Today I want to take a look at the wireless Luxe Earbuds from live. love. music. (gotta love that lack of capitalization and use of extraneous punctuation). These earbuds just hit the shelves at my local Five Below, and they’ve left an impression on me to say the least.
First, let’s start with the positives. The earbuds themselves have a nice velvety texture, though sadly the manufacturer did not use the same coating on the control unit. As for the audio quality, these actually sound really nice. The bass isn’t muddy, and the treble does a great job avoiding coming across as tinny (unlike other headphones in the same price range). Something tells me the fact that these headphones mimic the design of Apple EarPods/AirPods has something to do with the audio quality.
Now on to the negatives. You know that great audio quality I mentioned in the previous paragraph? Well, it turns out that the earbuds are actually mono instead of stereo, despite the packaging lauding their “dynamic stereo sound”. Sure, mono earbuds can be of use to people with hearing damage, but there are far better ways to achieve the same effect without using poorly manufactured electronics. Most phones and computers allow you to adjust the balance of your audio to a single ear, and there are even accessibility modes that allow you to output mono over stereo. Of course, if you have your heart set on a hardware solution, there’s always a stereo to mono adapter.
Another issue I have with these earbuds is the overall build quality. Yes, the texture on the buds proper feels nice, but the metallic bits look really cheap. Not only is the “gold” vacuum plated plastic more akin to tarnished brass on the black earbuds, but the rose gold (or copper?) highlights on some of the white models looks more like its neon pink. Also, the vacuum plating on all of the different models will definitely chip off in the long term.
Finally, the design of the control unit is terrible. While the manufacturer was considerate and added a dust cover to the USB port (something that was missing from some $5 Bluetooth headphones), that feature is rendered pointless with how the buttons were designed. The buttons are just cut portions of the control unit’s body, and that leaves three nice open cavities for every type of contaminant imaginable to reach the main circuit board of these headphones. If you wear these bad boys outside they’ll get gunked up and possibly even fried relatively quickly. In the wrong environment these headphones might not even survive to the end of their 2.5 hour battery life.
All in all, I’d say save your $5 for something else. There have been far better Bluetooth headphones available at Five Below before, and there are sure to be better headphones on offer in the future. In fact, if you’re lucky you may still be able to find a few leftovers from their last batch of Bluetooth headphones. The LED cable earbuds were actually pretty nice.
