Review: Beats Solo Buds

Budget buds are booming. While flagship wireless earbuds like the AirPods Pro (8/10, WIRED Recommends) and Bose’s QuietComfort Ultra grab all the accolades, brands like Soundpeats and Anker’s Soundcore lineup have proven you can get good sound, ample features, and even effective noise canceling at a fraction of the cost of the major players.

It’s only natural that mega brands like Apple-owned Beats would want a piece of the action. As Beats’ cheapest fully wireless earbuds to date, the dashingly compact Solo Buds are on the front line, promising a focus on core design and sound quality in lieu of extras like noise canceling. They even use the same speakers as the much pricier Studio Buds+, but after several hours of testing, the Solo's sound left me wanting. It’s clear and relatively balanced, but the fidelity falls short of some of my favorites in their price class.

The Solo serve up some neat features like auto-pairing for both iOS and Android phones and fantastic playback time per charge, but their astonishingly small charging case lacks a backup battery, limiting their total playtime away from an outlet. Without any other standout features like noise canceling or even basic waterproofing, the Solo simply don’t bring enough artillery to compete with the fleet of affordable competitors knocking down your door.

Micro Package, Macro Play Time

The Solo Buds’ most noteworthy design trait is easily their incredibly tiny case, which stands out (or rather disappears), even in a sea of miniature cases. Forget fitting it in your regular jeans pocket, this thing fits in the key pocket. Beats says the case is 40 percent smaller than the relatively compact Studio Buds+ case, and it’s even available in a trendy transparent red colorway—welcome back to 1992, everybody!

Photograph: Ryan Waniata

Whether the case’s spyware style and ultralight weight of just 22 grams make up for its lack of an onboard battery may depend on how you’ll use the Solo Buds. Their eye-popping 18-hour playback time is enough for the vast majority of scenarios, and I got approximately that much in testing, with the buds lasting multiple days of listening without a recharge. (If you’ve got the new iPhone 15, Beats says you can also plug in the case directly to charge on the go.)

The lack of a case battery does change its functionality in a few other ways compared to most buds. There’s no onboard LED to indicate battery life, so you’ll need to check the buds in your iOS settings or (for Android users) the Beats app before traveling. The case also lacks a pairing button, so manually re-pairing the buds must be done via their onboard controls.

The buds themselves aren’t quite as astonishingly small compared to other tiny buds, but they’re still relatively compact, matching up similarly to other recent Beats buds. They’re a bit stubbier and rounder than the Studio+ but have the same convenient fins on the exterior for pulling them out and putting them in place.

Photograph: Ryan Waniata

Keeping in step with their Studio siblings, physical buttons hidden at the ends of each fin offer mirrored controls to let you tap your way through playback/calling and song skip/reverse, while a hold command evokes your voice assistant (with the option to swap it for volume control in your iPhone settings).

It’s a solid enough system, but as I continued to find in my evaluation, some tweaks to the Solo’s design made them less inviting than their pricier predecessors. Their buttons are surprisingly stiff, forcing the buds into my ear canals with each tap. And unlike either Beats buds—or just about any buds we test—the Solo Buds have no IP rating for dust or water resistance, so buyers will need to be careful when wearing them in the elements.

Snug Fit, Simple Sound

I wasn’t a huge fan of how early Beats buds fit my ears, but since Apple took over, the brand has (perhaps not coincidentally) consistently crafted some of the comfiest buds you can buy. The Solo Buds are another winner for long-term use, feeling light, stable, and generally unobtrusive. There's some decent noise isolation with music playing, too.

Even so, I never felt like the buds were 100 percent seated in my ear canals, even after trying all four available ear tips. Lining them up with the Studio Plus, I noticed they’re not only rounder at the base but also use shorter sound tubes, the portion that extends the tips into your ear canals.

Whether it was a lack of proper seating or simply the Solo’s acoustic voicing I can’t say, but they’re a clear step down for me when compared to the pricier Studio Buds+ and even value-packed rivals like Soundcore’s Space A40 (8/10, WIRED Recommends). Both competitors showcase better instrumental definition, livelier dynamics, and a more accurate stereo image. The Studio+ also bring deeper and firmer bass, notable in songs like The Weeknd’s “Starboy” or Too Short’s “Money in the Ghetto,” even though they share the same 8.2-mm driver design.

That’s not to say the Solo Buds sound bad. They certainly lean toward the brighter side in the treble and midrange, but their sound is accessible and never got excessively sharp in my testing. The dynamics feel rather flat, but there’s some decent detail here, and they wholly avoid the kind of muddled lower register common in so many budget options. You'll find clear delineation of each register across a wide range of tracks and genres.

They also support Spatial Audio with supported videos and music on services like Apple Music and Amazon Music Unlimited, though they don’t offer the same head-tracking common with such features, designed to virtually anchor the listening position around you.

I took several calls with the Solo Buds with no complaints on either end. Beats says the buds employ a noise learning algorithm with “advanced logic” that targets your voice and suppresses “external unwanted noises.” While I wasn’t able to test them in especially windy conditions, I tried a call under the bathroom fan. The caller said my voice sounded a bit like a speakerphone call, but the fan noise wasn’t audible.

Minimal Extras

Finding the Solo Buds to be somewhere around the “just fine” level for sound quality isn’t uncommon at their price, but it does make their distinct lack of other features tougher to square. Unlike so many new options at this price (and even well below), you won’t get any noise canceling to buffer annoyances or even transparency mode to keep you aware of your surroundings.

Photograph: Ryan Waniata

Also missing here are plenty of now-standard Apple offerings, like sensors to pause the sound when you pull a bud out, “Hey Siri” voice assistant summoning, or auto-switching to seamlessly swap between iCloud devices. They offer a few handy Apple exclusives, including Find My support to keep track of them, audio sharing, and one-touch pairing, popping up on your iPhone automatically when you first open them.

Like other Beats buds, the Solo can switch hit for Android gear, with some handy tricks like auto-swapping between Google-connected cloud devices, as well as the same one-touch pairing and Find My Device features you’ll get on iOS. The Beats Android app provides some basic settings adjustments and firmware updates.

It’s not nothing, but it’s a rather short list when you look at the litany of extras Soundcore offers in the A40 or the even better outfitted Liberty 4 NC (8/10, WIRED Recommends), with everything from noise canceling and transparency mode to multi-band EQ control and multipoint Bluetooth pairing. Even granting the possibility of a sound upgrade for those who can find a better fit than I did, the Solo Buds are a tough sell with so many loaded budget options out there, and countless more on the way.

If you’re after ecosystem-agnostic buds nestled in the cutest little case in the galaxy, the Solo Buds fit the bill at a modest price that’s sure to see a swift drop. Otherwise, you’ll get more for your money elsewhere.