Soundcore Liberty 2 Pro by Anker

True Wireless in-ears with good sound and sound personalisation

In a nutshell

The Soundcore Liberty 2 Pro from Anker are excellent true wireless in-ears with an excellent sound, good hardware and software. Cutting edge, thanks to Bluetooth 5.0 and Qi charge standard, the only thing missing is the possibility of coupling the in-ears with two devices at once, as well as being able to use an aptX Low Latency Codec, which would allow lip-synchronous YouTube viewing. Apart from that, this package contains everything you need to hear music beautifully. The Soundcore Liberty 2 Pro by Anker is 150 Euro, which is in a price range that seems very reasonable for equipment of this quality. My conclusion: definitely listen to them!

When an award-winning audio producer says that a pair of headphones are good, then that is supposed to be proof of quality and inspire customer confidence. Anker is not afraid of criticism and presents the Soundcore Liberty 2 Pro with ten such Grammy Award-winning audio producers who all say that these true wireless in-ears are pretty good. So let’s see if that’s true.

Features

When you unfold the strong cardboard packaging, the Liberty 2 Pro in-ears and their carrying case are shown on one side. On the other side, a nice exploded view shows the construction principle of these in-ears: Astria Coaxial Acoustic Architecture, or ACAA for short, which is what may have led those ten producers to make their positive statements about these headphones. ACAA describes the arrangement of the built-in drivers, which are not placed next to each other, but in front of each other and turned to each other, so that there is no frequency cancellation and less delay. This, in theory, is supposed to provide rich bass and beautiful mid-range and treble. The sound should be as good as if it’s straight from the recording studio.

In Practice

In practice, I take the in-ears out of their presentation pack and marvel at their sturdy, high-quality appearance and workmanship. The elongated oval shape does well to camouflage the particularly large size. There is just one button on each side for control. Connecting to a computer using Bluetooth 5.0 is only mentioned here for the sake of form, as it is completely unproblematic. AptX is offered as a codec. There are lots of ways to adapt these headphones to your ears, with seven pairs of ear-moulds and three pairs of earbuds. You might ask why they aren’t made of memory foam, but I quickly found the ideal combination to fit me.

Sound

Reviewing these straight out of the box and remaining completely unbiased (what do ten Grammy winners know anyway?) these headphones were a real pleasure for the ears: basses, mids, highs – everything is there and everything is defined, clean, powerful and well balanced. Maybe there would be a not quite enough bass for some people, but I like it and if I want more bass, I can turn up the EQ.

In the meantime I have installed the Soundcore app on my iPhone, which is sleek and modern with just two large menu items: equalizer and control. The “control” setting in the app allows me to customise some remote functions like, for example, whether I want to use double-clicking the left or right button for skipping tracks, volume adjustment or summoning the digital assistant, or if I want to use a long click on both sides. I think this offers good options.

Even better is the equalizer. First of all, it offers 22 presets, which give me numerous options for my optimal sound perception – some more effective than others. My only criticism here would be that I wasn’t offered any manual intervention options via x-band equalizers. You could fiddle with it a bit more until you really like the sound, but this is nitpicking of the highest order.

When using the “Hear ID” feature, you can use the app to test your hearing (it takes about three minutes) and then create a profile that is optimal for you. In practice, you press a key for as long as you can hear a certain tone of a certain frequency, which gradually becomes quieter and quieter. At the end, there is a graphic, from which an EQ preset is formed. The resulting sound is actually good and somehow more balanced, a feature which no other preset has offered me.

Listening to current pop music, there’s a rich and excellent mix of dull bass and clear treble, with the space in between being lush and smooth, giving me the impression of really penetrating deep into the sound. The volume is more than sufficient and even when playing louder music nothing is distorted or clipped, except for the fat guitars of heavier music, which still sounded good. The stereo stage is deep and wide; I feel I’m in the middle rather than in front of the sound. It all comes together and thanks to the app, and there are lots of opportunities to make improvements.

The speech quality and intelligibility of the built-in microphones was rated as good by the editor who I called to test it out.

Case Studies

The oval-shaped, velvety, rubberised charging case is now lying on my charging mat because – besides the USB-C connection (USB-A on USB-C cable is included) – I get Qi-certified, wireless charging. I am always informed about the current charge level thanks to the triple LED charge level indicator. However, I still have enough time before I have to use the case to charge as the in-ears run about eight hours without it. Then I can refresh them up to three times in the case and get 32 hours pure runtime, which is very good value.