For as long as I’ve been buying audio gear, Edifier has been one of my go-to brands for reliable, high-quality speakers—but somehow, I’d never owned a pair of their headphones. When their newest flagship earbuds, the NeoBuds Planar, came up for review, I had to give them a try.
While Edifier has built its reputation on top-tier mid-range products, the company occasionally steps into the premium market, and when it does, it tends to deliver. The NeoBuds Planar are no exception; they produce what is, hands down, the most detailed and distortion-free audio I’ve come across in a Bluetooth earbud. However, they also come with an eye-watering $299 price tag, average battery life, and disappointing microphone quality.
NeoBuds Planar are tiny, technological powerhouses. Edifier is banking on its miniaturized magnetic planar drivers to differentiate the NeoBuds from the more traditional dynamic drivers found in the likes of Beats and Sennheisers. Planar magnetic drivers are uncommon and usually reserved for high-end, audiophile-oriented, over-ear headphones.
Unlike traditional dynamic drivers, which use a moving coil and cone to push air, planar magnetic drivers create sound by vibrating an ultra-thin flat diaphragm. In the case of the NeoBuds Planar, that diaphragm is just two microns thick. The low mass of the diaphragm is more responsive to changes in vibration, and its flat surface evenly distributes sound with greater consistency. The result is audio with sharper detail and lower distortion.
“NeoBuds Planar are tiny, technological powerhouses.”
But the design isn’t without drawbacks. The Achilles heel of planar drivers has always been air movement: an ultra-thin membrane simply cannot force the same amount of air into your skull as the thumping cone of a dynamic driver. That’s a real problem if you like bass—lower frequencies require more wind to produce. By miniaturizing the planar drivers, Edifier has accentuated the benefits of the technology but, through careful tuning, avoided amplifying its greatest weakness.
The bass response is much better than I expected, excellent even, and not just for planar drivers. However, expecting these 12mm planar drivers to reach the same level of bass-heavy decadence as a pair of Beats is unreasonable. At most, the low frequencies can be increased from accurate to rich, but never to the point where they overwhelm the brightness and presence of a track.
But, for those seeking just a bit more bass, you’re not entirely out of luck. The bass performance can be pushed; the difference will be small, but it’s there. The first step is using the EQ mixer in the Edifier Connex app. The mixer features four programmable frequency bands, each with a slider to add or subtract 3 dB. Adding 3 dB to the 100 Hz slider and widening the bandpass filter with the Q factor dial did make a slight difference but at the cost of the dynamic range.
The other option is to stick with the Dynamic EQ setting and ensure the earbuds have a better seal. If I had to describe the caliber of my earholes to strangers, which apparently, I do, I’d say they’re on the small side of normal. Don’t laugh. Usually, I opt for a set of medium-sized ear tips, but to optimize the sound performance, I vacuum-sealed my ears by attaching the included set of XL ear tips. This change made a much more noticeable difference than the EQ adjustments.
Overall, the sound reproduction quality is precisely what you’d expect from a premium pair of earbuds, but with the added advantage of having an unconventional level of definition. My stars aligned for this review, and I was able to use the NeoBuds Planar to listen to Ghost’s newest album, Skeletá, for the first time. The Dynamic EQ setting never faltered, broadcasting every note from the soprano choir sections and airy synths to the menacing basslines without a hint of unintended distortion.
I continued on, playing albums I’ve listened to literally hundreds of times over. My beloved Unleash The Archers and Deftones took on a presence closer to a live show than I thought possible from MP3 tracks running off an old hard drive. The experience melted the heart of this aging metalhead.
“The NeoBuds Planar also features a wide range of touch and context controls that make using them on the go a breeze.”
On the software side, the NeoBuds Planar run on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Sound technology and support LHDC 5.0, LDAC, and AAC codecs for versatile, high-definition playback that decodes audio with up to 96 kHz/24-bit sampling. The buds are also Google Fast Pair ready for quick connections on Android devices running Marshmallow or newer, and include multipoint connection that can smoothly transition between two paired devices.
Edifier has also included Qualcomm’s third-generation adaptive noise-canceling technology, which, in my testing, did a phenomenal job of eliminating steady-state noise, such as the rumble of my HVAC system and the humming of PC fans, while reducing the sound of background chatter in a cafe by about half. However, even with the dedicated wind reduction setting turned on, the active noise cancellation struggled to mask the sound of medium-strength wind gusts during a walk at the beach.
That hike along the rocky shores of the Great Lakes was the perfect place to test the ergonomics of the NeoBuds Planar, and the results genuinely surprised me. They aren’t the lightest earbuds money can buy, and the stems and rear body are boxy and bulky, yet they sit nicely in the ear. It’s not an easy walk; there are lots of wet fallen trees to hop over and a few bluffs to climb, but the buds rarely needed reseating, and the IP55-rated dust and water resistance was more than enough to keep them safe from the wind, spindrift, and rain.
The NeoBuds Planar also features a wide range of touch and context controls that make using them on the go a breeze. Each bud comes with tap and squeeze controls to adjust volume, playback, noise cancellation, and mode switching. If you’re unhappy with the default layout, the controls can be remapped in Edifier Connex. Additionally, each bud has smart wear detection that automatically pauses playback when a bud is removed and resumes when worn.
As impressed as I was with the ergonomics, quality and performance of the NeoBuds Planar, they aren’t without a few shortcomings.
Battery life was ok, but not what you’d expect from a flagship set of earbuds. With active noise cancellation off, I got about seven hours of playback on a full charge, and with it on, about four and a half hours, roughly in line with Edifier’s claims of 7.5 hours and 5 hours, respectively. There’s an extra 22.5 hours of power stored in the charging pod, which certainly classifies as all-day power, but the bulky design of the case and short run time of each charge feels decidedly mid-range.
Battery life lags well behind that of similarly priced earbuds like the Xiaomi Buds 5 Pro and is slightly behind the Beats Fit Pro, which are priced $100 less than the NeoBuds Planar.
The other unimpressive feature is the microphones. Each bud is equipped with three microphones, which work with voice enhancement features and noise reduction to produce a shockingly garbled signal. The audio quality of my recordings was about what I’d expect from a budget Bluetooth headset.
At $299, the NeoBuds Planar are competing with some seriously compelling alternatives. To stand out, Edifier has invested all its effort into raw sound quality, hoping that the promise of planar magnetic drivers and the hyper-detailed audio they produce will capture the attention of audiophiles. To that end, they’ve hit it out of the park, but the limited battery life and disappointing microphone quality make the NeoBuds Planar less appealing as an everyday headset.
- 【Revolutionary Planar Magnetic Drivers】Experience studio-quality sound with 12mm planar magnetic drivers, featuring a 2μm ultra-thin diaphragm for zero harmonic distortion and lifelike audio detail.
- 【2nd Gen EqualMass Wiring】Patented technology ensures uniform diaphragm motion across all frequencies, delivering balanced sound with unmatched clarity.
