are equipped with both two drivers and hi-res support.
So probably unsurprisingly, these sound pretty good, even out-of-the-box. There’s plenty of tight, warm, bass that accompanies a controlled treble that presents vocals and instruments that are both clear and defined, with a good seperation between them. Those dual drivers really do make a difference and giving space and clarity across the whole spectrum.
If you do want to tweak the sound you can jump into the soundcore mobile app and choose from 22 different EQ presets, or jump into the 8-band graphic equaliser and change it to your exact preference. There’s even a ‘preference test’ that runs a sequence of tests to find out the type of sound that you prefer listening to. It then creates a custom EQ based on your listening preference.
There are lots of options here for getting the soundcore Liberty 4 Pro’s to sound exactly how you want them to. Having said all that, I found the soundcore signature profile, which is the default setting, more than good enough for most genres of music.
The Mobile App
The soundcore mobile app also allows you to enable spatial audio, with five different spatial audio modes to choose from. If I’m being honest though, they’re all a bit sub-par. Using ‘movie mode’ makes the audio in any movie sound weird and echoey. Music mode isn’t much better. I’m not a spatial audio fan as most companies seem to do it poorly as it just messes with the sound profile way too much. So I wouldn’t recommend using it.
These sound good enough without it. You don’t need spatial audio.
ANC
The soundcore Libery 4 Pro’s come with five different levels of ANC allowing you to fine-tune how strong you want the noise-cancelling to be. That’s useful for those that can be sensitive to high ANC levels.
There’s even an airplane mode that uses a built-in barometric pressure sensor to give you the best ANC whilst flying. That’s similar to what Sony have in their more expensive headphones, like the WH-1000XM5’s.
These earbuds are also equipped with real time adaptive ANC. This uses 6 sensors, and the barometric sensor, to measure your environment three times a second. This then gives you the best ANC for any environment. That’s a lot of tech in a pair of earbuds.
The net result of all of that makes these earbuds good at canceling out low frequencies, such as the rumble of a plane engine, or passing cars. It does okay with the high frequencies such as a coffee machine, although people’s voices do still get through a little bit. Still, overall it’s good ANC for the price.
Transparency Mode
The five transparency levels lets you customise how much outside noise you want to let into the Liberty 4 Pro’s. So whilst level 5 lets little noise in, at level 1 it’s definitely amplifying your surroundings. It’s most natural sounding when left at level three. So overall soundcore have done a good job at controlling letting outside noise in even if it does sound a little artificial at those lower levels.
Wind Reduction
I live in a particularly windy part of the country and so I was happy to see a wind reduction mode on these earbuds. Unfortunately it doesn’t work particularly well on these earbuds. Despite trying different ear tips I could not get the mode to make any significant reduction to wind noise. Thankfully at least the ANC is pretty good.
Mic Test
The Liberty 4 Pro’s have six mics to help cancel out background noise, whether that’s wind, or noise, to make sure you’re clear and well heard when using these to take a call.
I’ve taken calls on these outside, on a noisy and windy day, and the earbuds have done a good job of cancelling that all out whilst making my voice clear. It does digitize your voice a bit, which is to be expected, but you can still be clearly heard. That’s really impressive on any pair of earbuds, at any price, not just this price.
Weatherproof
The soundcore Liberty 4 Pro’s are IPX5 rated which makes them water resistant and so are fine to use if you happen to get caught out in the rain wearing them, or are using them whilst at the gym.
Battery-life
A fully charged pair of Liberty 4 Pro’s will run for 10 hours, or 7.5 hours, with ANC off or on respectively. Including the case gives you a total battery life of 40 or 30 hours, again depending on whether ANC is turned off or on .
And when you do need to charge them, the earbuds support fast-charging where a 5 minute charge will give you 4 hours of playback. The case charges using the USB-C port at the back, but can also be charged wirelessly as well.
Extra Features
These earbuds also come equipped with “Easy Chat” where the earbuds will lower the volume of your music when it detects you talking so you can easily talk to someone. It will then raise the volume of your music back up again when you stop talking.
It sound like a good idea, but in practice I don’t find that it works well. It is way too sensitive as even just humming or singing to yourself triggers it. So if you’re the type of person that likes singing along to their music then you’re going to find this super annoying. You’re better off just talking an earbud out to talk to someone.
Connectivity
The Liberty 4 Pro’s support multipoint so that you can be connected to two devices at the same time. That’s super useful if you want to listen to music from your phone and take calls from your laptop without having to constantly disconnect and reconnect from one to the other.
The Mobile App
The soundcore mobile app gives you full control over all the features in these earbuds. It’s a well-polished app that is intuituve and easy to use. It also allows these earbuds to get firmware updates. I can’t stress enough how important being able to update the firmware on a device is, especially the more and more tech that companies squeeze into items like this.
The first time I used these I had to update not only the firmware of the earbuds, but also the firmware of the case! There’s so much tech inside not only the earbuds, but also the case as well, and there’s always bugs in software so being able to get firmware updates is essential.
Verdict
So the soundcore Liberty 4 Pro’s do have a few little minor issues, and there’s certainly a few things I don’t like about them, but then again nothing’s perfect.
Overall these souns great though. They also have good ANC and mic quality too. Add to that all the features that you get with these earbuds and you’re looking at.a really good package. Especially considering it’s less than half the price of a lot of other ‘Pro’ earbuds.
These are available for $130 from Amazon or soundcore directly, in either a glossy blue, glossy black, or white color.