Soundcore’s excellent Liberty 3 Pro headphones are flawed, sure, but they’re among the best wireless earbuds I’ve used in the past few years.
The world of wireless earbuds fall into two main camps these days: those that put sound quality first, and those that prioritize other features, like comfort, call quality, battery life, and other specs. The Liberty 3 Pro fall firmly into the former category; they are oddly shaped, with pre-installed wing tips that prove necessary to keep the protruding body from moving around during activity.
They’re also very good, and at $170 are one of the best-sounding true wireless earbuds under $200.
Anker’s new Soundcore Liberty 3 Pro offer some of the best sound quality from a pair of wireless earbuds along with plenty of tip and wing options for even the most stubborn ear canals. With excellent ANC and decent call quality, better-than-average battery, and an app you’ll actually want to use, the Liberty 3 Pros are among the best wireless earbuds you can buy today.
- Brand: Soundcore
- Battery Life: 7 hours (ANC off), 6 hours (ANC on), 5 hours (LDAC enabled)
- Bluetooth: 5.2
- Additional Tips: Yes, 4 pairs (S, M, L, XL)
- Noise Cancellation: Yes
- Mono Listening: Yes, independent listening (ANC/transparency, too)
- IP rating: IPX4
- Codec support: SBC, AAC, LDAC
- Wireless charging: Yes
- Microphones: 6 microphones
- Multipoint support: Yes (2 devices)
- Great sound quality
- Decent battery life
- App is actually useful
- Multipoint support
- Touch controls are finnicky
- Only IPX4 rated
Soundcore Liberty 3 Pro: Design & what’s in the box
As with all Soundcore earbuds, these come equipped with enough silicone ear and wingtips to satisfy even the pickiest of ear canals. This makes the unboxing experience all the better, since Anker ensures you feel good about your purchase.
The Liberty 3 Pro’s case is pill-shaped with a top that slides open to reveal an awkward placement — you’re forced to turn the earbuds around before inserting them, and they lay flat enough that you unless you have small fingers you need to grab the rubber wing tip to extract them. It’s not my favorite case, especially because it’s larger than I’d like. Anker improved almost every aspect of the design from the previous generation, which was even bigger and more awkward, so that’s something at least.
The case tops up via USB-C or Qi wireless charging, and thankfully the port isn’t covered by a rubber gasket (that I promptly broke off and removed from the previous model) this time. I’ve been carrying the case in my right pants pocket for a month or so now, and while I’d prefer it a bit smaller, it’s not distracting.
Soundcore Liberty 3 Pro: Sound quality
The Liberty 3 Pro’s claim to fame is its dual-driver composition, one dedicated to bass and mids and the other, a smaller dynamic driver, that focuses on smoothing out the highs. It’s a potent combination that I fell in love with on the Liberty 2 Pro and it’s just as effective here.
In short, these are among the best-sounding TWEs I’ve tested, generating a generous amount of sub-bass that ensures even the most dynamic songs are reproduced as closely as possible to a set of closed over-ear headphones. The bass isn’t overwhelming, but the larger coaxial drivers produce accurate and rich low-end that most earbuds can’t come close to recreating. There’s a suitably wide soundstage for a pair of wireless earbuds, too, owing to the larger drivers, and I appreciated the additional separation between instruments when listening to tracks like Marvin Gaye’s I Heard It Through The Grapevine.
The 3 Pro boast LDAC support, which was missing in its predecessor. I’m typically not a huge fan of LDAC as its increased bandwidth usage often leads to cut-outs and other inconsistent behavior — Bluetooth gonna Bluetooth — but I experienced no such issues with these ‘buds. With Spotify imminently adding its own hi-fi tier to better compete with Apple Music, Tidal, Amazon Music HD, and others, true wireless earbuds that support higher-quality codecs will benefit most. That said, the lack of support for any of Qualcomm’s codecs — no aptX or aptX Dynamic here — is a bit disappointing, since AAC is the only other option.
The Liberty 3 Pro also introduce active noise canceling to the Soundcore repertoire, and it’s pretty darn good, especially once you tweak it to your liking. Anker designed the ANC to be adaptive to the environment, using its external microphones to gauge ambient noise and set the severity accordingly. In general it works pretty well, but even with significant background noise the ANC algorithms aren’t good enough to compete with the likes of Sony’s WF-1000XM4s and Bose QuietComfort Earbuds.
Soundcore Liberty 3 Pro: Features
One of the Liberty 3 Pro’s best features is shared with many of Anker’s higher-end Soundcore headphones and earbuds: a superlative app experience that makes tweaking the listening experience not only joyful but fruitful. Should the ANC’s dynamism be insufficient, you can manually adjust its strength.
Want to change the equalization settings? A surfeit of presets are available, from “Signature” to “Podcast” to “Hip-Hop” to a custom, evaluation-based equalization called HearID that performs a bunch of (agonizing for this mid-30s-years-of-concert-damage) tests to determine what frequencies to adjust to accommodate for, um, hearing deficiencies.
You can adjust the controls, too, which is helpful because there are a lot of options and plenty of variety in accessing them: single, double, or triple taps, as well as touch-and-hold, can be independently configured for both ears, making it easy to pause tracks, increase volume, activate transparency, or engage Google Assistant, with a series of gestures.
Unfortunately, best-laid plans are just that, as the capacitive area on each earbud isn’t sensitive enough to accurately turn this complex dance into action. Too many times a single press would be missed, or a double-pressed processed as a single press. I felt it strange that the single-tap action was disabled out of the box, but it’s clear that after trying to live with it for a few weeks, Anker knew as well as I do now the input method was fundamentally flawed.
Thankfully, the Liberty 3 Pro’s unfortunate gestures are the only major flaw; after reviewing the disappointing Jabra Elite 7 Pro, I was happy to see multipoint support here, and the earbuds connect quickly and reliably to two devices. The earbuds also have a pretty-good-but-not-great transparency mode that uses the external microphones to pump in sound from the outside. I’d recommend avoiding this feature altogether during conversations, though, because unlike a pair of smaller earbuds, you’re not going to trick anyone into thinking your ears are unencumbered. These are pretty honking specimens, despite coming in 20% or so smaller than their predecessors.
Soundcore Liberty 3 Pro vs. Liberty 2 Pro
From a call quality and microphone perspective, the Liberty 3 Pro are middle-of-the-road: good, but not great. I made a dozen or more calls in my time with the ‘buds and no one complained about the clarity of my voice or the suppression (or lack thereof) of background noise. In direct testing, recording snippets of my voice in a quiet room while the earbuds were connected to my MacBook Pro, the Liberty 3 Pros were considerably less clear than the AirPods Pro and Jabra Elite 7 Pro, but better than the Liberty Air 2 Pro. Similarly, the earbuds performed worse than the Apple and Jabra earbuds while recording next to a running fan, which really tests the background noise suppression algorithm’s mettle.
While writing this review, the earbuds received two updates. The first claimed to improve transparency and call quality in high-noise environments; the second improved touch controls and the ability to use ANC and transparency with only a single earbud. I noticed minor improvements from the former and none from the latter, but it’s still early days and I’ll update the review should that opinion change.
Finally, on the subject of battery life, the earbuds get around seven hours per charge with ANC off, which isn’t especially notable, but since I prefer to leave it on, I’m pleased that the drop — to six hours per earbud — is more than acceptable. Given the case’s additional 18 to 24 hours of uptime depending on usage, I rarely wanted for battery life during my testing, especially since the case supports wireless charging, making it easy to place on a nearby pad on my office desk when not in use.
Soundcore Liberty 3 Pro: Should you buy them?
Yes. The Soundcore Liberty 3 Pros are my favorite wireless earbuds right now, and that’s no small feat. They sound great out of the box, but through easy tools built into an excellent app can be tweaked to sound superb. They fit nicely, and the plenitude of ear tip and wing sizes almost assures a comfortable fit in even the most hostile of ear canal shapes. The ANC is effective, as is the transparency mode — though neither are industry-leading — and Anker has a consistent track record of updating its earbuds with new features and bug fixes.
At $170 — and often less with frequent sales Anker is sure to heavily advertise — the Soundcore Liberty 3 Pro manage to compete assiduously with earbuds a hundred dollars more. Specifically, I think these should force people — you, me, anyone — to reevaluate Sony’s $280 asking price for the WF-1000XM4s, admittedly superior earbuds in a couple ways, but not 60% pricier ways.
Buy them if…
- Your priority is sound quality
- You like to tweak your experience
- You have hard-to-please ear canals
Don’t buy them if…
- You want your earbuds to disappear
- You want to work out with your ‘buds
- You hate touch controls
We hope you like the items we recommend and discuss! AndroidPolice has affiliate
and sponsored partnerships, so we receive a share of the revenue from some of your purchases. This
won’t affect the price you pay and helps us offer the best product recommendations.
About The Author
