As for the bluetooth headphones, they have been long democratized. Actually, people can even obtain real wireless earbuds for cheap. So it doesn’t come as a surprise that high-end features like active noise-cancelling (ANC) are the next frontier. With the Mi Neckband Bluetooth Earphones Pro, Xiaomi is trying to make ANC more accessible.
What about the design of the Mi Neckband Bluetooth Earphones Pro?
The Mi Neckband Bluetooth Earphones Pro are budget earbuds, and the design reflects the price. The construction is a mix of rubber and glossy plastics. Nobody will mistake it for a premium product — these things were clearly built to a cost. That said, the soft-touch neckband is comfortable to wear over long durations. I had no issues leaving it around my neck even when switched off.
The earphone cables protrude from a hard plastic end that is glossy on the inside. A micro-USB (ugh) port lies over on the right along with all the other buttons. You’ll find a power button and volume rocker within easy reach. On the inside lies an additional key to toggle active noise-cancelling.
The noise-cancelling button is too small and there’s not much tactile feedback from the volume buttons either. I often fumbled when I tried to activate the keys.
Following suit, the earphone cables aren’t the epitome of quality either but they suffice for the price. The earbuds, meanwhile, are made of polycarbonate and magnetically attach to each other. The magnetic attachment is for cable management only; it doesn’t power off the headset.
Will these neckband earbuds stay connected?
The Mi Neckband Bluetooth Earphones support Bluetooth 5.0 and stay connected in any environment, so long as the headset is within 10 meters of the source device. Bluetooth codec support is limited to just SBC and AAC.
If you own an iPhone, you’ll listen to consistent high-quality audio over the AAC codec, but Android users take a bit of a gamble when streaming over AAC. Android OS doesn’t uniformly encode the AAC codec, which is hardware-dependent. That said, the earphones defaulted to AAC when connected to my OnePlus smartphone and stability was reliable even at a distance. I faced no issues at all walking around my apartment streaming music over Spotify.
What about the sound quality
Xiaomi is playing to the crowd with the Neckband Bluetooth Earphones Pro. The earbuds amplify bass, which will please most listeners who intend to use these casually during a commute or at home. I played a range of music tracks across a number of genres to see how they fared.
My go-to track to gauge treble response is You’ve Got to Have Freedom by Pharaoh Sanders, and the Mi Neckband Earphones don’t do it justice. The loud bass is emphasized to the point of masking vocals and treble sections. A lack of detail and clarity come at the expense of extra “oomph” in the low end.
On acoustic tracks like Featherweight by Fleet Foxes, vocals are yet again masked out by the bass-heavy sound. Switching over to rap music, like I Stand On That by E-40, the rumbling bass track made itself more than evident. These are not neutral sounding earphones, and you’d better have a preference of bass — oodles of it — to appreciate the sound here.
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