1More Piston Buds Pro

Affordable wireless earbuds with noise cancelling

1More’s Piston Buds Pro are inexpensive wireless earbuds that use Bluetooth 5.2 to connect to your iPhone, iPad or Mac. Pairing is as simple as removing them from their case, which places them into pairing mode. The battery case charges the buds when they are placed into it, and it charges over USB–C, though there’s no wireless charging. You’ll get a full case charge in two hours and a full buds charge in one hour, with playback from the buds of 7.5 hours with active noise cancelling (ANC) off and five with it on, and a total case plus buds capacity of 20 hours when using ANC, and 30 when it's off.

The earbuds are small and neat, the case lightweight but solid enough, and both come in black or white finishes. A choice of three sizes of ear tips means your fit should be snug, and the buds have capacitive controls where you can usse different numbers of taps to start and stop playback, answer calls and toggle ANC on or off. The companion app is well–featured, and enables you to customize tap behaviours to perform various functions as well as choose ANC modes. An EQ section has presets to let you tweak the buds’ sound.

Music playback is fair though a little lackluster and missing the punch and sparkle of other earbuds even in this price range. It’s OK at lower volumes but seems to lose focus at higher levels. While call quality is decent, the noise cancelling wasn't as efficient as others, letting through more sound than expected. Similarly the transparency mode came across as hiss–heavy. A low latency mode is available for gaming which did reduce lag a little, and the buds use SBC and AAC codecs for audio streaming. These are affordable buds with good battery life though perhaps better for sports use than audiophile listening, with their snug fit, solid battery and IPX5 water resistance rating.

1More Piston Buds Pro Features

USB–C charging case. Active noise cancelling (ANC), capacitive controls

1More Piston Buds Pro Price

$69.99

Affordable buds though sonically a little lacking.