Samsung Galaxy buds 2 pro review: Superior sound all round, but they struggle with the basics

Smartphone manufacturers are starting to build forts around their products. If you buy into Samsung or Apple or Google’s ecosystem, owning a tablet, a watch and a phone, you’ll get yourself the most seamless all-encompassing connected experience. With the introduction of the Samsung Galaxy buds 2 pro, Samsung is building up its fortress – it’s clear this is a Samsung Galaxy product and, if you’re already in the ecosystem, you’ll be better off.

Much like Apple’s AirPods and iOS devices, you’re only going to want to buy it if you’re already sitting inside Samsung’s castle. That’s because some of the best features found on the latest premium earbuds only work if you own a Samsung Galaxy device, such as 24-bit hi-fi audio, automatic switching and support for Samsung 2022 TVs. But if you are very much inside Samsung’s ‘galaxy’, these might very well blow the competition out of the water.

The Galaxy buds 2 pro aren’t the only Samsung products launching this month, with the company releasing two new folding phones – the Galaxy Z flip 4 and Galaxy Z fold 4 – as well as the new Galaxy watch 5.

The buds 2 pro arrive just as the wireless earbuds battle heats up, with Google having just launched the cheaper Pixel buds pro (£179, Amazon.co.uk) last month, and Apple rumoured to launch the AirPods pro 2 sometime this autumn. But are the Galaxy Buds 2 pro a cut above the rest? We’ve put them to the test to find out.

We’ve been testing the new Galaxy buds 2 pro with our Samsung Galaxy S22+ handset, listening to a range of different genres of music in varying environments and situations. As well as paying close attention to the sound quality, we’ve considered the design, fit, features and controls, as well as active noise cancellation and transparency modes.

To test 24-bit hi-fi audio, we’ve been listening to our favourite tunes using the Tidal music streaming service, and to test Dolby Atmos and 360 audio, we’ve been watching 6 Underground on Netflix – perhaps the world’s best film... for testing surround sound.   

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Samsung has slightly revamped the design of the Galaxy buds 2 pro, and they absolutely ooze quality. While the clamshell case is much the same as the previous model – it’s still slim and light – it now boasts a lovely matt finish. There are also super strong magnets keeping the case tightly shut. Not even a shoulder-height drop was able to crack open the case’s lid.

Once you open the little treasure chest, you’ll find a pair of dinky earbuds, which are now wholly matt, instead of mostly glossy, making them feel and look more luxe than before. They’re also much more compact, weighing 5.5g – nearly a whole gram lighter than their predecessor – and 15 per cent smaller. The buds and the charging case come in either black, white or bora purple.

When viewed face-on, the buds are completely undetectable and hardly jut out of the ear at all, with the matt finish making them easier to grip compared to the plasticky gloss exterior of the original Galaxy buds pro. It helps that they’re pretty comfortable, even with the default medium-sized eartips. Pop them in, rotate them a little – so they face upwards and sit inside the fold of your ear – and you’re good to go. Despite not having a stork or wingtips like other Galaxy buds, they still fit extremely well. There’s an ear fit test inside the Galaxy Wearable app as well, so you know whether you’ve got a good, secure seal.

While the Galaxy buds 2 pro will work with your Android or iOS device, you won’t get as rich an experience unless you pair them with a Samsung Galaxy phone or tablet. It’s still not as aggressive as Apple’s wall garden, however, considering you lose most functionality when using a pair of AirPods on an Android phone, but you won’t be able to use the buds’ best features unless you’re using them with your Galaxy device, such as 24-bit audio.

Setting up the buds 2 pro with a Samsung device is a doddle. When you open up the buds 2 pro case next to your Galaxy device, you’ll get a pop-up asking you to pair them together. You’ll then be taken to the Galaxy Wearable app to check for updates. When that’s all done, you can perform an ear-fit test, customise the touch controls and select your equaliser preferences. It’s all pretty seamless.

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These are much more feature-rich than the Pixel buds pro, which felt like a slightly half-baked product compared to the Galaxy buds 2 pro. You get things such as 360-degree head tracking, voice detect and, yes, neck stretch reminders, which has to be one of our favourite features of any wireless earbuds. Gimmicky, perhaps, but weirdly satisfying to have, especially if you’re prone to slouching at your desk. If the buds detect you’ve been hunched over for more than 10 minutes, you’ll hear the voice of ‘God’, or rather Samsung, telling you to tip your head back and stretch your neck. You can choose whether to turn on this function or leave it off.

Voice detect has obviously been plucked straight out of Sony’s playbook, a feature that turns on ambient mode and lowers the volume whenever the buds detect you’re talking. It works well, and it’s not on by default either, so take solace in the fact that you won’t accidentally turn on ambient mode whenever you start singing. Plus, it’s customisable, so you can choose how long it remains in ambient mode after detecting speech.

The touch controls are a little hit and miss. They’re potentially a little too sensitive for their own good, but that’s something we’ve found with most touch-control buds. Sometimes taps or hard presses didn’t register. Other times, when we were re-adjusting the earbud in our ear, our music paused or skipped to the next track. We also had a few issues with the left bud not recognising when it was inside our ear, so, while we could hear music from the earbud, we couldn’t actually use it to control our music until we placed it back into the case and took it out again.

There isn’t a setting for increasing and decreasing the volume in the control settings, but there are in the experimental lab settings. If you turn this on, you’ll use the corner of each bud to lower and increase the volume. There’s also a gaming mode in the lab area.

Weirdly, the buds 2 pro don’t have auto-pausing and auto-playing tech either, so when we took one bud out of our ear, our music just kept playing, rather than stopping and playing once we put it back in. It’s a feature that nearly all premium buds have nowadays, including the Pixel buds pro and the much older AirPods pro, so we found it odd that Samsung decided to leave out this feature. Your music does pause when both buds are taken out of your ears, however, so the capability is there.

Another strange omission is the lack of multipoint connectivity on these buds. While the buds 2 pro can automatically switch between Galaxy devices when it detects one is playing audio – something we weren’t able to test because we only own one Galaxy smartphone – you can’t connect the buds to two devices at once. It’s, again, a feature that pretty much all modern buds contain. Yes, Samsung does include some neat features, but it somehow misses out on the more basic stuff.

Sadly, the battery life hasn’t been improved at all on these buds when compared with the original Galaxy buds pro. You still get five hours of playback with active noise cancellation turned on, but this increases to eight hours with ANC turned off. You can get an extra 13 hours with a few visits to the charging case. It’s average, and doesn’t better the Pixel bud pro’s industry-leading 11-hour battery life.

This is where the Galaxy buds 2 pro really shine. The buds 2 pro boast a dual-driver system, featuring a tweeter for the treble and a woofer for the bass. With tuning from AKG, it’s no wonder the buds frankly blow the AirPods pro and the Pixel buds pro (which had terrible tuning) out of the water. These buds sound fantastic, and they sound as hi-fi as Samsung claims.

Listening to music on Tidal’s master quality setting (24-bit), which essentially reflects the original source, is astonishing. Tracks have depth, and it envelops you, even without the 360 audio setting turned on. The soundstage is wide, we can hear every instrument and synth on Perfume Genius’ On The Floor within the mix, and the vocals are crisp and clear.

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The buds 2 pro didn’t struggle with complex, bombastic instrumental tracks such as Anna Meredith’s Nautilus either. It sounded simply extravagant and musical. It’s a track less-capable earbuds have had trouble with in the past, muddling up all the synths and rumbling horns, but there was still a good sense of separation and a hefty amount of bass to boot. There was almost no distortion, and the buds simply powered through everything we threw at them.

The 360 audio feature is also excellent, easily rotating the sound around us as we turned our head. It’s still a little gimmicky when it comes to music, but when watching 6 Underground on Netflix, things felt and sounded explosive, as helicopters zipped around us and we turned to look over our shoulder.   

That said, there’s actually no way of knowing whether you’re getting 24-bit audio. If you’re using a Samsung Galaxy device with Android 8.0 or higher and One UI 4.0 or higher, you should be getting hi-resolution audio, but really, there’s no way of telling.

Active noise cancellation is fine. We found it dampened external sound, rather than blocking it out completely. It still worked well enough, but we’ve used earbuds with better active noise cancellation before, which do a better job at silencing low-frequency sounds. We also weren’t big fans of how ANC is utilised. You can’t customise the level of active noise cancellation on the buds 2 pro, they adjust based on the level of sound outdoors, and that can get annoying. A lawn mower was constantly motoring by our window at work, and ANC kept blocking our ears as if we were on an aeroplane, and then unblocking it a couple of seconds later. The constant block and unblock didn’t feel as elegant as we’d like.

We’ve still yet to find a pair of earbuds that do as well as the AirPods pro when it comes to transparency/ambient mode. Again, the Galaxy buds 2 pro do a decent job, but there is a constant humming in the background. It does let in a good amount of background noise, however. For some reason, transparency mode couldn’t be turned on with just one bud in our ear – we had to have both buds in if we wanted to turn on ambient mode. That’s important because it’s something that’s particularly useful when walking down the street and you need to be half-aware of your surroundings.

The microphone quality is also just fine. While we can be heard clearly, it sounded a bit like we were stuck inside a cave on the other line. Our voice echoed a little bit, and it was overly boomy. These are all things easy to overlook, simply because of how good the buds are in terms of sound quality.

Samsung has made some of the best-sounding, best-looking, best-feeling buds ever. These Galaxy buds 2 pro sound incredible with supposed support for 24-bit audio and 360-degree sound, they’re light in the ear and so small no one will notice you wearing them, and they are really comfortable. They’re pricey, costing more than the Pixel buds pro, but they’re cheaper than the AirPods pro, and better than both.

They just struggle when it comes to a few of the finer details. There’s no multipoint technology, a prerequisite for earbuds in this day and age, the ANC is good enough, but not amazing, and there are some weird quirks when it comes to in-ear detection. We did love the more experimental features, such as neck-stretch reminders and the ability to increase and decrease the volume. And while 24-bit audio is reserved for Samsung Galaxy devices, it’s not something we can really blame the company for. Like all of its competitors, Samsung is building up its wall garden, and if you get a better experience with Samsung buds when using a Samsung device, then so be it. Wall us in.

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