Clear phone call , comfy, worth $10 but a little mid-bass heavy for music, "meh" noise canceling.
First off, I'm in the Vine program so I got these at no cost. I only order & review products I would actually be willing to keep & use. Executive summary: The Raddi USB-C earbuds offer good value, comfortable & secure fit, clear sound on phone calls, good music reproduction for the cost with one issue that might or might not bother you. The earbuds are pretty typical as far as cord length, and style with the tube dropping straight down. They were comfortable with fairly soft pads (extras of different sizes included) and stayed in my ears during the highly scientific "shaking my head around" test. Right & Left are not marked but they clearly fit well only one way, with mic on right as is conventional. On a phone call they sounded good to the other person, not quite as good as the built-in mic right next to my mouth but still good. Noise canceling did not seem to be great, I used a pink noise generator to simulate wind and it was clearly audible on the other end. To be fair I have yet to meet an earpiece or earbud with actually good noise canceling on a phone call that doesn't distort the voice noticeably. Hang-up function and others on the inline cord button worked as described. They block outside noise pretty well, typical for decent fitting earbuds. For music I compared these to my reference Klipsch Image 5 earbuds. These cost well over $100 so it might seem unfair, but these buds say "high fidelity lossless" so tough cookies. Obviously though there has to be a sliding scale of cost vs quality. The Raddis had good separation, midrange/vocals and treble was handled well on Tuck & Patti's "Tears of Joy" without getting tinny or hot. They had good dynamic range on Beethoven's 7th Vivace movement (Norrington) which was handled without distortion during loud passages or losing the soft parts. Good reproduction of soft noises with Wynton Marsalis' "Hot House Flowers" but there is one thing to be aware of. Bass frequencies are boosted around 140Hz which happens a lot with smaller and less expensive buds, headphones, and speakers. This is usually to compensate for a lack of true low bass in the subwoofer zone, say 80hz and below. This was very noticeable on XTC's "Mayor of Simpleton". The thing is, these buds actually reproduced the truly low notes (kick drum etc) pretty well so really could have done without the boost. I verified this frequency range with some more pink noise testing. Will this matter to you? Depends on your hearing, what music you are listening to, whether you are in a noisy environment or commuting where you might want that boost (like on a plane with those darn jet engines) or you just really like some extra bass. So for me who was willing to spend like $125 on earbuds, these would not be my go-to music earbuds but good on a phone if you don't need a lot of noise canceling. 4 stars because I think they are worth $10 but not 5 because of the bass boost and the mediocre noise canceling. Read more
