Review: SoundPEATS Clip1 Open ear clip-on headphones

You can watch the YouTube version of this review here.

I’ve reviewed the Bose Ultra Open and Huawei Free Clip earbuds before, and subsequently tried the SoundPEATS PearlClip Pro as a cheaper alternative. But the much cheaper PearlClips just didn’t do it for me. However, when SoundPEATS asked if I wanted to try a pair of Clip1 wireless earbuds I was happy to take a look but had no real great expectations. After all, how good can a pair of sub 70 clip style earphones really be? Turns out pretty good!

But why would you want clip style earphones anyway? The thing is, while I have a pair of AirPods, they never seem to stay in my ears particularly well, and the slightest unusual movement tends to cause them to fall out. The clip style ear buds, like these, suit me far better. One part is the speaker, sitting close to the ear canal, and the other part sits behind the ear, typically holding the ‘brains’. The brains of the units that is, not my brains, I’m not Lobot.

Because your ear canal isn’t full of headphone, it means you don’t feel as isolated when you wear them – they always let some of the ambient sound in. I think clip style are a great option if you want to enjoy your audio when you are out and about but still have some sense of what’s going on around you – perfect in suburban areas or the gym.

Now, there are a growing number of clip style earphones, ranging from $30 dollar options, up to the Bose Ultra Opens that will run you into the hundreds. You can see that I was very impressed with the Bose in my prior review but they went faulty about 10 months into owning them so wanted a different, less expensive option. The SoundPEATS Clip1, for under £70, are a very inexpensive option. Not the cheapest you can find, but value for money wise, they are the best I’ve tried so far. So here’s what you need to know.

They come in black, blue and beige and I got the black ones. Well, it says black on the box but they actually come in a bluey gun metal kind of colour case, which we will talk about some more, and even the clips themselves look a little blue to my eyes.

Getting Started

To get started with the Clip1s, you take them out, remove the blue film from each of them, stick them back in the case and they go into pairing mode. Do the usual Bluetooth connection dance and ‘Power On – connected’ is announced in your ears and you are away.

I’m no audiophile but they sounded really good to me, surprisingly good actually given the price point. These are just under £70 and sound, to my ears, as good as any other clip style earbuds I’ve tried. Because my Bose Ultras went faulty a couple of months back I don’t have them for a direct comparison but I can’t imagine on sound quality they would be able to make a case for the vastly more expensive price over these. These sound easily as good as my AirPods 3, without the bar of soap problems of keeping them in my ears. I tend to listen to all manner of music from rock to rap and also listen to a lot of audio books and podcasts and the Clips impressed me in every scenario.

But it’s not just about the sound with headphones these days, it’s how you do stuff like pause playback, skip tracks etc so let me tell you a bit about how all that stuff works.

Software

To do any customization you need to get the SoundPEATS app down. It’s not going to win any design awards but it is functional enough. One minor peeve is that it’s pretty annoying that you have to register with an email address before you can use the app to do any customisation but you do.

The firmware on the Clips was .24 when I got them and they prompted me to upgrade to .26 which is what I used for the duration of my testing.

The main thing I wanted to do, was alter what the double-tap and triple-tap gestures do. You see, the way the SoundPEATS controls works is as follows. You have a number of ‘hit’ areas on each bud, the bridge, the S logo on the back, or the actual speaker part. I found the bridge was the most effective target for me, so I tend to direct my taps there. There are two gestures available on each; double-tap and triple-tap.
So I have double-tap on the left to bring volume down, triple-tap to increase, and the right side I have double-tap for next track, triple-tap for next track.

Now, as of right now, about the only negative thing to say about the gestures is that, I’d like to see an addition or two, some way to bring the volume up and down more easily would be great, especially if you could get a little audio feedback to tell you what percentage of volume you were at. If you want to bring the volume right up, it can be a lot of taps and you aren’t always sure if your endless taps are futile – you might already be at the limit. And then you are getting your phone out to check, so you may as well have done that already. Maybe some setting that a gesture can be assigned to that sets the volume to a pre-determined level? I don’t even know if that’s possible but anything to help in this scenario would be a bonus.

More positively, the SoundPEATS Clip1 have wear detection which is the ability to know when you remove a bud from your ears. At this price point that feature alone is pretty astonishing. So that means for me, I press play on my device to begin playback, and take a bud out when I want to pause the sound, and then put them back in again to resume.

You also get the added bonus of the Clips automatically figuring out left and right, a feature SoundPEATS calls AutoSense, again, this is something I’ve only seen on more expensive buds like the Huawei in the past, but its great because it doesn’t matter which ear you put each bud in, as they figure out which one will be right and which will be left. I love that feature, it removes the friction of fannying around trying to see which bud is which by reading a tiny legend.

More features

I’ve read all the specifications from SoundPEATS but I honestly can’t speak to the efficacy of the 0.6mm ultra-thin nickel-titanium allow arch other than to say they feel really comfy. They are on a par with any of the other clip style headphones I have used. They use Bluetooth 5.4 so you get multi-point connection to have a couple of connected devices. That works absolutely fine where the most recent playing paired device takes over.

They also support LDAC but I have not been able to test it as I don’t have an Android device. I also haven’t tested the Dolby Audio capability because I use YouTube for music rather than Apple Music.

Call quality

Perhaps the biggest surprise for me has been the call quality. Basic physics means that you are never going to get better call quality when a microphone isn’t physically close to your mouth. But like for like, even compared to Apples own AirPods, the call quality of these is surprisingly good. Definitely for me, better than the AirPods 3. Without knowing the first time I used them on a call with my wife, she commented that the call sounded better than usual, without realising I was using different headphones.

Downsides?

A few 3rd party headphones let you use Siri with an Apple device but not these. At this price point I would have been dumbfounded if they did to be honest. Now for some, a lack of Siri fumbling around for responses to the most basic of requests might be a blessing, but if you rely on getting messages read to you as you workout and such, that’s the kind of functionality you will only get from AirPods and select other 3rd party headphones.

That case

The only thing I can honestly say I don’t like on the Clip1s is the case. It’s… how can I say this? Fat. It’s almost twice the depth of an AirPods 3 case. Chunky enough that you do notice the case in your pocket. It’s not particularly heavy, just large, compared to the cases of most other earbuds I’ve owned. If you were looking for a catch, the size of the case is as good as I can come up with. It hasn’t stopped me using them day to day, I just wish it was slimmer.

Summary

Plenty of stuff I get to review never makes it to daily use, but I’m still using the Clip1s as my daily earphones. I use them when out walking and exercising, and you can absolutely do HIIT style workouts in them without the fear of them flying out, and as such, they have instantly taken the place of my AirPods.

One thing I can’t speak to is the long term durability of these. I’ve only been using them for three weeks as I write this.

But here is the bottom line, they sound as good as competitive pairs costing over twice as much, they have features like wear detection, multi-point and gesture support to control them.

For under £70, I think they are a steal. Grab them from SoundPEATS at https://geni.us/clip1 with 10% extra off for a limited time using code ‘SPCP1ALL12’. If you do get a pair, let me know in the comments, I’d love to know if you like them as much as I do.