Wyze Buds Truly Wireless  Headphones Review

The Wyze Buds are big earbuds with angled tips and round, flat touch-sensitive surfaces. They're mostly made of matte plastic with some glossy accents. They also have a small Wyze logo on the outside of each bud. They come in all black or a limited edition 'Electric Green' color.

The Wyze Buds are decently comfortable. They're light and come with lots of tip options, but their bulky design can put pressure on your ears and cause some pain after a while.

The Wyze Buds' control scheme is limited. By default, there's no way to skip a track, and you can't change the volume at all. You can remap the controls to skip tracks, but you lose the play/pause function. However, you can use either bud to cycle between 'Standard' and 'Transparency' Mode. The touch-sensitive surfaces are responsive, and there are different beeps for all the commands. The earbuds also have an auto-pause feature, so when you take one or both out of your ears, your audio pauses automatically and resumes when you put them back. You can turn this off in the app.

On either bud:

• Touch and hold: Cycles between standard and 'Transparency' mode, which lets you hear your surroundings without turning off your audio.
• Double tap: Plays and pauses audio. Can be remapped to skip to the next or previous track and also answers and ends calls.
• Triple tap: Activates voice assistant or rejects a call.

The Wyze Buds are very portable. They're lightweight and small enough to slip into most pockets, even inside their case.

The Wyze Buds' case is small but is made of cheap-feeling plastic. There's a small light on the front for the case and earbuds' remaining battery life. There's also a light on the inside of the case that flashes when they're in pairing mode.

The Wyze Buds are well-built earbuds. They feel like they can withstand a few accidental drops without breaking, but the glossy finish could get damaged easily. They have an IPX5 rating for water resistance, which is better than the Wyze Buds Pro Truly Wireless' IPX4 rating.

The Wyze Buds have good stability. They come with five pairs of differently-sized ear tips to help you find a good seal. While they don't have stability fins, they feel very stable and shouldn't fall out of your ears, even during intense workouts.

• Wyze Buds earbuds
• 5x ear tips
• Charging case
• USB-A to USB-C charging cable
• Sticker
• Quick start guide

The Wyze Buds have a warm and smooth sound profile that delivers extra punch and boom, which should please fans of genres like pop or rock. However, the underemphasized treble can rob lead instruments and vocals of detail while sibilants are dull. Some users may find that they sound muddy or cluttered.

Unfortunately, the left and right drivers of our unit are mismatched, resulting in a stereo image that seems off-center, depending on the frequency. This may not apply to every unit, though. If you experience this issue with these earbuds, please let us know in the discussion section below.

The Wyze Buds have fantastic frequency response consistency, like most in-ear headphones. Once you get a good fit with the selection of ear tips, you should hear the same sound each time you use them.

The Wyze Buds have alright bass accuracy. The low-bass is neutral, so mixes have adequate thump and rumble. The rest of the range is exaggerated, though, so instruments have a lot of extra body and punch. Overall, mixes sound warm but also somewhat muddy and cluttered.

They have excellent mid accuracy. The overemphasis in the bass range continues into the low-mid, which can make mixes sound a bit cluttered. However, the mid-mid and high-mid are more neutral, so instruments and lead vocals are present, clear, and intense.

They have decent treble accuracy. The whole response is underemphasized, so instruments and vocals lack detail and articulation, while sibilants like cymbals and S and T sounds are dull.

The Wyze Buds have decent peaks and dips performance. The L/R drivers of our unit are mismatched, so most peaks and dips are more present in one driver than the other. There's a dip in the low bass that reduces thump and rumble and a wider peak across the mid and high-bass that adds punch and boom. There's a shallower dip from the low to mid-mid that thins out instruments and lead vocals and nudges them to the back of the mix. A dip in the low treble hurts the detail of instruments and vocals, but it's only present in the right driver. There's also a peak in the mid-treble that makes sibilant sounds more piercing.

The Wyze Buds have a good imaging performance. The group delay falls below the audibility threshold for the entire range, resulting in tight bass and transparent treble reproduction. However, while the left and right drivers are well-matched in phase response, there's an audible mismatch between their amplitude and frequency response. You can hear this issue with regular content. The stereo image seems skewed to the left with mid-range sounds and pulled to the right with treble frequencies. That said, these results are only valid for our unit, and your experience may vary.

The Wyze Buds have a bad passive soundstage performance, like most in-ear headphones. Their design means sound doesn't interact with your outer ears, so it seems to come from inside your head instead of from speakers in the room around you. The soundstage also seems small and closed off compared to open-back earbuds like the Apple AirPods (3rd generation) Truly Wireless.

The Wyze Buds have a decent weighted harmonic distortion performance. There's some distortion at higher frequencies at normal listening volumes, but it shouldn't be very noticeable with regular content, and audio reproduction is mostly clean and pure.

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

The Wyze Buds have a disappointing noise isolation performance. Unlike the Wyze Buds Pro Truly Wireless, they don't have an active noise cancelling (ANC) feature and don't isolate you from bass-range noise like rumbling bus and plane engines. They do a good job of cutting down on background chatter and are decent at reducing high-pitched noise like humming A/C units or computer fans.

They have a 'Transparency' mode advertised to amplify ambient sound so you can hear what's going on around you without turning down your audio. The headphones' noise isolation performance was tested with this feature turned off ('Standard' mode). However, you can see a comparison of their noise isolation performance with 'Transparency' on versus off here. The companion app says you should turn off 'Transparency' mode in windy places.

The Wyze Buds have an excellent leakage performance. They don't leak very much, and the sound that does escape sounds thin, so even if you like to listen to your music at high volumes, it shouldn't bother people sitting near you at the office.

The mic has a decent recording quality. Your voice sounds full, fairly open, and easy to understand. However, it also seems unnatural and a bit distorted. Check out the JBL Vibe Beam True Wireless for similar in-ears with better recording quality.

The mic has a disappointing noise isolation performance. With moderate background noise, your voice is understandable, but it seems muffled, and you can still hear the noise. Your voice can be nearly completely drowned out by loud noise like a train passing through a subway station.

Note: These headphones have a beta feature in their app called 'Call Enhancing' intended to improve the mic's noise handling when you're on the phone. Our results are based on tests with this feature disabled, but we also made recordings with it enabled to test the mic's noise handling performance with speech, pink noise, and subway noise. The voice is less muffled with pink noise when you have this noise gate turned on. However, Speech is still hard to understand with very loud noise in the background.

The Wyze Buds have an adequate battery performance. They're advertised to provide seven hours of continuous use, and we measured just under that. They only take one hour to recharge, which is quite quick, and the case holds about three extra charges. However, battery performance can vary with real-life use, meaning you may have a different experience. Similar to the Wyze Buds Pro Truly Wireless, you can use the app to enable or disable auto-pause, which automatically pauses your audio when you take the earbuds out of your ears. This feature doesn't turn the headphones off when they're not in use, though.

Note: We initially had trouble measuring the battery life because the earbuds would disconnect unexpectedly during the test. It took six attempts before we could complete the battery test without running into this problem. Our results are valid, but we don't know if other users have had a similar issue with their earbuds. If you own these headphones, please let us know your experience in the discussions below.

The Wyze Buds have good app support. There's a graphic EQ and presets you can use to customize their sound profile. You can rename the earbuds, see the buds as well as the case's remaining battery life, and remap the touch controls. However, the only function you can add that isn't already included by default in the control scheme is track skipping. You can also choose to use your device's voice assistant or Alexa. You can toggle 'Call Enhancing' on and off, which is a beta feature that's supposed to use microphones to cancel noise when you're on a call. If you don't want your music to pause when you take an earbud out, you can also turn off auto-pause.

The Wyze Buds have alright Bluetooth connectivity. They don't have features like NFC pairing, and unlike some earbuds, like the Amazon Echo Buds True Wireless 2023 (3rd generation), they can only connect to one device at a time. They also have high latency with PCs as well as iOS and Android devices, so if you use them to watch a video on your phone and computer, there's noticeable audio lag. Some apps seem to compensate differently for latency, so your experience may vary.

These are Bluetooth-only earbuds and can't be used wired.

These earbuds are compatible with Bluetooth-enabled PCs, but their latency is too high to stream videos or game without noticeable audio lag.

They come with a case that holds about three extra charges. Unlike the case for the Wyze Buds Pro Truly Wireless, it doesn't support wireless charging. There's a USB-C port for charging, but it doesn't have any other inputs.