Soundcore Liberty 4 Pro review: lower price, better earbuds

If you’re unfamiliar with Anker’s Soundcore brand of audio products, allow me to bring you up to speed. For several years, Soundcore has been killing it with wireless earbuds that offer great performance and features for far less money than the brands you probably are familiar with.

Their wireless earbuds lineup is loosely organized into two tiers, with its Liberty Pro models acting as the brand’s flagships.

To say that we were impressed with the second and third generations of Liberty Pros is an understatement. We loved them. So when I got my review model of the Liberty Pro 4, my expectations were already sky-high. With only a few small caveats, Soundcore has met those expectations.

The price is impressive at just $130 — 23% less than the cost of the previous gen — but as you’ll see, you’re actually getting more features too.

Making a case for more smarts

The first thing you notice when you unbox the Liberty Pro 4 is the case. Soundcore loves to use sliding lids on its charging cases, and I’m fully on board. It lets you open the case single-handedly and it provides excellent access to the earbuds once it’s open. The earbuds are oriented in the case such that you can grab them and put them in your ear in one fluid motion, unlike the Pro 3, which require an awkward set of movements.

However, if you want your case to keep looking its best, you may want to consider the white version. It’s the only one of the three color options (the others are light blue and black) that doesn’t use a mirror finish on the lid. The mirror finish looks stunning until you touch it. Moments later, it’s a greasy mess of fingerprints that needs constant cleaning.

On the black and light blue models, the case screen is visible through the lid. Simon Cohen / Digital Trends

The second thing you notice is visible beneath that slick lid through a translucent window: there’s a color OLED display mounted to the front of the case’s interior. Tap the front touch bar once (or open the lid) and the display gives you a detailed battery readout, showing the percentage remaining for each earbud, and a horizontal bar for the case’s battery. Given how vague (and/or confusing) most earbud battery indicators can be, this one feature might have some folks chanting “take my money now.”

Once the earbuds are out of the case, the touch bar and screen can control several additional features. By default, you get noise cancellation (ANC) with a sliding scale of 1-10, where 1 is full transparency, 5 is “normal” (no ANC or transparency), and 10 is full noise canceling.

You can also add other functions via the Soundcore app, including spatial audio, find my earbuds, camera trigger, and something called atmospheric, which I’ll touch on later.

The touch bar is very responsive, making it easy to navigate. It only reacted to my skin — not fabrics or other objects — which should keep it from inadvertent actions in your pocket or purse.  You tap once to wake the display, swipe left or right to get to the control you want, and double-tap to enter that mode. I got used to it quickly, though it’s not as intuitive as using a touchscreen like the kind you’ll find on the JBL Tour Pro 3’s case.

It’s worth noting that some of these features are also accessible from the Soundcore app and some can be assigned to controls on the earbuds themselves. This raises the obvious question about smart case features: Why do we need them?

Ordinarily, I’d say we don’t need them at all, but I love the battery gauges, and the camera trigger can be very handy if you don’t own a Bluetooth remote or a smartwatch.

Specs

Stems are the new black

Simon Cohen / Digital Trends

Soundcore seems to be agnostic when it comes to earbud design. It has made (and continues to make) models that are stemless (Soundcore Space A40), models with stems (Liberty 4 NC), and models in a variety of other shapes. However, for its top-tier wireless earbuds (the Pro series), it has now standardized a stem-based shape. Whether that’s a good thing is subjective, but I find them more comfortable, if somewhat less stable, than stemless designs.

The most important factor in getting any set of wireless earbuds to fit and perform their best is finding the right size of silicone eartip for your ears. The Liberty 4 Pro ship with six sizes — twice as many as the Apple AirPods Pro 2 — which should help greatly with that task.

As is often the case, the preinstalled medium tips fit me the best, and I was able to wear the Liberty 4 Pro for hours, pulling them out only when they inevitably made my ears itchy.

Simon Cohen / Digital Trends

The controls are a carbon copy of the AirPods Pro: pinch the stems to control playback and calls, or swipe up/down on the flat inner surface for volume adjustments.

The pinch gesture is easy to perform, but the slightly oval shape of the stems isn’t as conducive to getting it right as the round, barrel shape of Apple’s buds. With bare fingers, it was rarely an issue, but adding gloves to the mix made it a lot trickier.

You get a few customization options in the Soundcore app, but not every function can be accessed. Spatial audio and the camera trigger features, for instance, aren’t available.

To supplement these controls, you can take advantage of both wear detection (for auto-pause/resume when you remove a bud) and Easy Chat, which listens for your voice and automatically dips the volume and shifts from ANC to transparency mode. I like the Easy Chat feature — Sony and Apple have similar features on their earbuds — but it gets triggered too easily. Clearing your throat, coughing, or sneezing are often interpreted as speech.

Big, bold sound

Simon Cohen / Digital Trends

In all of its products, Soundcore consistently delivers audio quality that punches well above its weight, and the Liberty 4 Pro follow in that tradition. Despite a redesigned acoustic layout that uses two dynamic drivers instead of one dynamic and one balanced armature, the sound is essentially unchanged from the third generation. That’s fine by me since the 3 Pro are superb.

It’s a big, bold sound signature with copious bass and clear, detailed highs. The earbuds aced my usual bass torture test, courtesy of Billie Eilish’s bad guy, and conveyed all of the warmth and tone I expect from tracks like Dire Straits’ You and Your Friend.  The word immersive is overused these days, but it captures the feeling of listening to these buds, even before you start playing with the optional spatial sound modes.

Maybe I don’t need to say it, but I will anyway: These $130 earbuds put the sound quality of Apple’s $249 AirPods Pro to shame.

Out of the box, they’re enjoyable, but I encourage you to try out Soundcore’s HearID personalized EQ tool, which is one of the best I’ve used. After a brief listening test and a series of A/B comparisons while listening to a sample track, HearID created an EQ curve that suits me perfectly — boosted lows, a slight bump in the upper mids, and an uptick in the highs.

If you don’t get similarly good results, the app has tons of additional EQ tweaks, including a big selection of presets, plus a full eight-band equalizer.

You can also try out Soundcore’s spatial audio mode. Like Bose and Apple’s version of this tech, it “spatializes” stereo, which creates the sense that your two speakers are somewhere in front of your listening position. It’s not as effective as either Bose or Apple, but it’s the head-tracking option that needs the most work. Unless you move your head slowly, it can lag behind — an unpleasant sensation.

A quick note on hi-res audio: The Liberty 4 Pro support Sony’s LDAC codec on Android phones, and it can make a difference in detail and nuance. You’ll need a quiet location and access to lossless audio to hear the effect, though.

Unfortunately, you can’t have LDAC and Bluetooth Multipoint running simultaneously, and LDAC use will use battery life much faster than standard SBC/AAC codecs.

Airplane ANC

Noise canceling is also very good. There are a few higher frequencies that escape its clutches, but for the most annoying daily sounds, you’ll hear a big difference with ANC on. A few times I noticed a very faint, intermittent buzzing sound when I wasn’t playing any audio, but it didn’t bother me. However, there were also times when the ANC sounded like it was shifting intensity on its own. Walking down the street, traffic noise got louder, then quieter again, and I couldn’t figure out why.

During my test period, Soundcore issued a firmware update that improved this situation a lot, but didn’t entirely eliminate it.

There’s an optional airplane mode for ANC. It uses a barometric pressure sensor to compensate for diminished ANC performance due to the reduction of air pressure you experience in a cabin during flight. Soundcore says that with airplane mode enabled, the earbuds can improve the cancellation of sounds under 300Hz by 178%. Sadly, I had no flights booked during my time with the Liberty 4 Pro so I can’t verify this claim, but as soon as I get a chance, I’ll try it out and update this review.

Simon Cohen / Digital Trends

Strangely, transparency mode is a little worse than on the previous generation. As with the Liberty 3 Pro, you’ll hear external sounds very clearly, but your voice won’t sound as natural (to you) when you’re talking.

This is also true when making calls in transparency mode, but your callers will thank you for using the Liberty 4 Pro. They do a great job of canceling out distracting surrounding noise that would make it harder to hear you — it’s noticeably better than on the third-gen earbuds.

Battery life on the Liberty 4 Pro should easily get you through your day, or even your week. Soundcore claims you’ll get 7.5 hours in either ANC or transparency mode per charge, with another 30 hours when you include the charging case. If you turn both features off, this rises to 10 hours and 40 hours, respectively.

Keep in mind, that playing at louder-than-50% levels or turning on LDAC will reduce these numbers by as much as 3 hours per charge.

Ordinarily, that would be a nuisance, but the 4 Pro can recharge very quickly. A 5-minute recharge gives you a claimed 4 hours of playtime, which is excellent by wireless earbuds standards.

In my experience, it’s hard to go wrong with Soundcore earbuds, regardless if you go entry-level or spring for the company’s flagships. Once again, the best thing about the Liberty 4 Pro is the value. With the possible exception of missing Auracast compatibility (which I’d love to see in future Soundcore products), you get it all. And the price? It’s lower than any previous Liberty Pro model, making them a very enticing upgrade.

The smart charging case is a fun extra. The battery gauges are easily its best feature, though depending on your lifestyle, you may find its other functions handy too.

If you don’t value what the smart case offers, I still think the Liberty 4 Pro are an excellent choice given their strengths in sound quality, ANC, and call quality. However, you may want to consider saving some money by going with either the Soundcore Liberty 4 NC ($100) or the Earfun Air Pro 4 ($90). They can’t match the 4 Pro’s sound, but they come close and cost less, and the Earfun work with Auracast.