Mini review - Yurbuds Liberty wireless earphones

[Peter_B]

Hi, having been getting annoyed with the wires on my existing Sony earphones I decided to try out some wireless ones.

To be honest, I struggled to find some that I thought would do the job. I've never gotten on very well with the standard sort of in-ear earphones. My current Sony ones are over/behind the ear ones, which I have found comfortable and secure, especially when running.

I couldn't find many wireless sets that were the behind the ear variety, just a few random, never heard of, makes on Amazon and some really pricey ones.

Then I came across the Yurbuds wireless range, one of which is the Liberty model. Having read good things about Yurbuds on here I thought they might be worth a try. They weren't the cheapest, the RRP is £79.99 and I got them for about £65 from Amazon.

They arrived yesterday, initial impressions were good. They were nicely packaged. You get the earphones, a carry pouch containing the charging cable and an alternative set of "enhancers" (as Yurbud call them - basically the rubbery bits that go in your ears) and some paperwork (most of which wasn't relevant. There's a quick start guide, which isn't the easiest to read. The text is very small and the few lines of English are interspersed with various other languages. Fortunately the pictures that accompany the text make things easier.

The earphones themselves seem very nicely made. They are connected by a fairly short length of fabric covered cable. A couple of inches along the cable from the right hand earphone is the small 3 button control unit. The central button controls power on/off, pairing and play/pause whilst the top and bottom buttons are for volume control and next/previous track.

After a couple of minutes I'd gotten them paired with my phone (a Nexus 5 Android handset), and put them on to see how they felt. Not too bad was the answer, although not fantastic. I decided to try the alternative enhancers which were a bit bigger. That felt better. The earphones were nice and secure thanks to the behind the ear design and the Yurbud Twist-Lock feature. A good bit of head shaking didn't seem to loosen them or anything.

After a quick play to make sure they worked it was a case of putting them on to charge in preparation for trying them on a run this morning.

On the run they felt pretty good, no movement or anything, they stayed nice and secure. I'm not an audiophile but to me the sound was perfectly fine while listening to Zombies Run and a shuffled playlist of 101 Running Songs!

There was the odd stutter/cut out, not enough to be a problem though. As I think about it now, the cut outs were at times when I was passing by one of those electricity substation things, so perhaps that caused a bit of interference with the bluetooth signal.

The other downside I found was with the fabric cable connecting the 2 earphones. At times it seemed to catch on my shirt collar resulting in a scratching/bumping noise being heard in the ears. If music was playing it wasn't a problem but if things were quite quiet then it was tad annoying. Possibly it's something that could be solved by trying to route the cable differently, although because it's quite short there isn't much scope for that. I'll investigate next time I use them.

On the whole I'm fairly pleased with them. They seem to do a good job and were comfortable to wear. I'm looking forward to trying them out some more and see how they are as I get more used to them.

Sorry, this was meant to be a mini review and got a bit long!

[Peter_B Graduate]

Apologies if the picture is a bit messed up for anyone - it looked fine when I added it to the post, but after posting it seems to have gone a bit yampy.

Here's the link to the earphones on the Yurbuds website yurbuds.com/uk/wireless/151...

[old_git Graduate]

Thanks Peter, Interesting and useful review.

What with you and Jase, my Christmas wish list is going to be very expensive!

[useitorloseit Graduate]

They sound complicated. I've never understood what Bluetooth is. I am a luddite! I've only just got to grips with my ipod nano after 10 years!!!

They look comfy though!

Glad you're back out again. How are the boys? I used occasionally to resort to Phenergan elixir (shhh don't tell the authorities ...!) for a decent night. You can get it otc now, instead of having to beg the doctor for it!

[Peter_B Graduate in reply to useitorloseit]

It was good to get out this morning (although it wasn't the best of runs) after missing the other day. Looking forward to parkrun on Saturday.

The boys are good thanks. It's been a rough few weeks for them, with colds, sickness bugs, poorly poos and rashes. They seem to be getting past it now though.

Interesting you mention Phenergans. With one of the boys rashes we initially thought it might be chickenpox, so I spoke to the pharmacist and stocked up on stuff in preparation. One of the things he recommended was an antihistamine syrup (not Phenergans), which he said might make them drowsy.

It didn't. lol

Note - we didn't just give them random medicine. The Dr diagnosed one of the rashes as hives and told us to give it to them.

[useitorloseit Graduate in reply to Peter_B]

I can't remember why we initially had it for Peter (he did have terrible itchy eczema - it could have been that), but it bought us a few hours sleep every now and then. I tried only to give it in dire emergencies, but when you haven't slept at all it's very tempting ... I'm a terrible sleeper now, thanks to all those years without proper sleep, and I admit to popping the odd antihistamine every now and then just to get some sleep!

[Bazza1234 Graduate in reply to useitorloseit]

Bluetooth is just a means of wireless communication between two devices - without using an interconnecting wire Pretty simple - you turn Bluetooth on in your phone, it tells you what other Bluetooth enabled devices there are within range and you select which one you want to connect to eg earbuds. Then the music goes from the phone to the earbuds without a wire!!

[Wristy Graduate]

I've not run with music simply because I can't really get on with all the wires dangling around everywhere. Bluetooth is the way forward on that but I'm not a fan of ear "buds" - I always prefer the normal ipod style ones. Might have to keep looking!

[Peter_B Graduate]

As an update to my (not-so) mini review...I'm thinking about returning the earphones to Amazon.

There are a couple of reasons why;

Firstly, I went off to parkrun on Saturday, equipped with the new earphones, safe in the knowledge that I'd charged them when I got them and only used them for one run so there should be plenty of charge left.

Of course there wasn't. For some reason they were as flat as a pancake. I'm almost (95%) certain that I turned them off after that first run, before putting them back in their carry case. Either I didn't, or they accidentally got turned on whilst I was packing them away and I didn't notice, or there is a fault with them.

To be fair I charged them Sunday night and they were fine for my run this morning, but I didn't attempt to put them in the case after charging.

The second reason is that during my run this morning I suffered a lot of connection drop outs. In my original review I thought it might be interference due to passing an electricity substation. But this morning it was happening all of the time and did get rather annoying.

I've ordered a set of Plantronics Backbeat FIT earphones to give a try to and compare against the Yurbuds. They'll hopefully arrive tomorrow so I can try them on my Thursday run and decide which (if any) I'm going to keep. Reviews of the Plantronics are pretty positive though where as reviews of the Yurbuds are pretty sparse, I took a punt on the brand really.

More than likely I'll post a review of the Plantronics when I've tried them.

[Wristy Graduate in reply to Peter_B]

funny you should say this because the yurbuds inspire I bought kept falling out on my first run - keep us updated how you get on!