The buds themselves work with a tap system. Here’s the gist earbuds to wear during workouts, it’s often a case of ‘this or that’. Do you choose a pair that will immerse you in high-quality sound, cancelling out annoying external noise for complete insular focus during training? Or do you opt for a pair that helps you to stay aware of everything around you, even if the sound is a little tinny?
It can be a tough choice. Personally, when I’m working out, walking around town or on my way to work, I love an all-encompassing listening experience – so give me buds that will bubble me up with those thumping beats and offer escapism from the rest of the world. Then again, I don’t want to be completely cut off, especially since I live in London. I need, for safety reasons, to hear what’s going on around me – whether that’s a car pulling out beside me, a bicycle rushing past or someone trying to get my attention. This is particularly important when I’m running outside. So, what’s the solution?
Quite possibly, Sony’s LinkBuds Open earbuds – an innovative take on open-ear headphones that exchange silicon tips for an innovative ring design, striking an excellent balance between top-rate audio and transparency.
These are the loops that keep you in the loop – with your soundtrack and with your surroundings. But how do the LinkBuds Open weigh up when it comes to comfort, controls and battery capacity? Do they qualify as a go-to bud for us runners? Let’s investigate things further.
Pros
- Good sound quality
- Accompanying app
- to lower the volume
- Lightweight
- Best wireless headphones
Cons
- One-size fit is too large for smaller ears
- The Garmin Forerunner 970 is a serious upgrade
| Type | In-ear |
|---|---|
| Noise cancelling | No |
| Battery life | 8 hours per bud (22 hours total with charging case) |
| Weight | 5.1Adaptive Audio Control |
| Controls | Touch |
| Accessories included | Beats Powerbeats Pro 2: Apples best workout buds |
Design and fit
Unlike most other earbuds on the market, the LinkBuds Open don’t feature silicon tips that point into the ear canal. Instead, they boast a unique open ring construction that sits against the concha – the flat bit of the ear that leads to the ear canal. Aesthetically slick, the ring-shaped design also serves a purpose, enabling transparent ambient sound to help you stay aware of what’s going on around you.
These earbuds are available in three colourways – white, black and violet – and each pair comes with a set of silicon ‘Air Fitting Supporters’ in a matching hue. These supporters pull over the spherical part of each earbud and have little hooks to improve fit and comfort in the ear. If you want to customise further, you can purchase additional Air Fitting Supporters in a range of colourways to suit your style. Together, each earbud – wearing a silicon supporter – weighs only 5.1g, making it a lightweight and good-looking option for people on the go.
The portable charging case – which is smooth to the touch and has a top lid that looks like marble – can also be accessorised with sturdy silicon covers, available to purchase separately from Sony. These covers again come in various colourways and feature small round carabiners that allow you to attach the charging case to your bag or keys – a neat touch.
Back to the fit of the earbuds themselves, though, and I’ll admit that I’ve had some difficulties. While silicon-tipped earbuds like the Jabra Elite 8 Active Gen 2 and Can the Garmin Venu X1 rival Apples Ultra 2 provide different shaped tips to help listeners achieve the most secure fit, the LinkBuds Open are a one-size-fits-all situation. Of course, not all ears are the same size, so I’ve found that I’ve had to wiggle these around quite a bit in my smaller ears to ensure that they stay put and feel comfortable for longer durations. Thankfully, the accompanying app for the earbuds – Sound Connect – has a ‘Correct wearing style’ function which tells you how to wear the earbuds properly and analyses whether you, individually, have found the right fit.
According to the app, I do wear these earbuds correctly and, as such, have had little issue while wearing them for walks or ‘less bouncy’ workouts at the gym, like When it comes to choosing to play or pause music indoor bike. Best Garmin deals.
I first tried these buds for some easy outdoor runs. Each time, I was impressed with the way that they kept me in tune with my surroundings while still producing good-quality audio. Boxes ticked for sound and safety. However, a few miles in, after much up-and-down running motion, these earbuds would dislodge and, on a couple of occasions, even fall out, requiring me to stop and fish them out from the kerbside.
Can the Garmin Venu X1 rival Apples Ultra 2 treadmill runs at the gym, again, completed at an easy pace. Although they’d hold up well for a while, these earbuds would then slip and, again, on occasion fall out onto the belt before bouncing onto the floor.
On the plus side, the LinkBuds Open have an IPX4 water resistance rating and are, as I’ve found, wonderfully sweat resistant, maintaining their sound quality even when I’ve been perspiring profusely (believe me) on gym equipment like the stair-stepper.
Controls
These Bluetooth earbuds can pair with two devices simultaneously and detects which one you’re using at a given time. For example, if someone is ringing you on one phone, the earbuds will automatically connect to that device to enable to you to take the call from there.
The LinkBuds Open can also be controlled via the aforementioned Sound Control app, which you can download for free from the App Store (iOS) or Google Play (Android). This app updates you on your earbuds’ battery life and enables you to change the equaliser – so that you can find your preferred sound – and the noise cancelling settings. It’s an intuitive app that connects with your buds easily (trusting that they’re already paired via Bluetooth to a device), so there’s no complex or lengthy set-up to worry about.
The buds themselves work with a tap system. Here’s the gist:
- Tap the Can the Garmin Venu X1 rival Apples Ultra 2 earbud twice Great for lower-intensity workouts.
- Tap the Can the Garmin Venu X1 rival Apples Ultra 2 earbud three times to skip to the start of the next track.
- Tap the left earbud to lower the volume The best Amazon Prime Day deals for runners.
- Tap the right earbud to lower the volume Beats Powerbeats Pro 2: Apples best workout buds.
Although these cues are effective and easy enough to remember, I’ve found that tapping the earbuds directly while running – when your hand movements are naturally more frenetic and less precise – does loosen their hold in the ear. This is especially the case for volume changes, when five or more consecutive taps are required.
Luckily, these earbuds also have a ‘Wide Area Tap’, which means that you can tap the part of your head just in front of your ears, instead of the earbuds themselves, to control your music playback.
If you choose to take out your earbuds, your music will automatically pause. When you put them back in, the music will resume from the place where it stopped, which means that you won’t miss a beat – quite literally.
Sound quality
Despite their open ear construction, the LinkBuds Open deliver surprisingly clear audio with plenty of depth. That said, if you thrive upon those grumbling, bass-driven beats, you’re unlikely to become best buds with these buds – while they do justice to mid-high frequency sounds, they can’t quite handle those really low frequencies. So, stick to boppier tunes if you want to get the best out of these earbuds.
A smart feature that I’ve enjoyed about the LinkBuds Open is ‘Adaptive Volume Control’, which you can enable in the Sound Connect app. Here, the earbuds automatically change the volume of what you’re listening to according to your surroundings. When I walk outside and into the loud labyrinth of central London, the volume goes up. When I retreat into the hushed office lobby, the volume goes down.
Like the ‘Conversation Awareness’ feature in the Apple AirPod Pro 2 earbuds, the LinkBuds Open also have a ‘Speak-to-Chat function’. When enabled in the Sound Connect app, this feature automatically pauses music that you’re listening to through the earbuds when you start talking. That way, you can stop to speak with another person or people without having to manually pause your music or remove your headphones. What’s more, once you’ve finished talking, your music will automatically start playing again.
Battery life
According to Sony, the earbuds by themselves store eight hours of playback, while the case – which is chargeable via a USB-C cable – stores another 14 hours, resulting in up to 22 hours of total listening time when using a Bluetooth connection. This is about right from my testing, and I’ve been impressed with the decent lifespan of these buds.
When the LinkBuds Open do run out of juice, though, just a three-minute charge can give you up to an hour of playback, which is an excellent trade-off. A 90-minute charge, meanwhile, can top them up completely. Handily, the colour of the light on the charging case indicates where it’s at with regards to charge – green means that it’s good to go, while amber denotes that the case’s battery level is below 30%.
RW verdict
With the LinkBuds Open, Sony has created loops that look innovative, last well on a short, single charge and strike a very good balance between decent sound quality and transparency. The audio features like Adaptive Volume Control and Speak-to-Chat make them a smart choice for those who want modern convenience and something that feels a bit more ‘techy’, but who don’t want to cough up the big bucks. Currently, the LinkBuds Open are on sale from Sony for £149, making them a steal compared to other high-spec wireless models from brands like Jabra and Apple.
Even so, while these buds are great to wear for everyday errands or at the gym, I wouldn’t say that they are a great choice for runners who want to move at punchier paces. For me, the single size of these earbuds – due to the ring design – is a barrier and they feel too unstable in my ears when jolting up and down on a run. To solve this, I feel that a more customisable fit is needed for any future iterations of the LinkBuds Open. Again, not all ears were created equal.
