Sony Linkbuds S Review - Excellent For Small Ears But Worth The Price?
Earlier this year at Sony Camera Camp, an event I attended to learn about Sony’s newest cameras, these little earbuds were in my swag bag and I figured yall might be interested in hearing about them since now you can find these for as little as $120, which is a steep discount from the original MSRP of about $200.
The 3 colors are pretty basic - black, white, or this earth blue (I also spotted a desert sand color on Best Buy), with this color being made from factory recovered plastic and reclaimed water bottles, both the case and the buds.
Let’s talk about the case first. It charges via USB-C, no wireless. It’s very small, compact, and lightweight. It’s got a nice soft touch and a magnetic closure. The earbuds themselves also magnetically attach in their charging ports and when unboxing these, you’ll get a usb 2.0 to usb c cable as well as 3 ear tips, as well as the preinstalled medium size.
I recommend taking some time to test the fit of each of these sizes to find your best one. The Sony Headphones Connect app includes a fit test which can help with this. Using the perfect size ones can help with the ANC quality. I have some memory foam ear tips that I prefer over these, but the silicone is fine.
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Speaking of fit, I was pretty interested in these because I have smaller ears, so a lot of earbuds hurt my ears due to the depth of the main units. If it’s too deep, it presses against the concha. So, finding prosumer earbuds that are small enough for petit people is kind of a pain.
So they’re pretty comfy. I’m using the medium size tips for a snug ear canal fit and I really like that they are pretty shallow in depth so they aren’t pressing very hard on the back of my outer ear. And I do find that they’re lightweight enough that they aren’t too noticeable in ear. The earbuds are IPX4 - light sweat resistance basically. I also noticed that they really stay in place even when I’m shaking around and trying very hard to make them fall out.
I was able to get 6 hrs of battery life out of just the headphones on a full charge, and another 14 hours from the case. The full charge time for the buds is 2 hours and 3 hours for the case but you can get an hour of playtime off a 5 minute charge.
So let’s chat about sound. I gotta tell y’all I just bought a pretty swanky vinyl record player and got some Daft Punk records and I’m really getting a good grasp on high quality audio, so I’m educating myself on the audiophile analysis. Unfortunately I don’t have any LDAC music to listen do locally, so we’re using AAC for this review.
I’m connected to my Samsung S23 Ultra via the supported BT 5.2, listening to music via Youtube Music aka AAC, though these also support LDAC and SBC. They get loud - like I’m not comfortable raising these over 60-70% volume because of how loud they get - I don’t wanna damage my ears.
I listen to a lot of electronic, classic rock, women’s vocals, especially jpop, along with some lofi gaming music and soundtracks and scores. It’s kinda all over the place.
There are 5mm drivers, with Sony’s Integrated V1 Processor chip to improve noise cancellation. My treble music, like songs by a group called Air, was clear and bright. So vocals sounded nice and warm, with lots of range. I was impressed by the separation of stereo audio between left and right on music like Ghostwriter by RJD2. I also listened to some 1990’s hip hop and the bass was great. It didn’t get all muddy, it was pretty clear and pronounced.
My cousins band Night Spins was great to listen to, I could clearly hear all the instruments and his voice was warm and it never felt harsh, even when he hit those stronger, higher chords. The guitar was really bright too.
There is no low latency mode but honestly when I was watching podcasts or youtube videos I noticed very very little lag between videos and the audio.
I prefer just having playback options for the tap controls, so I changed the left earbud to have playback controls instead of ANC controls. There’s no swiping on the touch sensors, just tapping and holding, but you can do some slight adjustments to what they do in the app.
The proximity sensors work great - removing either earbud will pause your music. And it starts right back up when you put it back in your ear.
I like that you can control how much ambient noise gets through when these are in ambient mode. It certainly helps with hearing audio around you and there’s very minimal white noise that I commonly find with ambient modes. The noise cancellation isn’t as good as my more expensive earbuds, but it’s really consistent and pretty good for blocking out fans, A/C noises, and dulls voices.
They also have this cool feature where the sound control will change between ambient or noise cancelling depending on your activity and location. You can allow it to optimize switching for you or you can customize it yourself. And it does work - if I get up and walk around, it does change to ambient from noise cancelling, but took a minute or two to switch back when I sat down at my desk. The equalizer customization is also nice to have, since I listen to different types of music - sometimes I want the bass to hit hard and sometimes I want my vocals to be brighter.
Multi Point connection is included but I had a lot of trouble getting mine to connect to two devices with the fully updated earbuds, so I wasn’t able to test this, even trying to register the earbuds on a second device after disabling bluetooth on the primary phone was a struggle. I also tried having one earbud in my ear with the other one in the case and the case open while holding down on the back button as I read works online but that didn’t work. If you just intend to use these with one device though, you should be good to go!
Google Assistant or your assistant of choice can be programmed to work with these. I set mine up so if I hold down on either, Google assistant will answer me.
So… would I buy these for $200? Probably not. But seeing ‘em on sale for $120… yeah, that’s a good deal. The audio sounds great. They last on a charge for a nice long time. I would just want a bit stronger ANC, wireless charging, and maybe some more touch controls, like swiping up or down to raise or lower the audio.
I think these are a solid buy, but I’d love to know if you agree. Comment below. Also any interest in me reviewing my new vinyl record player? Thanks for watching and subscribing, bye yall!
