As streaming music services such as Spotify and Apple Music have announced that they will launch lossless music in the near future, the audio equipment market has caused a bit of uproar. The actual situation is that most bluetooth headsets on the market only support playback of SBC or AAC encoding. Head-mounted bluetooth headset that support the LDAC lossless bluetooth encoding format often cost more than 2000 CNY. Between the sound quality and the price, most of the head-mounted bluetooth headset consumers have to make a full budget before making a decision.
The Soundcore Life Q35 head-mounted wireless noise-cancelling headphones recently launched by Soundcore, which has already had a certain influence overseas, relieved my anxiety of choice-at a price of less than 1,000 RMB, it allows me to have a set. It is an all-round earphone with functions such as lossless music playback, multi-mode dual-feed active noise reduction, and long battery life.
After two weeks of intensive use, I would like to talk to you about this new product launched by the first Chinese true wireless headset brand that has entered the Top 10 sales in North America.
▍Fashionable appearance, long battery life
Compared with the TWS that everyone is more and more familiar with, head-mounted headphones are actually a difficult product to make, because it needs to fully consider the balance between design and wearing comfort. Soundcore Life Q35 finds a balance between appearance and function that makes me very satisfied. Its appearance is stylish and elegant, and it can be distinguished from other traditionally designed head-mounted headphones at a glance, and it is being worn at the same time. A lot of effort has been made in comfort and battery life.
As the first high-end head-mounted headset launched by Soundcore in China that supports lossless music playback, the color of Anker Soundcore Life Q35 boldly adopts royal blue, which adds a sense of vitality to the stability. The main body of the head beam adopts a metal brushed design, which is firm and light to wear, without losing the sense of technology.
Speaking of wearing, because the inner side of the head beam and the earmuffs are made of skin-friendly protein leather, the area where the earphones fit the skin feels comfortable during wearing, and it will not bring foreign body sensation at all when worn for a long time.
Soundcore Life Q35 also uses a 15-degree inclined headphone body design, which makes it more suitable for the face, while also effectively solving the problems that head-mounted headphones often encounter “Clip head” and “ear pressure”. At the same time, the main parts of the earphones on both sides also support inward folding, which is convenient for storage.
In addition to earphones, head-mounted bluetooth earphones should have a lot of accessories. Soundcore Life Q35 comes with an audio cable with MIC, a USB-A to USB-C cable and an airplane adapter. Benefit from the foldable left and right earphones, these things can also be easily stuffed into the earphone storage box made of flannel when you take it out.
As for the battery life that I am most concerned about, Soundcore Life Q35 supports 60 hours of long battery life in standard mode, and the battery life is as long as 40 hours when ANC double-feed noise reduction is turned on, even if it is the longest ride in the world without landing The flight is enough for a round trip.
In addition, the Type C interface of Soundcore Life Q35 also supports fast charging technology, which can provide 4 hours of use after 5 minutes of charging, which is enough for emergency situations when the battery is temporarily found to be insufficient.
▍Good diaphragm + large unit, excellent tri-frequency performance
In the early years, talking about sound quality on wireless noise-canceling headphones was a thing that would be ridiculed, but with the advent of Sony WH-1000XM4, Apple AirPods Max and other products, excellent sound quality and wireless noise reduction can have both, and it has gradually become A reality accepted by many consumers.
As a thousand-yuan wireless noise-cancelling headset, Soundcore Life Q35 has become a product with sound quality comparable to the explosive models of big brands by virtue of its solid hardware configuration such as the use of a silk composite diaphragm and a 40mm drive unit.
The first is the diaphragm. Silk diaphragms can often be seen in tweeters. They are all woven from common silk. Although they are very light and thin, they have insufficient rigidity. Soundcore Life Q35 uses a silk composite diaphragm, which contains ultra-fine High-strength polyester fiber and natural silk are made by high-density weaving method, and the special treatment of impregnation by adding polymer glue layer formula makes it have the dual advantages of light weight and rigidity.
In order to feel this feature, I also selected some representative music in music style to play on Soundcore Life Q35, and compared it with Sony WH-1000XM3. The front-end equipment uses Sony Xperia XZ1 that supports LDAC encoding, and the playback software is Tidal with a Hi-Fi package.
The lighter the mass of the diaphragm material, the smaller the motion inertia, and the better resolution and details can be presented. The first I chose was a classic vocal song-“Lovin’ You” sung by Minnie Riperton, which was played on two headphones for comparison. The dolphin sound in the chorus is the climax of the whole song, and it is also the most well-known to the public. When listening to this section with Soundcore Life Q35, you can clearly feel its super resolution, clean and neat from beginning to end, without a little bit. The burr can basically be leveled with Sony WH-1000XM3.
Another interesting detail of this song is that some birdsongs are added to the accompaniment, and the sound is not prominent, so it is easy to be ignored when listening with ordinary headphones. In the process of listening to this song with Soundcore Life Q35, even if the human voice comes out, I can hear the birds singing very clearly in the background, and when listening with the Sony WH-1000XM3, the human voice will easily cover the birds. song.
The stronger the rigidity of the diaphragm, the more balanced the dynamic performance will be. In this part, I chose “Bad Guy” with sufficient low frequency and “Emotions” with outstanding high frequency, and continued to compare the two headphones.
Billie Eilish’s “Bad Guy” accompaniment drum beats throughout the entire song. When listening to Soundcore Life Q35, you can feel full and full of tension low frequency. The low frequency extension is more sufficient than Sony WH-1000XM3, but it will not be excessive. Buzzing feeling; Mariah Carey’s “Emotions” can be called a classic in high-pitched singing. Soundcore Life Q35 performs well in this song, and the brightness of the sound is slightly inferior to Sony WH-1000XM3.
On the whole, Soundcore Life Q35 performs very well in terms of sound quality. It can even compete with products like Sony WH-1000XM3 at the price of 1,000 yuan, which is really surprising.
▍Not restricted by wires, bluetooth can also enjoy good sound quality
It is worth mentioning that Soundcore Life Q35 is also a product that has obtained the Hi-Res double gold certification.
Under this popular science, Hi-Res Audio is a high-quality audio product design standard formulated by JAS (Japan Audio Association) and CES (Consumer Electronics Association). Headphones that have obtained this certification are considered to have the ability to play lossless format audio. On this basis, the Hi-Res Audio Wireless certification has been extended. Only headsets equipped with one of the LDAC, LHDC (HWA) and aptX HD bluetooth transmission methods can apply for this certification.
This also means that the Soundcore Life Q35 equipped with LDAC is considered to be able to play high-resolution lossless music even in the state of bluetooth wireless connection.
In order to experience the almost lossless sound quality of Soundcore Life Q35 in bluetooth connection, I also used Sony Xperia XZ1 that supports LDAC.
On the platform side, because my commonly used Spotify and Apple Music have not yet launched the lossless music function, the Tidal Hi-Fi package I subscribed above is still used here, and the Streaming sound quality has been set to the highest Master gear in the settings ( 96kHz/24bit).
If the playback quality is set to emphasize the audio quality connection, after connecting the headset, you can see that the audio codec has been set to LDAC by default in the bluetooth settings. You can also see in the developer options that the system has selected 96.0kHz by default. Bluetooth audio sampling rate and 32 bits/sample of bluetooth audio bits per sample setting.
Under this setting, the LDAC transmission protocol will try to restore Tidal’s high bit rate audio as much as possible. Compared with the current mainstream SBC and AAC, the highest transmission rate can also reach 990 kbps, which can easily achieve full bit rate playback support for lossless music.
After actual experience, although the details of the LDAC bluetooth connection state must be somewhat different from that of its own wired mode, the large bit rate advantage combined with the above-mentioned diaphragm and unit allows Soundcore Life Q35 to still meet the sound quality enthusiasts under wireless connection. Need for listening to songs. If you have a need for sound quality and portability in a wireless connection, choose a better professional playback device to get better sound quality and details.
Speaking of connection, I have to mention two small functions of Soundcore Life Q35 that are very intimate when listening to songs. One is to support NFC pairing. Just point the NFC-enabled Android phone to the right earphone and touch it, Soundcore Life Q35 will automatically connect to the phone via bluetooth, and the notification bar will show that the LDAC device has been connected; if you want to disconnect, also It’s very simple. Point the phone at the right earphone and touch it again, and the earphone will automatically disconnect.
The other is that it supports wearing detection. When I take off the headset, the music will pause. When I put on the headset again, the music will continue to play.
In order to further test the soundcore Life Q35’s ability to play lossless music, I put on headphones and did a small test on the website abx.digitalfeed.net. The test audio uses the 35MB FLAC lossless format. After 5 rounds of testing, I got an accuracy rate of 80%, which just passed the test. If you are interested, you can also test it.
Finally, Soundcore Life Q35 can also choose 22 EQ presets in the Soundcore App, or you can customize a preset of your own according to your own preferences, which can fully meet the various needs of audio enthusiasts for music styles. In addition, there is a white noise function in the App. Users can choose their own DIY combination of white noise such as bird song and wave sound, which can give people a relaxing feeling.
▍Scenario-based multi-level active noise cancellation
On Soundcore Liberty Air 2 Pro, I experienced Soundcore’s double-fed ANC noise reduction technology for the first time, and its performance far exceeded my expectations. As a new force in noise-canceling headphones, the active noise-canceling technology of Soundcore headphones can be ranked in the first echelon.
Now Soundcore has introduced doubly-fed ANC noise reduction technology to head-mounted headphones, bringing the same surprising noise reduction performance.
Soundcore Life Q35 supports multi-scene noise reduction. We can switch between commuting, indoor and outdoor modes at any time in the APP according to the scene, corresponding to different noise reduction levels. It can also be set directly through the desktop widget, which is more convenient.
In commuter mode, Soundcore Life Q35 can reduce noise from low-frequency road noise such as engines, which is especially suitable for use in transportation such as airplanes, high-speed rails, and subways; in indoor mode, Soundcore Life Q35 can be used to reduce cafes or other indoor places The human voice and mid-frequency noise in the medium are suitable for me to work or study in places with many people such as cafes or libraries. In the outdoor mode, Soundcore Life Q35 can reduce the noise of the complicated environment in the city, which is suitable for going out and shopping in the city. scenes to be used.
In addition, Soundcore Life Q35 can also set the ambient sound to transparent mode. When you wear headphones and want to communicate with others or are crossing the road, you can easily switch the noise reduction mode to transparent mode by pressing the NC button of the left earmuff (or directly covering the right earmuff with the palm of your hand for 1 second). You can directly communicate with people around you when you drop the earphones and hear the sound of the surrounding environment. This function is particularly practical for me: I like to wear headphones to listen to music when I am writing. If a colleague or boss wants to communicate with me, I don’t need to remove the headphones, just switch the transparent mode to communicate with me. The other party communicated freely; in addition, in scenes such as subway approaching station or station ticket checking, you can also directly press the headset NC button or cover the right earmuff to quickly switch to the transparent mode and hear the station information clearly.
It is worth mentioning that in addition to earphone noise reduction, Soundcore Life Q35 has also specially tuned the microphone and equipped it with dual AI call noise reduction technology to ensure sound pickup in noisy environments.
▍Summary
Soundcore Life Q35 is a product with almost no obvious shortcomings in my eyes. From supporting key technologies such as lossless music, dual-feed ANC noise reduction, and long battery life, to details such as NFC pairing, wearing detection, and gesture operation, I am It is very satisfied.
If I want to consider ecology and brand more when choosing TWS headphones for daily use, then for head-mounted wireless noise-cancelling headphones with relatively fixed usage scenarios, I pay more attention to the function of the product itself. In terms of sound quality, noise reduction, battery life and control, it has the performance of the flagship products of major brands. The official Soundcore Life Q35 is undoubtedly a very powerful choice for me.
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