After what seems as a lifetime of rumor mills, the Samsung Galaxy Buds Live bean-shaped buds have finally been launched. Samsung’s latest member of the Galaxy wearable family strays from its Galaxy Buds lineage by introducing a novel design, active noise-canceling (ANC), a first from the company making directly competitive with Apple’s AirPods (Look out for our comparison soon.)
The Galaxy Buds Live promise a lot for the reasonable price of $169.99 and promise to be the perfect companion for your new Samsung Galaxy Note 20.
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The company boldly claims its Galaxy Buds Live earbuds have open active noise-canceling technology that will unite the best of both worlds. The company posits frequencies below 700Hz (e.g. trains and buses) will be quieted, while other ambient sounds like a train conductor’s announcement will still be audible. Ambient pass-through isn’t supported because the earbuds physically allow sound in. Samsung’s reasoning for this is that the open fit allows enough background noise, making a software passthrough redundant. This only makes me more dubious of the noise-canceling performance.
Galaxy Buds Live earbuds use Bluetooth 5.0 firmware and support three Bluetooth codecs: SBC, AAC, and the Samsung scalable codec. Samsung’s codec is proprietary, and balances streaming and connection qualities to give listeners the smoothest experience with minimal sacrifice to audio quality. Streaming quality slides from 96-512kbps to achieve this.
On the spec sheet, each bean-shaped earbud weighs 5.6 grams, and the Galaxy Buds Live are only available in a single size. This “one size fits all” approach hardly ever even pans out as “one size fits most” in practice. Even still, Samsung provides two pairs of wingtips (small and large) to secure the earbuds in place along with the outer ear, and includes instructions on how to install the earbuds properly for an optimal fit. Samsung asserts these are its most ergonomic earbuds yet, but fellow reviewers and I praised the Samsung Galaxy Buds Plus for their comfort. The Galaxy Buds Live buds have a lot to live up to given the hardshell design.
The exterior plate of each bean is touch-capacitive, and enables a slew of onboard controls. Users can control playback and volume, call management, and create custom settings that can be chosen from the Galaxy Wearable app. Each earbud has two microphone holes and a bass duct. On the interior side of each earbud are two charging contacts, a spot for wing tip installation, a voice pickup unit (VPU), an air vent, a third microphone, a speaker hole, and an infrared sensor.
The Samsung Galaxy Buds Live use a similar but different microphone system from its predecessors. Just as the Samsung Galaxy Buds Plus, the Buds Live rely on a triple-microphone format, two of which are beamforming. In short, these three microphones work to focus on your voice, and are assisted by an inward-facing voice pickup unit (VPU). A VPU is an accelerometer that detects jawbone movement and uses bone conduction technology to convert these vibrations into audio signals. It also helps reduce background noise.
I have used earbuds with ANC–Noise-cancelling is a hungry beast, but the Samsung Galaxy Buds Live are rated to last six hours on a single charge with ANC enabled, which is very impressive. The charging case provides an extra 2.5 battery cycles. If you exclusively use ANC, you may listen to the Galaxy Buds Live for a full 21 hours before you have to top the case up. With ANC off entirely, standalone battery life sits at a cozy eight hours, with a total 29 hours of playtime.
Practical features include IPX2 water-resistance, so you can lightly sweat in the earbuds without damaging them. You also benefit from quick connection, Music Share (formerly Samsung Dual Audio), and quick device switching — a shame that Bluetooth multipoint functionality is still absent. I would have loved to connect the Galaxy Buds Live to two devices at once, but you can’t have it all, how else would companies find ways to drag out annual new releases?
The Samsung Galaxy Buds Live will be available on Samsung’s website beginning August 6, and will retail for UGX 630k ($169) before taxes. You may select from three color variants: Mystic Bronze, Mystic Black, and Mystic White.
