What do you want in an earbud? Active noise cancellation that actually works? High quality audio on calls, music and gaming? Great battery life? Maybe a sleek design that kinda measures up to the Apple AirPods? The QCY melobuds N50 is marketed to be something of that sort. I’ve had one the last two weeks and here are my thoughts on whether it actually fits that bill of being a budget ANC earbud that ticks all the relevant checkboxes.
What’s in the box
There’s the carry case, in which you’ll find the earbuds themselves, two pairs of differently sized ear tips, incase the one that comes with the earbuds don’t fit your ear, a USB A to C cable, for charging and the manual for the buds.
Design and build quality
I’ll say the melobuds N50 is a pretty looking earbud which is an easy conclusion to reach for me to reach considering I got the purple variant. But I’ve definitely seen better looking earbuds, some even from QCY.
It’s flashy, the silver finish on the stalk makes this stand out from whichever angle you look at it and I’d say that stalk is sort of big when you picture the overall proportions of this earbud. Maybe it’s cause I’m used to a sleeker form factor from QCY, long ago I reviewed the T11s and that was all shades of sleek. I’m guessing the bigger stalk and bigger form factor is so they could pack in more technology, or maybe it’s just poor design.
Build quality is fine tho. It’s an all plastic build that feels solid in hand. The material is lightly textured which is important for helping the buds stay in ear but more on that later. My overall impression is that this is durable and will stand the test of time. Certainly has stood the test of the last two weeks – no blemishes, scratches or crack picked so far.
Each earbud weighs about 4.1grams. with in ear earbuds you want them as light as possible. 4.1grams is a good number.
Fit and comfortability
You’ll appreciate the 4.1grams weight number when you put these in ear, they exert no pressure whatsoever. And while the stalk seems to have picked up some weight since I last touched a QCY earbud, the part that fits into your ear remain as sleek and streamlined as ever.
All of that makes the QCY nice and comfy in ear. The fit is snug and thanks to the lightly textured build I talked about earlier these have no problem staying up your ear, even for extended periods. Matter of fact I went for a jog with them and aside from one or two adjustments they pretty much stayed glued to my ear through the workout routine.
If the default tips don’t work well for you, say you have bigger or smaller ears than mine you can easily swap them out for the bigger or smaller tips that come included in the pack.
Features
The Melobuds N50 is the typical budget TWS earbud in that it comes with:
- Active noise cancellation
- Bluetooth 5.4
- IPX4 rating
- Multipoint connection
- Touch controls
The noteworthy omissions here are wireless charging, proximity sensing and hiRes audio support. Particularly hiRes audio which is something you’d find on the cheaper AilyBuds Pro+ which is from QCY too. Although I would note that the updated Melobuds N70 tdoes ship with LDAC hiRes audio.
Active noise cancellation
QCY markets this is an earbud that’ll suppress noises of up to 45 decibels with it in ear. My experience was that this claim was valid. Indoors with people talking or the TV on in the background this was very good at blocking out the noise.
Outdoors on a walk and it’ll also do a good job of silencing chatter, traffic noise and maybe some loud talking. If you were to step into traffic and then get a cars blaring horn aimed right at you, that’s passing right through the ANC filter.
You can set noice cancelling to either of three modes; active noise cancelling which blocks out all the noise, transparent, which filters heavy noise but allows you to hear what’s going on around you for when you’re say walking in a park, and normal which just disables it altogether.
Active noise cancelling on its part can be set to either adaptive which analyzes the noise and automatically sets the best mode, noisy for noisy environments, commuting, indoor or anti wind.
Bluetooth 5.4 and multipoint connection
Bluetooth 5.4 is the most recent bluetooth version available now and compared to 5.3 or later this supports the LC3 codec which is better for audio quality at low bitrates, has better energy efficiency and better latency.
Im guessing the multipoint connection feature is an offshoot of Bluetooth 5.4 and what it does is allow you pair the earbuds to two devices simultaneously. So no need to disconnect from one devices to connect to another and that’s a neat touch, if you use two phones like me.
IPX4 rating for water resistance
IPX4 on the Melobuds N50 means this can only handle water splashes and maybe sweat. You can’t take a dive with it in a pool or use it in heavy rain (maybe in light showers but don’t call me if it doesn’t turn on after that). It could have been better, some TWS at this price point come with an IPX8 rating or better, but but IPX4 is what you’d expect for a sub $30 TWS earbud with a feature set that is comparable to the N50 out of the box…
Sound quality
The 12mm diaphragm on the Melobuds and its dynamic driver delivered a very balanced soundstage. It’s rich, feels very detailed and I was really impressed by how full the soundstage came out to be the pure surround sound and overall clarity. This picked up and delivered a lot of adlibs I never even knew existed on my favorite songs, and I love my adlibs.
Bass was deep and punchy. I like to think of it as being expressive but still controlled, so it didn’t upstage the other frequencies which is something you see more often than not in budget TWS earbuds.
Mids were clear and precise, probably not as punchy or pure as the bass but that’s not something to expect from a sub $30 TWS earbud. It’s still right on the money though, listening to Timeless by the Weeknd was thoroughly refreshing and if you know that song you know what makes it sensational stuff it is the very generous synth infusion on every layer of the song.
I feel trebles on the Melobuds N50 could be a little bit crisper, while it’s crisp enough to reveal enough detail, at higher listening volumes you can sense some roughness around the edges. When the volume is high enough you can certainly feel it being suppressed to the extent that it sounds a bit mushy. I think these were intentionally tuned to tone down the trebles and accentuate the bass and mids, more of mids actually, and in a way it works to fit the overall sound profile – deep, detailed and punchy.
All that said what I really liked about the Melobuds N50 was the surround sound. This was legit talking to me from the back of my head. The listening experience with the right songs (again Timeless the Weeknd if you’re looking for recommendations) is truly fantastic. You feel the Music coming from around you and every now and again there’s an adlib, snare drum or piano cutout hitting you from the back or front of the soundstage.
Calls
QCY claims this ships with six microphones and when I saw that I was like that’s a lot. I counted and I could only spot five.
Anyways, the five microphones I found definitely do their job very well.
This handles calls like a champ, the whole clear, crisp sound quality I described earlier lends itself to calls as well. So on a phone call you’re getting crisp and as detailed as can be sound into your ears.
Conversely the five mics capture enough detail in your speech with enough clarity to deliver a good enough in call sound to the receiver.
Gaming and media playback
For TWS earbuds the one issue you might face when using them for gaming or media playback say watching a Youtube video is latency or how long the difference is between seeing sound that are produced and actually hearing them in your earbuds.
The Melobuds N50 doesn’t have any issue of that sort tho. When gaming it was in perfect sync; watching movies whatever the source, internet, YouTube or local content was all aligned as well.
Battery life
You’d expect a budget TWS earbud like this to easily push past 6 hours of active listening time and that’s exactly what I got in my hands on experience. 6 bordering on 7 hours of active listening time. If ANC is active that drops listening time by about 2 hours which again is pretty much normal for a budget TWS earbud.
On standby this can go north of 48 hours. The carry case houses an extra 380mAh battery that can charge the earbuds through about four 0-100 cycles before requiring a charge itself. QCY says you can get 2 hours of playtime from just 10minutes of charging and I found that to be essentially true.
Like I mentioned earlier, no wireless charging support here. The carry case comes with a USB C port and there’s an A to C cable included in the pack for charging. Why A to C though, at this point I feel like these manufacturers are just dumping their old …stock on us because I can’t remember when last I saw a new charging brick with an A outlet.
App and customization
QCY are big boys now so you get a fully fledged Android or iOS app to go with your cheap earbud. Its very well thought out, you get a:
- Status tab that provides an overview of the bud’s current state
- Sound tab where you can customize the EQ, noise cancellation mode and sound left right sound balance
- Settings tab that provides even more granular control, you can configure the touch inputs and map then to your preferred action, find your earbuds if they get missing, enable sleep mode or gaming mode and perform software updates.
My one and only gripe with the app is you need to create an account before you can use it. I honestly don’t see any reason why QCY needs my email before they allow me change the EQ on my earbuds. I’m blocking those marketing emails the very first one I see.
Should you buy the Melobuds N50?
Honestly, even though this is a well built and solid earbud, I’d just get the more recent Melobuds N70 or even the N60. Those come with support for hiRes Audio and I personally prefer the looks compared to the N50. If you want to save $10 and maybe you don’t need hiRes Audio support then yeah you can consider the Melobuds N50.
They do everything right, the sound quality is immersive, battery life very good, superb touch controls and great active noise cancellation. I feel like if they looked how I love my TWS earbuds to look I’d probably ignore that lack of hiRes (LDAC) support and outright recommend them over the newer models. But they don’t, so if you don’t mind spending the extra $10 – $15 just get those instead.
