Review: Syllable earbuds


For the last several days, I have been trying out a set of ear bud headphones from Syllable. They claim to have dynamic sounds that balances the high, mid, and low ends of audio, predicated on each bud apparently having two speakers within. Let’s see how things panned out in actual use.

The earbuds I were sent were brown colored in wire, with a gray, brushed “metal” appearance to the portions that were hard, such as the button/microphone housing on the right channel, or at the either end of the headhphones. While not a color scheme I would’ve chosen, it’s not a bad look. There are small black tabs that stick out, and are located near the buds proper; these fit into the external ear to help keep the buds in place. As far as I can tell, they’re not removable. There are also a few different sized buds that are included with the earphones, and I noticed an appreciable difference in the quality of sound when I changed from the near-middle sized ones that came on the device, to larger ones that fit in more snugly. About halfway up above the split, on the right hand side, rests the controls and the microphone. It has three buttons: a multipurpose toggle, and two volume buttons. These felt fairly flush against the housing, and thus I had trouble finding the play/pause toggle at times, without looking to find it. Lastly, this housing also is where the microphone is located.

As for performance, this set of ear buds isn’t bad. I’m not sure where the dual speakers and dynamic sound are supposed to fit into the equation though, as the musical range only goes down to 20hz, so it struck me as a sort of floor being there, for how strong the bass was going to be. Don’t get me wrong, once I got a larger set of buds on there to keep the sound from “leaking”, it improved over what I was first hearing, it’s just that I’m not seeing an appreciable difference over the cheaper pair of run-of-the-mill Sony buds I bought at Best Buy. In fact, it has better base than these do. As for call quality, the ear buds did just fine. While there is a small drop off in sound quality on my end when using them instead of my phone’s ear piece, the quality between my phone’s mic and the earbuds was indistinguishable to the caller at the other end, so kudos to Syllable on that. Using the buttons on the ear buds was a touch tricky. Volume was straight foward, with up and down being dedicated buttons. All the other functions that one might want are crammed into a smaller, third button. Tapping once will peform the aforementioned play/pause functionality, while pressing it twice will skip forward to the next track, and pressing it three times will skip it back a track. Given that I had trouble feeling for the button, this doesn’t strike me as ideal. Instead of using flat buttons that are only slightly raised up, having little dimples protrude might be better, as they would be easier to find in a tacticle way, without stopping and looking for it.

On the whole, I’m unsure what to make of these, at least in the sense of the value propostion. They’re regularly listed at nearly forty dollars on Amazon, yet I can spend less than half to get better sounding music from a local store. But they aren’t bad, in a vacuum. The call quality is adequate for hearing, and great for being heard, and they felt secure in my ears with the proper sized bud in place. Thus, I’m going to give it a 7. If the musical range was greater, I’d score it at a 9 or better, as then things would make more sense.




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