Quality Earbuds With Some Annoying Quirks

There are hundreds of audio devices vying for your attention. The Soundcore Liberty 4 Pro is a strong contender for that attention, with great noise canceling, a fancy case, and some nifty features. However, they also have a couple of annoying quirks that can get in the way of a jam session.

Price and Availability

Anker’s Soundcore Liberty 4 Pro earbuds cost $130 and are available in black, light blue, and white colorways. They’re sold at the Soundcore web store, Amazon, Best Buy, and other retailers.

The earbuds come with several different sized ear tips, a USB charging cable, and a paper instruction manual.

Robust Quality With Some Hit-or-Miss Features

These days, earbuds tend to fall into two categories: those with stems and those without. The Liberty 4 Pro is the type with stems, which I personally am not a fan of, though that is just me. The main thing is just that I tend to bump the stems when readjusting the earbuds, which is a bit annoying. Normally, that would be bad enough, but with these earbuds, the stems control the audio.

You can slide your fingers up or down the stems to raise or lower the volume, respectively, and you can pinch the stems to pause the audio, or make multiple clicks for other functions. I’ll admit, this is a useful feature. But if you are, like me, constantly touching the stems on accident, you’ll often find yourself adjusting your audio or pausing it without meaning to.

The earbuds also have some sort of sensor that causes the earbuds to automatically pause when you shake your head too vigorously, so if you’re the head-banging type, that can also be quite annoying. I get a little excitable when listening to good music, so this feature paused a good jam session without my intent more than once.

Thankfully, you can turn off some of these functions if you download the Soundcore app (available on Android and iOS) to go along with your headphones. Then, you can adjust the functionality of single, double, and triple tapping the stems of the earbuds. I programmed these buttons to do nothing. However, there are some functions you can’t change, like sliding your fingers along the stem to adjust the volume. It’s a shame because that function is a bit finicky in my experience.

The Liberty 4 Pro comes with six ear tips of different sizes, so you’re almost guaranteed to have a set that will feel comfortable in your ears. The build quality is robust, and the material doesn’t feel cheap. Combined with the case, which is sleek, tough, and has a sliding transparent cover, you really feel like the price is worth it as far as materials go.

Crystal Clear Sound With Acceptable Mic Quality

The sound quality of the Liberty 4 Pro is very good. Crisp, clean, and definitely free of any static, buzzing, or other shortcomings. The noise-canceling capability is also pretty robust for a pair of earbuds. You can use the case that came with the earbuds (or the Soundcore app) to adjust the transparency level of the active noise-canceling if you want. At maximum, the noise-canceling will completely block out almost anything except human speech (or my cat’s caterwauling).

That said, I’m not sure if the sound quality is worth the $130 price tag. Don’t get me wrong, I love music, and I love it when it sounds amazing. My music sounds extremely good coming through these earbuds, and admittedly, a little better than it usually does through some of my cheaper earbuds. But at the end of the day, I don’t know if the improvement in audio quality is worth as much as Soundcore is charging. That’s probably for each individual to decide.

On top of that, if you are a real audiophile, the Liberty 4 Pro is not going to compare to any good over-the-ear headphones, though that’s not the fault of the earbuds themselves: over-the-ear options just have a higher threshold for audio quality than earbuds do. All of this is to say that the audio quality of the Liberty 4 Pro is very good, just maybe not $130 good if you are on a tight budget. Despite all that, I can say that you at least won’t be disappointed with the audio quality offered here.

As for the quality of the microphone, it’s far from the best, but it’s not downright awful either. The quality is good enough that you’ll be able to clearly hear whoever is using the mic, but it’ll hardly be like the speaker is standing right next to you. There will be a little bit of a digital tone, but thanks to the great ANC of these earbuds, they do a great job blocking out interfering noises when speaking, even things like loud bathroom fans.

A Simple But Effective App for Customization

The Liberty 4 Pro is compatible with the Soundcore app, which you can use to modify and customize your experience with the earbuds. It’s simple and intuitive to use, though you can only mess around with your settings when the earbuds are connected to your phone via Bluetooth. From this app, you can download firmware updates, change the functionality of different button presses, play around with the equalizer, and even test the perfect ear tip fit.

There are a number of other nifty features you can take advantage of here as well. There are several modes you can activate, such as “Wind Noise Reduction” mode or “Spatial Audio” mode. If you don’t want to go through the hassle of customizing your music experience yourself, there is an option in the app that allows you to sample various music settings, allowing you to pick the one you like the most.

Admittedly, there’s not much to do in this app other than playing around with your settings, but the UI is easy to navigate, and the simplicity makes it pretty easy to manage what you want without getting lost or confused. This app is free, of course.

Impressive Battery Life

The Liberty 4 Pro has quite a lot of juice to give. The earbuds, when carrying a full charge, can last approximately ten hours. If you have the case with you, you’ll be able to get a total of atuob 40 hours of listening, while accounting for a little bit of recharge time for the earbuds themselves. Thankfully, these bad boys recharge very quickly: with just about five minutes of charging, you can get several hours of playtime.

This is also where a nifty feature of the charging case comes in, as it gives you an exact charge percentage for the earbuds when they are connected to it, down to the decimal. The case display will read exactly 59.32% for the left earbud and 32.33% for the right if that’s the situation. It will also update the charge in real time, so you can stay aware of how much charge you have every single second if you’re desperate for your tunes.

The earbuds can definitely go for at least eight hours on one charge, though I didn’t test whether or not they went up to ten hours exactly.

Alternatives to the Liberty 4 Pro

There are a lot of earbuds that compete with the Liberty 4 Pro. I can’t cover all of them, but a few comparative options are the Samsung Galaxy Buds 2 Pro and the Jabra Elite 8 Active. These earbuds are also around the $130 price range, with similar audio quality, noise-canceling, and comfort, though they have their own shortcomings compared to the Liberty 4 Pro as well.

The Samsung Galaxy Buds 2 Pro has some features exclusive to Samsung devices, while the Jabra Elite 8 Active has slightly worse battery life than the Liberty 4 Pro. Ultimately, personal preference is the biggest determining factor here, as neither option is really superior: it depends on what you are looking for in a pair of high-quality earbuds.

Should You Buy the Soundcore Liberty 4 Pro?

While I have a few personal gripes with the Liberty 4 Pro earbuds, it’s exactly that: personal opinion. Objectively, these are very nice earbuds, with excellent sound quality, noise-canceling abilities, comfortable tips, and a really fancy charging case.

For me, $130 is a lot for a pair of earbuds. But to be honest, most mid-range earbuds are around $100-$200. If you don’t care about the noise-canceling properties and just want good sound quality, you could probably go a bit cheaper than these. If ANC is really important to you, these earbuds are just as good as any of the competition at this price range. I can definitely recommend the Liberty 4 Pro in good faith.

Ultimately, the only things holding me back from giving these a perfect score are a number of minor gripes with the earbud stems and the functionality attached to them, but you can turn those off if they are a problem for you.