Most earbuds block out external sounds, but Anker’s Soundcore AeroFit Pro earbuds are designed to let you maintain awareness of your surroundings while still providing impactful audio. They do this with an open design that leaves your ear canal unplugged, using drivers to channel sound into your canal instead.
At $169, they’re not a budget set of earbuds, making the question of whether they can do the job all the more important. With a flexible fit, little means of controlling how they sit in your ears, and too much audio quality depending on placement, the pricey buds are hard to recommend.
Anker Soundcore AeroFit Pro
The Anker Soundcore AeroFit Pro put some good ideas and hardware into a form factor that just makes it hard to get the most out of them. With better and cheaper options on the market, it’s hard to find a reason to choose these earbuds over alternatives.
Price and availability
The Soundcore AeroFit Pro cost $169 onAnker’s websiteorAmazon. They come in one size and one color for now. White, light blue, and purple models will be coming sometime after launch.
Design, hardware, and what’s in the box
Opening up the Soundcore AeroFit Pro, you’ll find the earbuds, their rather sizable charging case, and a special tether that can clip into the buds' stems to connect them behind your neck. You’ll also get a USB-C charging cable. You won’t find many different-sized ear tips, as these buds don’t sit down in your ear canals but rather direct sound down into your canals.
The design of the buds is more common on workout headphones, with the bud element sitting loosely in the opening of the ear and a hook wrapping around the back of the ear to hold the buds in place. Anker’s design for the Soundcore AeroFit Pro appears to put the batteries in the end of the hooks, which makes for a fairly large and cylindrical tail. Comfort is subjective, but in my time testing, I’ve found those thicker ends uncomfortable, ineffective at providing a secure fit, and very good at getting in the way of putting the earbuds on with one hand.
The tether included can help a bit with fit by pulling earbuds down slightly, ensuring the hook around the ears is more secure. But this does little to improve the comfort. Appropriate fit is also a question. Moving the buds around in my ears, the sound varies greatly with only tiny adjustments, and there’s no element of the earbuds that allows you to lock in a specific placement, with the shape of your ears and tragus ultimately dictating where the buds will sit.
A key aspect of this design is that it leaves your ears partially open, allowing external noise in alongside whatever you’re listening to, much like the 1More Fit Open Earbuds S50 I recently tested or bone conduction headphones. This design is ideal for buds you’ll wear during workouts, runs, or walks. But with an iffy fit, the Soundcore AeroFit Pro won’t be reliable during intense physical activities. They’ll stay in place during a light jog, but serious headbanging or a few burpees are likely to send them to the ground.
The buds feature a physical button on the top of each speaker unit. This makes it easy to control the buds with a simple pinch or double pinch. The buttons are light to the touch, though, and I frequently mispress them while adjusting or inserting the earbuds.
Because of the lengthy hooks on the buds, the charging case is fairly large, taking up about twice as much space as the compact case found with most in-ear Bluetooth earbuds.
Audio and ambient sound
The Soundcore AeroFit Pro earbuds have a strange premise. On the one hand, they’re trying to provide clear ambient sound, so you can always remain aware of your surroundings. On the other, they’re trying to deliver some audiophile listening from 16.2mm titanium-coated drivers paired with support for the high-fidelity LDAC codec. Critical listening is hard to accomplish, though, as the earbuds are incredibly effective at allowing surrounding sounds in.
The buds definitely accomplish the goal of situational awareness. In the right conditions, they can even offer good sound. Thanks to those large drivers, they do an impressive job providing clear audio and even get a bit of oomph out of the bass. However, I generally have to crank the volume a bit to really hear everything clearly, and the best sound is only there when I press the earbuds further into my ears with my hands. As they want to sit naturally, sound quality is less reliable.
Yellow Ostrich’s “I Got No Time For You” features a roaring outro with the constant clash of cymbals, and while it’s normally plenty raucous, the treble resonates in my ears to make a horrible cacophony because of the way the AeroFit Pro sit. If I press the buds down so the speaker grille sits closer to my ear canal, this effect is reduced. The heft of the bass is also improved here. But there’s no way to make the buds stay in this position on their own.
The 1More Open EarBuds S50 had something of a workaround for this with a little plunger-like eartip that partially linked the drivers with the ear canal. Still, Anker’s solution shoots sound into the ear from wherever it sits, resulting in highly inconsistent sound. At least the buds get loud enough that I can generally hear what I’m listening to even in busier settings, like a noisy cafe with its own music playing.
Call audio isn’t too impressive, with the mics picking up my voice clearly, but that quality is fairly low. That is to say, they sound like Bluetooth earbuds typically sound.
Features and app
The Soundcore AeroFit Pro aren’t terribly feature-rich earbuds. Their key feature comes from the physical design. That said, Anker offers a spatial audio feature through the Soundcore app. Like what you’d find from Apple’s AirPods Pro, the feature adjusts the audio depending on head position, making it sound a bit like the audio is coming from somewhere other than the buds in your ears. But the feature is clunky.
Rather than transitioning smoothly, it seems to jump after my head rotates past a certain angle. There’s also a fixed mode, which doesn’t use the head tracking and simply aims to push the soundstage further out. This one is a little more effective, though not a great improvement in sound quality.
The Soundcore app also offers a few EQ presets and a custom, eight-band equalizer, so you can make some of your own. This may be more handy for finding a sound that plays well in your ears. Of course, this is a process you shouldn’t have to do to get decent sound from a $169 pair of earbuds.
Anker advertises Bluetooth multipoint connectivity, which is strangely not enabled by default. Enabling it is buried in the Soundcore app’s settings under “Dual Connections.” The feature is also fairly slow to switch, taking several seconds.
Similarly, LDAC is not enabled by default. Support will vary from device to device, but strangely, a toggle in settings needs to be switched to enable LDAC. LDAC and multipoint audio also can’t be used simultaneously, so the Soundcore AeroFit Pro’s features aren’t all available at the same time.
Battery and charging
One positive of the chunky battery design of the ear hooks is that Anker has squeezed in sizable batteries. The earbuds can run for 14 hours on a single charge, and the case can extend that to 46 hours. Most of the time I’ve worn the buds, I never saw the charge drain considerably, and listening to music for a couple of hours as I work, the charge only dropped to 10%, validating Anker’s battery life claims. The buds also offer quick charging, with just a 10-minute charging offering 5.5 hours of playback.
Competition
The Soundcore AeroFit Pro may have an uncommon design, but they’re not unique. 1More recently introduced the 1More Fit Open Earbuds S50 that serve the same purpose as the Soundcore AeroFit Pro, even going for a similar mix of hi-fi sound and ambient awareness. 1More’s option is a hair cheaper at $150, though it comes with a slightly larger carrying case. Having tested the 1More earbuds myself, I’d give them the win for fit, comfort, and sound quality, though even they could be a little weird when it came to getting them to sit just right in the ear.
Othersport earbuds and headphonesoffer a similar premise, such as theSony LinkBudsorH2O Audio Tri headphones. The LinkBuds started at $179 but are a little cheaper now. They’re far more compact, come in a tiny charging case, and offer perfect transparency, but their fit is perhaps even more dubious. A pair I owned never wanted to stay in my ears for long, and there’s no hook to hold them in place.
Meanwhile, the H2O Audio Tri headphones use bone conduction. While it can be an impressive tool for clear audio while keeping the ears completely unobstructed, it hinges considerably on fit. They’re more affordable headphones at $99 but lack many features, upgraded connectivity standards, quality mics, and the long battery life of other earbuds.
Should you buy them?
The Soundcore AeroFit Pro are a premium pair of earbuds with a high price. But they struggle to deliver value. The sound quality you pay for and the actual quality you get will vary widely depending on fit, and the earbuds offer little means for customizing the fit to suit you best.
While the open design of the buds makes them competent for hearing your surroundings, as you might want to while exercising outdoors, the fit is far from secure enough to use for vigorous exercise. The open design also only further impacts the sound quality. I found the buds underwhelming for the price and more than a little uncomfortable overall. While I had my qualms with the 1More Fit Open Earbuds S50, they are much easier to recommend, especially thanks to their lower price.
