Sony’s LinkBuds allow even more ambient awareness than the AirPods thanks to a ring-shaped design that doesn’t enter the ear canal.
I’m gonna say something a little controversial: I don’t really care if my headphones have noise canceling. Sure, I might appreciate the isolation on a long plane ride, but for 95% of what I use headphones for, noise canceling isn’t a priority — or it’s straight-up undesirable. Whether walking down a busy street, doing the dishes, or riding my bike through a quiet trail, I prefer music and audiobooks add to the environmental soundscape, not replace it altogether. I know I’m not unique in this either; it’s the reason some people prefer basic AirPods, which generally don’t form a tight seal, over the AirPods Pro. Sony’s new LinkBuds are made for people like me, and at $180, they’re clearly trying to capture that entry-level AirPods market too. They’re simply the best headphones I’ve tried when it comes to enabling full ambient awareness — a little ironic, coming from the company that might have the best noise-canceling tech in the business. I’ve been using the LinkBuds for a couple of weeks now, and they do a whole lot right — but there are some important caveats to keep in mind as well. The alien-looking earbuds use a ring-shaped driver in order to maintain a hole in the middle that allows sounds to reach your ear with virtually no attenuation at all; you can hear the outside world as clearly as if you weren’t wearing headphones at all. They’re also made for people who don’t like the sensation of sticking a plunger into your ear. Unlike most earbuds, the LinkBuds don’t actually enter your ear canal, instead nesting comfortably right outside them (that’s good news on the earwax front too). We’ve seen a few earbuds like this before — Samsung’s Galaxy Buds Live come to mind — but none with quite the combination of fit and ambient transparency. Most noise-canceling headphones these days also offer a “transparency” mode that uses built-in microphones to feed outside sounds back into your ears. The problem is, the transparency mode on most headphones usually isn’t very good. Don’t get me wrong; I’m grateful the feature exists on many headphones. It usually does do at least the bare minimum, allowing you to hold conversations and hear your environment. But for a lack of a better word, these transparency modes almost always sound weird — like you’re listening to the world with strange EQ settings. It’s fine for the occasional short conversation, but it’s not something I want to use for any extended period of time. More practically, ambient sound is (usually) something you have to manually activate via a button press or two; if you need to speak with someone, it’s often easier to simply remove the headphones than to switch to modes. The feature is also often ineffective under windy conditions; I’ve yet to find a single pair of headphones whose ambient sound mode actually works without being a mess of distortion when I’m riding my bike. Wearing the LinkBuds simply sounds like wearing nothing; the sound is so transparent that you could leave the earbuds in all day (if you don’t mind being that person).
