u/Deliberate-Penalty

Follow up from here

https://www.reddit.com/r/Earbuds/comments/1tdo6a3/soundpeats_h3_questions_and_impressions/

Got a new set of H3s....the noise floor is just not what I expect coming from 2 Sony setups, especially in pass through or transparency mode.

There are many ways to EQ it that can sound fantastic. It's fun playing around with this. At this price point you have to have a trade-off somewhere. If this had all the features of a Sony product I'd expect to it to cost as much as the XM6, and it would probably be a superior product. For the money, if you are more tolerant than me with ANC issues it is a great product for the price.

I also ordered onebuds plus 4, wow...this is a better product than linkbuds S I lost ar the airpods pro 2 I used to use. It's my first stem style in a while and I'd forgotten I dont love the shallow fit, but they are secure and light enough. ANC, passthrough, battery, case, features (ear sensing, easy controls etc...) are excellent. Sound quality is on par with my old buds, very slightly behind the H3 even with EQ, golden sound hearing test etc.... the one thing I LOVE about the settings is the 3d audio, vocals sound creepily and amazingly "in your face" with this on. The treble is exaggerated, reports of the bass being overpowering are false to my ears, but I always like bass.

I think the oneplus have a slight edge for vocal clarity. On my preferred settings, H3 bass feels tighter and clearer, OP has more ways to extend the LF range imo. Soundstage great with both. H3 top end is for me the clearest difference. Using EQ to make the OP less peaky and bright means you also lose some of the adjacent frequencies so its a tradeoff.

Conventional wisdom on the sub is:

H3 the SQ value king (I paid 107 aud)

OPB4 the all-rounder value king (I paid 86 aud).

Cheap enough that I might keep both, but if I could only have one its the OnePlus all day for me....and in the end I learned more about what I value as a user than the products themselves. For any prospective buyers, keep it simple. SQ as the main priority - go thr H3 as ANC and battery are "good enough". Want a better balance of features and will trade some sound quality (how much they differ is of course subjective)? OnePlus is a flagship killer.

Thanks to all the great information in this thread I pulled the tigger on some H3s.

A bit about the use case....

For international flights (all of which are long from NZ where I'm usually based) I use ANC headphones (wh xm5). For geeky listening I'm starting to use iems. When I don't want anything on my head or in my ears I have a few BT speakers. In other words I have more ways to listen to music than I nees and like them all for various jobs.

My buds were recently Linkbuds S, which I miss now that they're lost....they often felt annoying, after long use in particular, the sound was a little lacking but for convenience buds became essential....especially for public transport, discrete office use etc.... I use transparency modes, ANC, and also normal, about 1/3 each.

So....I was happy enough to get linkbuds again but not for the current prices (assuming they are no longer current as some of the NIB prices were nuts...haven't really kept up).

After a few days reading here I was intrigued about soundpeats and compairng the capsule and h3.

Pulled the trigger on the H3 and my thoughts are:

- as documented elsewhere, out of the box they do not sound good

- used the popular eq curves from various threads and was not impressed.

Was likely to return a few hours ago, then I tried a couple of other things.

- there are 2 apps for eq, I think the old app gives you parametric options, using a wider q for a boost on the LF and 5kHz channels gives a more pleasing boost than what I could get on the peats audio app.

- changed to larger tips. Probably the biggest difference for my ears.

In short, after a couple of hours of mucking around I found they are a little finnicky but once you get something that seems "better" and then just listen to music, they start to live up to the hype. I imagine there are some ears they wouldn't work for at all.

Musically I've put them through 60 year old live recordings from egypt through to RATM and tool. Starting to agree that for the money they are seriously good. On sound quality alone they easily beat sony for price/quality ratio. However buds are more than sound quality and the Sonys are better products in some ways...so here are my questions while I ponder what to do next.

The ANC makes a farily loud hissing noise, which I'm not used to. It isn't audible over music at moderate listening volumes, but I wonder if this is normal for all soundpeats products? No point getting the capsule if its worse (capsule is about 40% cheaper for me).

Transparency mode makes this sound too....is it normal....used to it being quiet as well.

Finally, taking them out of the ears doesnt stop the music and the touch controls keep working.....whoch is really annoying when ive turned up the volume, switched to game mode, changed tracks 19 times and activated ANC when taking them out for 20 seconds haha. I'm assuming I'm dumb and just missed a setting?

Appreciate thoughts from anyone