Anker Soundcore C30i Truly Wireless Headphones Review

The Anker C30i are clip-on earbuds with an open-fit design. Rather than placing a nozzle with an ear tip inside of your ear canal, their cuff-like design wraps around your ear lobe and bottom of your pinna near the helix and antihelix and projects your audio towards your ear canal, leaving it open. Their shape seems clearly inspired by the Bose Ultra Open Earbuds Truly Wireless, while the Anker have exchanged a button control for a touchpad and added silicone sleeves that fit over the 'cuff.' They come in an opaque 'White' color, or 'Black', which includes an opaque case with an almost smokey quartz translucent look for the earbuds.

The Anker C30i are decently comfortable. The unusual rigid, all-plastic C-shaped cuffs are a bit one-size-fits-most, meaning depending on your anatomy, they'll fit you better or worse. They include two sets of silicone sleeves that can help adjust their fit and add grip. They're easy to place but lack the same degree of fit adjustment you get with the Bose Ultra Open Earbuds Truly Wireless, which have a flexible silicone 'hinge' to clasp with more or less tension. As a result of the rigid design, the Anker cuffs can apply too much pressure over time and cause discomfort to the back of your ear, but your mileage may vary. Plus, if you have multiple piercings along your ear, they might not fit you.

The controls are adequate. A touchpad is located on the back of each cuff in an intuitive, and you can reassign the default controls in the app. They emit tones for each registered command, chime when you hit max volume, and chime to signal pairing mode. Although, by default, there's no single tap command that helps mitigate misfires, you can dedicate a function to a single tap in the app. Sometimes hair can get in the way, and every so often, the touchpad registers a double tap as a triple tap, which is annoying when you want to pause your audio, and it skips to the next track instead. To adjust the volume the command is press-and-hold, which allows for precise adjustment, though, if you want to make drastic volume alterations it's a bit laborious. Of course, you can swap around the controls.

The Anker C30i are superbly portable. You can pop them in virtually any pocket, but you'll want to store them in the case.

The clamshell-style charging case is good. It's made of nice quality matte plastic and has a USB-C port on the back. Its lid's plastic is a bit thinner than the rest of the case, though. The Bluetooth pairing button for the buds is located on the bottom of the case.

The Anker C30i have great build quality. The buds are water resistant with an IPX4 rating, though the case lacks any rating, which isn't unusual. All the plastic is solid quality and the silicone sleeves that fit over the clip-on earbuds are also good quality. Their case feels well-made, but the lid is made of a thinner plastic.

The Anker C30i are amazingly stable. You can perform dynamic workout movements, including calisthenics and runs, and expect they'll stay put. Like the Bose Ultra Open Earbuds Truly Wireless, the cuff design sidesteps the stability issues that different people's ear shapes can encounter, even with a large selection of ear tips. To add to their stability, you can try using one of the two sets of silicone sleeves if you need a tighter grip. The downside is that if you have earrings along your ears, and not just on your ear lobe, these might not be able to fit on you, let alone concern yourself with their stability.

• Anker Soundcore C30i earbuds
• Charging case
• 2x sets of silicone sleeves (M, L)
• USB-A to USB-C charging cable (12-inches / 30cm)

The sound profile of these earbuds is rather bright with a strong roll-off in the bass range through to the low-mids. By design, they can't convey much low-end at all because the driver sits outside of your ear canal. If you're listening to podcasts and audiobooks, the mid and treble frequencies where human speech resides are pronounced and forward. Their tuning works okay for classical and vocal-centric music, but they really lack the boom and rumble needed for hip-hop, EDM, and rock.

How they sound is affected more than conventionally isolating earbuds by the ambient noise in your environment, simply because whatever sound is the loudest is always the most noticeable; that's the trade-off with buds that prioritize awareness over sound. With open fits, sometimes, the person next to you on the bus talking to their friend is loud enough to mask your favorite podcast host's voice. It's tempting to crank the volume to hear your audio better in hectic spaces, but this can be unhealthy for your hearing if the volume is set too high. Before you touch the volume, consider using the app's EQ to compensate. If you want more bass, the 'Bass' EQ preset actually reduces the amount of treble in the default 'Signature' EQ so that you hear the lower frequencies better.

If you plan on using the clip-on buds for calls, they sound a little different when the mic is active. They are less shrill in the high treble and quieter overall.

Their frequency response consistency is very good. Through the mids and low-treble, your audio sounds the same between wears and on different people. Due to their design that sits outside of your ear canals, it's possible that the higher registers will vary somewhat depending on placement, or if you have two ears that are a bit differently shaped from each other. Because they truly don't output much bass whatsoever, you needn't concern yourself with that range.

These open-fitting clip-on buds do a bad job of matching our target for bass, which is expected. Lack of bass is an inherent limitation of buds that sit outside of your ear canals. As a result, songs like Hot Stuff by Donna Summer are going to lack the weighty thump of the four on the floor kick drum and disco-infused bassline.

The Anker C30i have very good mid-range target compliance. Keys, speech, and sound natural overall. While the low-mids taper off relative to the rest of the range, without any competing bass frequencies, you'll still hear chunky rhythm guitars and vocals fine, though they'll sound a little thin.

They have okay treble target compliance. Most of the low and mid-treble are over-emphasized, leading to very present and detailed vocal articulation, which can cause premature fatigue. Meanwhile, the uneven dips and peak in the mid-treble into the high-treble can sound both closed-off and shrill on harmonics.

They have alright peaks and dips performance. While the midrange and low-treble have a very flat response and convey an even sound, the buds struggle more to control the high registers of their sound profile. Because you can't really hear the bass range, the peaks and dips aren't impactful. The flat mids are noteworthy for their even delivery, but the peaks and dips in the treble lead to an alternating piercing, veiled, shrill, and closed-off sound on vocal and cymbal harmonics, depending on the frequency.

Their imaging performance is passable. Unlike most other products we've tested by the manufacturer, these exhibit worse imaging performance, but the mitigating circumstances to keep in mind include that the loose bass in the group delay is basically inaudible because these don't meaningfully reproduce much bass anyway. Although the ergonomics aren't quite as good, based on the lack of bass (for instance), we don't think these necessarily have worse quality control than other Anker headphones, and the results are, in part, a reflection of their unconventional design. Where it counts for you, ignoring the bass you can't hear anyway, their group delay is tight with transparent treble. They have phase mismatch in the high-treble, which we couldn't notice with real-world music, and not everyone can hear that high, but through the rest of the range, they're well-matched. Otherwise, their weighted amplitude and frequency mismatch fall within good values for a balanced-sounding L/R and a stable stereo image.

That said, imaging varies between units, and these results are valid only for our unit.

Their passive soundstage is poor. Due to their design that places the driver outside of your ear canal, they sound very open and rather unnaturally open. Because of their open design, they leak a decent amount of audio into the space, but because they don't interact with your outer ear the way that conventional open-back headphones do, they don't create the same kind of immersive soundstage.

The '3D Surround Sound' digital sound processor (DSP) can be applied to any audio source. It doesn't include advanced and immersive features like head tracking or require specifically mixed audio formats. It's essentially a DSP effect rather than a true virtual surround sound, which can be novel for some music. You can't use it at the same time as any other EQ because your app gives you the choice of '3D Surround Sound' or other EQ settings.

The Anker C30i's weighted harmonic distortion is sub-par. At lower listening volumes, there's some distortion, but it's not too bad. However, at higher output volumes, the drivers introduce enough distortion to negatively impact the clarity and purity of your audio and make sound harsher, specifically in the midrange and the low treble. Depending on your environment, the harmonic distortion might not be as obvious as with isolating earbuds because the audio coming from the buds will always compete with the sounds around you.

These are the settings used to test these buds. Our results are only valid when using them in this configuration.

The full-range noise isolation of these clip-on buds is terrible, which is expected. Since they sit outside of your ear canal so you can monitor your environment, they block virtually nothing. The upside of this is you can soundtrack your late-night jogs without compromising situational awareness or work in open-concept offices without alienating colleagues. On the other hand, this open-fit niche is limiting because a lack of isolation impacts how well your attention can parse your audio from what's going on around you.

Unlike the Bose Ultra Open Earbuds Truly Wireless, the Anker doesn't have an automatic volume adjustment to offset fluctuations in environmental noise.

As open-fitting ear cuffs, these allow you to fully hear your environment without the artificiality of a transparency mode. Of course, this comes as the cost of the flexibility of turning on a noise cancelling mode.

The Anker C30i have poor leakage performance. Because their design consists of basically two tiny speakers placed outside of your ears, folks nearby will hear a thin approximation of what you hear when you wear them. This can get distracting in offices, and in quiet spaces, like libraries, nearby patrons will know the words to your favorite song. If you're on a walk or run, the leaking audio poses less of an issue as you won't be lingering by people for long enough to become a nuisance.

Their microphone system's recording is poor. Unfortunately, captured audio is impacted by high total harmonic distortion, which introduces noisy artifacts. That said, besides the audible buzzing, the frequency response of the mic retains an alright amount of body and doesn't sound overly thin.

The microphone system's noise handling is unremarkable. It struggles to separate your speech effectively from background noise, and this isn't helped by the fact the mic itself introduces distortion, so you sound like you're blowing out the mic. That said, you're still understandable if a bit hard to listen to. Sudden loud noises like passing subway trains completely overwhelm the mic's noise handling, though, leaving you inaudible.

These have decent battery performance. Advertised to reach 10 hours of continuous playback, in testing, they reached an impressive 14.2 hours with an extra two charges in the case. How long they'll last in the real world depends on factors like how loud you listen to your audio, but it's safe to say they'll last longer than your workday. Ten minutes of charging yields an extra three hours, according to the manufacturer. Unfortunately, they lack any battery conservation features, so if you leave them idle, they'll continue to drain the battery.

The Anker Soundcore app companion app is good. Its main features include remapping controls and the tones emitted for the various commands, enabling multi-device pairing, custom EQ, and a couple of presets. You can also access the surround sound DSP in the app. Essentials like firmware updates and monitoring battery life are also covered.

As you can see in this video tour of the app, the EQ goes as low as 100Hz, which could be worth exploring if you want to test the limits of how much bass you can squeeze out of the drivers (even if it introduces harmonic distortion). You can save the EQ presets, which is handy if you change your device at some point, but increasing updates to the Anker Soundcore app have forcefully encouraged people to create an account and log in to the app in order to access the full feature set.

These include a USB-A to USB-C cable that's meant for charging only.

The Anker C30i have good Bluetooth connectivity. They support multi-device pairing with a second device, so you can easily switch devices when you switch from your computer to your smartphone. Their range isn't as far as other Bluetooth 5.3 earbuds we've tested, though, but if the device is reasonably nearby, your connection should remain stable. Latency is high enough that audio and video don't sync up, and the app lacks a low latency mode. For podcasts and music, latency doesn't pose a problem, but if you watch a lot of videos, it can get distracting. That said, latency varies between devices, and some apps have built-in compensation, so your experience may differ.

These earbuds can only connect to Bluetooth-capable PCs for audio and mic system.

The Anker C30i include a case that's for charging and Bluetooth pairing only.