Customer Ratings & Reviews

Does not let you hear anything outside being open-eared. It does not fit in the ear very well. Very low on sound

The Sony LinkBuds Open Noise cancelling headphones are and interesting set of earbuds. Upon first glance, these earbuds certainly look different. Cool design, small and they deliver decent sound. First thing I did was charge the earbuds and then cracked open the case. After figuring out how to orientate them in my ear, I downloaded the Sony Sound Connect app. In the app, you can, and should, download the updated firmware. I also set the sound settings to my liking because the default sound is horrible. In fact, before the update the sound was pretty bad. After the firmware update, and adjusting sound settings in the app they now sound decent. The smart features work fine. Head gestures and whatnot work. Battery life seems pretty good as well. I'm not really a big fan of these smart gestures and features. I just like good sound. Comfort wise I give these a 6/10. They fit pretty well and have not fallen out of my ears like every other earbud I own. They don't irritate my ears or hit any pressure points. They do slip slightly affecting sound, though. One thing that might become an issue is the the tiny ports in the open ring getting clogged. As we all know, earwax builds up on earbuds and can flat out ruin them if you don't maintain them properly. Just something to keep in mind. I could see these needing to be cleaned more frequently than expected. Overall, the sound is pretty decent and comfort is alright. If you're in the market for earbuds you may want to look elsewhere, however. There are plenty of earbuds out there that sound better. These ones just aren't for me.

These headphones sounds nice, that is the extent that I like them for myself. I would only recommend these to people that have the ability to try them on in the store or return them shortly if there is a problem with fit. The concept is extremely cool, the ability to hear directly through the hole in the ear buds so there is no electronic translation of the noise around you, however in principle for myself and my wife we found that wearing them how it shows to meant that they were constantly falling out, the only way I could get them to stay in was to stuff the ring down my ear like a traditional ear bud, but at that point they didn’t work for the hear through method and my ear canals got soar from the ring being slightly larger than comfortable. The sound quality is nice. The control without touching them is a really cool feature, except that I had to adjust them so much that sometimes it would misinterpret what I was doing so I ended up disabling the feature as I do with all earbuds. So, I really like that bud controls can be completely disabled. Other than that, the app is awesome for the amount of control it gives you. The microphone isn’t great, from talking with my brother who has some hearing loss, the microphone wasn’t crisp on this end and rounded words and conversations much more than my other headsets. Basically he needed to be in a super quiet environment and needed to be able to focus to be able to have a conversation with me when I used these, which doesn’t work for us. The case is a nice size, and the battery life is decent. Overall, I can’t say that I would recommend them. Pros: Sound is good Case is small Cons: Poor fit for myself Microphone softened my voice too much for those hard of hearing

It's been a few months since I wrote a review on new headphones or earbuds, and even longer since I've reviewed a Sony product. I'm a big fan of the WH1000-XM series headphones, and the XM4 is still my go-to over-ear headphone. The LinkBuds Open, or as Sony engineers refer to them, the WF-L910/BZ (at least according to the label on the box) are among the recent craze of open-back earbuds that we're seing from some audio manufacturers. And what a journey it's been since I got these. First I'll say, I'm super pumped for the really creative way that manufacturers are packaging products in an ethical, but also premium, manner. I love unboxing experiences, and when everyone went super-eco-friendly I was dissatisfied (although I totally get it). Now we're seeing some "innovations" in packaging, and I'm totally here for it. Opening the box, I was greeted with an almost cartoonish, silly-looking contraption that is hard to describe. I think the thing is ugly, personally, with its two-tone matte- and shiny- case that looks more like a small, squarish moon pie than it does a piece of technology. It's all plastic, feels plasticky, not particularly heavy, and generally unbecoming. The buds are also weird, but that's to be expected from an open-back earbud, something that almost sounds too silly to exist. In place of a tip that isolates exterior noise from your drums is a small disk that sits in your ear, near the canal, and pipes music in while still allowing ambient noise through. Which is cool, you know, if you otherwise don't want to hear your music really clearly or without interruption. The fit in the ear is weird...the best way I can describe it is, it feels kind of like when you're wearing normal earbuds but they're starting to slip out, so you need to push them back into your ear canal. The LinkBuds Open feel like that, only all the time. Needless to say, not a strong start for our Sony friends. Once I committed to a nice long listening session, I started to get used to how to position them in my ears to minimize the discomfort (of them "falling out") and maximize the transmission of sound in my ears, I really started to like them. I could turn them down to hear the incessant humming of my dryer, or I could turn them way up and hear my music well... along with the still incessant dryer hum. But I get it, I guess. Kind of niche. I got used to it, and I could see these being pretty nice to have in certain situations (you know, like how it's nice to have noise canceling earbuds that have the option of letting ambient noise in). For a brief time, I actually started liking them. Then I took them out, and I noticed that the fins that hold them into place, in addition to the speaker "disk" in the lower part of my ear, were creating pressure on my ears and made a couple of specific spots in my ear pretty sore. I learned then that these are not ideal for long listening sessions. Not to mention, they're $200. For the low price of $200, you can get sore ears, music that gets covered up by your environment (with no control over it), goofy-looking buds and a goofy-looking case. Admittedly, not my cup of tea. Definitely not competitive for earbuds in general. Also... the sound was... fine. Nothing great, nothing terrible. It's the quality of sound that you get from Sony's higher-end consumer buds for sure, but not so good that the price tag and corresponding lack of features is any way justified. It uses the same app that the rest of the Sony audio products use, but that doesn't save what I think is a fundamentally flawed approach to earbuds at a price that's just crazy.

Less than impressed. Honestly I was very disappointed with these Sony linkbuds opens'. First off they are not a true open ear and kind of awkward and uncomfortable, they fit in the ear like a typical in ear headphone or ear bud. The "open" portion is just a hole through the center of the speaker area. Sound quality would be compared to a 9.99 set of gas station wired earphones. No matter the EQ setting or music type I could not get the sound quality I was expecting or hoping for. They lack in play volume as well, which also did not work for me as i where them in a noisy environment.The downloadable app was step after step of product tracking and cross application tracking, luckily you can skip through and opt out of those settings. There were a couple functions I was excited a out, until I used them. The auto pause when talking was one of them, but i felt that it would pause with louder noises that werent voices. And the length of the pause was too long in my opinion, and sometimes it would never start playing again. So that feature quickly got turned off. All in all I think Sony completely missed the mark on these. Super disappointed.