Soundpeats PearlClip Pro review — Occasionaly quality

I’m the kind of person who is constantly listening to something. Whether that be a podcast, video essay, or, most often, music. I just work better with some background noise, and how that noise sounds does matter to me. I’m not exactly an audiophile, but I know a thing or two and can tell when an audio device isn’t outputting the best quality. I also like to be able to hear my surroundings, and noise canceling earbuds that fit in your ear canal are incredibly uncomfortable. So the Soundpeats PearlClip Pro sounded like a perfect fit. They’re open air buds, meaning they don’t fit into your ear. Instead, they have an unconventional clip design similar to clip-on earrings.

That design certainly feels like an experiment that doesn’t quite work out. The PearClip Pros are difficult to wear for long periods of time as they have a constant pinching sensation on your ears. It’s frustrating, but on the flip side, they’re not going anywhere unless you remove them. When working out and moving around a lot, the buds didn’t move an inch. There’s definitely value in that, as its hard to find a good pair of earbuds suitable for more strenuous activities.

Whether these are a good pair of earbuds or not is more up for debate. Out of the box, the PearClip Pros are very bass boosted, crushing the mids and highs into dust. This will make a lot of songs unpleasant to listen to. For example, when testing them with Devil Trigger from Devil May Cry 5, my go to song for bass testing, I literally could not hear the lyrics. I’ve also been listening to a lot of The Pillows recently, since they sadly disbanded, and it makes their rockin’ tracks sound very flat.

Soundpeats does have an app to adjust the EQ of their various devices, though it’s filled with improper English and requires an account to use, but even after fiddling around with it extensively I could never find a sweet spot that sounded quite right. They even have an Adaptive EQ feature where you tap whenever you hear a noise and it creates an EQ profile based on your ears. This never helped and often made things sound worse, so I just stuck with the SOUNDPEATS Classic profile as it seemed to get the best results.

Those results aren’t great for most genres of music. Everything, from classical to rock, just sounds incredibly flat. Everything, that is, save for jazz, soul music, and rhythm and blues. I have no idea why, but when I popped on some Frank Sinatra or Otis Redding just sounds phenomenal, even better than my combination record player/bluetooth speaker. The buds always have an odd spatial quality to them, which usually results in them failing to recreate whatever room the music was recorded in. It seems like its attempting to sound like live music, but almost always creates an annoying room tone that detracts from what you’re listening to.

For whatever reason, it works perfectly for those three genres. I think the EQ is supposed to adapt based on what you’re listening to, as there are individual songs in other genres that sound good, but whatever its doing I wish it did it more often, or I could find a way to manually configure it to… whatever’s happening here.

As for outgoing audio, they’re serviceable but not great. They seem to capture a little too much of whatever’s going on around you and muffle your voice. You’re not going to want to take an important call on these things or even non-important ones if you have other options. Controlling everything going on here is a pain as well. They use touch controls and the box does have a handy manual showing all the gestures and what they do, with you able to further customize them in the app. However, they’re way too sensitive for their own good. I have long hair, and it would constantly register it as a touch, skipping songs or suddenly increasing the volume. I ended up needing to turn off the touch controls entirely, and there’s no other method on the buds for controls.

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