So here I was scrolling through AliExpress searching for my next quality bud to review and I came across the Air Pro 5. Cost just five bucks with over 5000 units sold.
Must be doing something right right? I was curious placed an order, got em delivered and I’ve had them for the last week or so. Lets talk about AliExpresses numerous clone Chinese Apple AirPods.
Design
Obviously they don’t try to outrightly put the Apple nametag on these, the only give away is the ‘Air Pro’ in the name but from a mile out you can see these were intentionally built and marketed to cosplay an Apple Airpods Pro. Unfortunately just from the feel of it you can tell it’s a dud.
It’s light, it’s finicky, the details are off and the materials used feel cheap.I know practically all TWS buds are made of plastic but I’ve never really had a bud that felt this plastic in hand.
With an actual Apple AirPods Pro in hand you can see how wide the disparity in build quality is. The cover for the surround speakers for instance, very tacky on this compared to the original Apple AirPods.
Even the contacts for charging look way off compared to the original stuff. Panels on the buds don’t match up right as well.
All this to say if you plan on getting this in hopes that you’d fool anyone or yourself into believing they’re actual AirPods you’re essentially wasting your time. Even to the untrained eye these don’t look remotely close to the real deal.
Now as $5 bud anyway, I’d say the build quality is decent. It’s not terrible, matter of fact if you went out of your way to find other similarly priced buds this would probably be the best of the bunch. And the manufacturers, whoever they are go out of their way to include a pouch complete with a rope to make them easier to carry about. Very nice touch.
Fit and comfortability
The fit on these is kinda good.
Surprisingly or perhaps not surprisingly since these are modeled after the AirPods, they stick in ear and without too much discomfort. Used this while I was on and about indoors as well as outdoors while walking and they felt like a secure fit all the time/while.
They’re comfortable too and again not a surprise considering these weigh a meager 3.3 grams. That’s officially the lightest TWS earbud I’ve tested and about 2.3 grams lighter than the original stuff. Ear fatigue was very minimal even after using these for a long period and it definitely lacked that annoying feeling of fullness you’d find on buds like the Soundpeats C30.
Feature list
These buds are not aiming to win any best budget TWS buds battles, just trying to be an incredibly cheap Apple AirPods knockoff so expectedly they don’t come with the bells and whistles you’d expect from a budget TWS bud challenger. I can also tell you that they don’t come with half the stuff you’d get on the original AirPods.
What you do get is:
- Bluetooth 5.3
- Touch controls
That’s basically it. No ANC, No fast pair tech, no IP rating, no support for high bit rate audio codecs. Also no audio app I should add.
Touch controls
The touch controls on this is quite simply the worst I’ve seen so far. You have to touch this very specific area of the buds to get any sort of registration and even when you do it doesn’t register more than half of the time.
Pretty much didn’t bother with using it for the while I had them on for testing.
Sound quality
I don’t even know what I was thinking going on to test the sound quality on these. These are arguably the worst sounding buds I’ve tested in a long while. The soundstage is so unbalanced and in a weird way cos mids take precedence over pretty much everything else as opposed to the usual issue of bass just suppressing everything else.
My main beef with these however is the detail and clarity on the mids and trebles. It’s downright atrocious.
Vocals comes off as if you’re in tunnel or something. Very very muddy and extremely hollowed out, with a overhanging hum that’s present at all volume levels. It literally turns the joy of listening to music into an actual chore. Every minute with these in ear was in literal terms, pure torture.
If you move past the atrocious mids and trebles you’re greeted with the most subprime bass I’ve ever had the opportunity of experiencing. Like the trebles it feels hollowed out and again in a weird way, cos you can still feel the umphhh in some cases but it’s an ump that’s all brawn and without any refinement or control.
Surround sound was poor maybe not as bad as other aspects of the listening experience but still not up to the mark as was the overall clarity of the sound profile. There’s a lot of muffling up in between the mids and the trebles that’s very much accentuated by that brash bass output.
Not the buds to get if you want to have even a semblance of a good music listening experience.
Call quality
I feel this is the only place these buds get a pass mark, this and the price maybe. Call quality was okayish even comparable to what you’d get from top buds like the QCY melobuds N70 or the CMF buds Pro 2.
It did a great job of isolating my voice from the background in numerous setting including those where the background noise was plentiful.
Check out the YouTube video up top for a listen of how the Mic sounds.
Battery life
On a full charge these will go about 2 – 3 hours if you’re actively listening to music, rarely ever went past a day of on time when on standby.
Not so good numbers considering buds like the Soundpeats C30 can do 7 hours active listening time but then again those as X5 the price of these.
What’s good what’s bad
What’s good
- Good call quality
- Ridiculously cheap price
What’s bad
- Everything else
Should you buy the Airpro 5 TWS
When I got these I wasn’t expecting them to match the many budget buds I’ve tested in any way. At $5 a piece it’ll take some sort of black magic engineering to do that. However I was expecting them to be a little bit good, just a little bit, but they’re not even a teeny weeny bit good.
The build quality is depressing, the sound quality is genuinely atrocious, there’s no ANC, no app, no IP rating. The only reason anyone should buy this is if they want to use them as props for actual AirPods in a movie or something.
