Customer Ratings & Reviews

The Sony LinkBuds Open wireless ear buds seem to exist in a fairly small section of the market. Whereas a lot of noise reducing headphones have implemented various microphone assisted methods for allowing ambient noise to pass through. The LinkBuds Open, on the other hand, trade the noise cancellation for being ambient-noise forward. It works as expected, but the execution leaves something to be desired in certain respects. As with all earbuds that don't have form fitting tips that place the buds more deeply into the ear canal, sound quality will ultimately come down to how well they fit in your ear and how well you can place them in your ear overall. For me, these tend to miss the mark; while I'm able to get them into my ear fine, the included ear "molding" simply isn't large enough for my ears and don't allow for a snug fit which lends to a number of issues. I find that I need to routinely reposition the buds every few minutes, and by extension, any form of physical activity with these is simply out of the question for me. As mentioned previously, this poor fit has a downstream impact on audio quality of these buds, which is generally pretty good if you can get the fitment correct, but which I have persistent issues with. While most ear buds these days come with a few fitment options, that's not the case with these, so I'm stuck with a pair of subpar fitting buds. I really like the concept of these buds. They aim to solve a problem that exists in society today; people being completely removed from their surroundings at the expense of those around them and at times their own safety. My issues stem from the fact that they don't fit my ears correctly, and I feel it would've been prudent for Sony to include at least one other molding to help with this. If you have smaller ears and are looking for ear buds that don't completely remove you from your surroundings, these could be a great option.

Summary: The sound quality of these is better after updating, they stay in well and are decent quality for their price. To start: on an iPhone, the Sony app failed to find the earbuds, but it was easier to pair them from Bluetooth system settings, when I went back to the app it continued. The app wanted to update the headphones and that took a long time to complete (felt like 60+ minutes), what made that difficult was that the earbuds had to be powered on, so I had to leave them in my ears for the entire time. During the update, I streamed some music off YouTube music, and at this point the sound was disappointing—it just didn’t sound clear (like the sound quality of plug in $19.99 Sony headphones from the 90s — which were terrific at the time). It may be because the update was transferring, but the music froze at least three times briefly while listening, as well as one earbud cutting out at times. To compare, at this point in testing I would say the sound quality of these are better than Air Pods Pro 1 but nowhere near the quality of Air Pods Pro 2 (which are more expensive than these). During the update, listening to music, I desperately wanted to switch back to my Air Pods Pro 2, but I had to let the update complete to give these a fair test. One good thing I can say is these stay in the ears well, if you’re going out for a walk/run that’s a good thing. After the update was completed, the sound quality did improve. After I played with the equalizer settings in the app it got even better. However, these still don’t compare to either the Air Pods Pro 2 (in quality or feature sets) or my Bose QuietComfort earbuds but for the price these are decent quality earbuds that, again, stay in very well. I was admittedly disappointed in these, and to top it all off because they were in my ears a little over an hour or so, my ears now hurt.