OnePlus Nord Buds 3 Pro

Verdict

There’s no arguing with the sort of ambition OnePlus is showing here – this is a product with a big specification at an admirably unbig price. But that will only carry you so far – and the compromises where sound quality and ANC are concerned will be too considerable for any number of customers to countenance.

Introduction

The world is far from short of Apple AirPods wannabes at all sorts of prices – but it’s down at the more affordable end of the market that the lookalikes are most prevalent.

The OnePlus Nord Buds 3 Pro (yes, that entire thing is their name) are the most recent entrants into an already-saturated market – do they have anything to make them stand out from the crowd?

Availability

The OnePlus Nord Buds 3 Pro are on sale now, and in the United Kingdom they sell for £59 a pair. In the United States you’ll have to part with $79, while in Australia the going rate is AU$89. So these are by no means the priciest true wireless earbuds around – but by the same token, they’re not exactly short of price-comparable competition.

Design

• 4.4g per earbud
• Two finishes available
• IP55

The Buds 3 Pro are yours in either soft jade or the starry black of my review sample – the ‘starry’ bit refers to the speckled effect on the lower portion of the charging case (honest it does, it’s not that I just couldn’t be bothered to wipe the dust off them before I took some pictures). No matter which finish you choose, you’ll be in possession of a 38g charging case made of hard and slippery plastic, with a couple of dangly stem earbuds inside that weigh in at 4.4g each.

There’s a USB-C slot on the bottom of the case, and there’s a very short USB-A / USB-C cable provided in the packaging, along with a total of three differently sized pairs of silicone eartips. Despite the relatively bulbous nature of the business end of each earbud, getting them securely and comfortably positioned is pretty straight forward. There’s a fit test in the control app (rather counterintuitively called Hey Melody, and free for iOS and Android), along with the facility to rearrange the function of each earbuds’ touch-surface.

While the charging case has no official rating against moisture, dust or what-have-you, the earbuds themselves are IP55-rated, and should therefore be fine in any realistic environment.

Features

• Bluetooth 5.4 with SBC and AAC codec compatibility
• Multi-point connectivity
• Noise-cancelling is a misnomer

The Hey Melody app also features some EQ adjustment and a facility to offer personalised noise-cancellation (your options for ANC are on, off and transparency). It, like the touch-controls on the earbuds, is quite well-implemented and reliable enough in use. Straight from the packaging, the earbuds have rather eccentric touch-control functionality – but the app is handy for rearranging the meanings of various taps, press-and-holds and so on.

The OnePlus Nord Buds 3 Pro use Bluetooth 5.4 for wireless connectivity (which is good) and there’s compatibility with SBC and AAC codecs (which is good as far as it goes, but doesn’t really go far enough). Multi-point connectivity is available, which is a handy feature and proves stable enough in usage.

No matter which of those bog-standard codecs you use to get your digital audio content on board, it’s eventually served to your ears via a couple of 12.4mm dynamic drivers. The company reckons a frequency response of 20Hz – 40kHz is available.

There are three mics on each earbud: one feed-forward, one feedback and one talk-mic – so these take care of telephony as well as active noise-cancellation. It’s worth noting at this point that the ANC plays havoc with battery life of the Buds Pro 3 – and also that the figures the manufacturer is quoting seem aspirational rather than strictly accurate.

According to the product’s web page, the Buds 3 Pro should be good for 12 hours from the earbuds and a further 32 hours in the charging case if you leave ANC switched off, and with it on those numbers should drop to five and 15 hours respectively. In practice, though, you’ll be lucky to get nine hours out of the earbuds with ANC switched off and more like four hours if you switch it on. Those aren’t bad numbers in and of themselves, but if you’re expecting more you’ll be disappointed.

The suggestion that topping up from flat to full takes around an hour seems fair enough, mind you. The Buds 3 Pro charge via the USB-C slot on their case – there’s no support for wireless charging here.

They’re similarly compromised where active noise-cancellation is concerned. On the plus side, engaging the ANC circuitry doesn’t affect the overall sonic signature of the Buds 3 Pro in the slightest. But there’s not a huge apparent effect on the sound of the outside world when you do so – higher-frequency distractions are dulled off a little, it’s true, but in overall terms the best the OnePlus can do is manufacture a small reduction in the intensity of external sounds.

Sound Quality

• Forward and energetic sound
• Not much depth to the soundstage

There are definite positives to the way the Buds 3 Pro present music, and they’re almost all concerned with the animated, upfront nature of the sound. No matter if you’re listening to a vigorous, uptempo recording like James Holden’s In the End You’ll Know or something more stately (John Cale’s Buffalo Ballet, say) – it’s all the same to these earbuds. They seize on the most forward aspects of a recording fanatically.

And for those recordings that require this kind of treatment, it works well. Low frequencies are controlled quite carefully, and rhythms are expressed with confidence as well as forward momentum being maintained at all times. This sort of positivity is apparent in the midrange too, and the top end attacks with similar determination. The Buds 3 Pro integrate the entire frequency range successfully, and the overall tonality is nicely judged too.

Detail levels are fairly high, and dynamic variations both great and small are paid proper attention to. The sort of straightforward drive the Buds 3 Pro can summon makes for an energetic and entertaining listen. But obviously things are less comfortable when listening to less cooperative music. The John Cale tune doesn’t much like being told to get a move on, and the tussle between earbuds that want to attack at every opportunity and a recording that would prefer to walk rather than run isn’t all that comfortable. In the end, no one’s a winner.

No matter the sort of stuff you like to listen to, though, what the Buds 3 Pro can’t achieve in any circumstances is a meaningful sensation of three-dimensionality. The soundstage they create is of decent size where left/right is concerned, and on this axis there’s a reasonable amount of space between individual elements and a fair sensation of elbow-room.

But there’s a woeful lack of the front/back equivalent – everything that happens seems to happen at the front of the stage. So while there’s decent separation where the width of the presentation is concerned, there’s next-to-none when it comes to depth – and the result is a staunchly two-dimensional sound.

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