The
Anker Soundcore Space A40 earbuds came out August 22, 2022 for $99.99
or if you prefer, over $100 once you factored in tax. That's nearly 3
years ago as of this review, and the average price of these earbuds now
is around $25-40 depending on where you shop with the cheapest sources
being third-party, secondhand retailers on AliExpress and eBay. I
grabbed aset of these earbuds for less than $20 on Temu as part of a
promo where they advertised it as $120 earbuds for 93% off, and I was in
the market for some good earbuds with high battery life and multiple
connection support, so I bit.
These are great earbuds! They
do everything I could want, minus a few minor nitpicks. I'd say they're
the best $20 earbuds I ever tried. If you're in the market for
something kind of like Raycons but way less brand tax, you could
consider these, but as always, there are some caveats.
The cons...
Con #1: Bad Interface
The
touch interface is hard to get used to, and the volume controls are
damn near impossible to use in a practical setting. Left ear swipe in
any direction counts as volume down while right ear in any direction is
volume up. This means using just one earbud locks you out of volume
controls on the earbud. Single press
Con #2: Poor Quality Mic
These
technically work for calls, but the sound quality of your own voice to
other people won't be great. I changed a setting and turned the mic
feature off via the phone app so I could use the phone's mic, but this
made the mic turn off for everything else as well, even my laptop... not
that I cared since the mic sucked.
Con #3: Only connects to BT 5.2+ with LDAC
To
some, this is a good thing, but I find that so few of my devices use
Bluetooth greater than 5.0 and even fewer have LDAC. Some devices I
found worked well with these earbuds: Surface Laptop 4, Samsung Galaxy
S23 Ultra. That's it. None of my other devices wanted to connect, even
some of my supposively Bluetooth 5.3 devices. The Nintendo Switch 2,
which does not officially list its Bluetooth specification, refused to
connect to these earbuds even after I used the phone app to remove all
old connections. I assume the LDAC requirement is the problem, but I
really don't know for sure. Your mileage may vary. Just be cautious
before you buy these. Make sure your devices are new enough and fancy
enough to use them.
Con #4: 2 devices same time but requires phone app
This
is aggrevating. One of the biggest selling points was the multiple
connected devices. Unfortunately, to connect to anything other than your
phone, you have to set up the secondary connection on the phone app.
This means one of the connections will always be taken by the phone.
This may not be a dealbreaker for most people, but I was hoping I could
use these to listen to multiple computers at the same time, like a work
laptop and a gaming computer. I know I'm probably in a niche use case,
but I wish they aimed higher with this feature and either didn't require
the phone app or allowed 3+ connections. I also wish I could get 2 of
these and use both on a single phone at the same time, but that's not an
advertised feature. Sure, I could set it up manually on a PC, but even
that could be a grueling task. I'd love to see Anker solve these complex
scenarios with something more streamlined. They could advertise it as
"podcast mode" and this mode would be able to mirror the output audio as
well as merge the two input mic audio sources with a simple toggle on
the phone app. I also wish Anker would release a desktop version of the
phone app so those without a good enough phone could still use these
earbuds for gaming or media consumption on a laptop.
Con #5: Ear pieces can come off in ears!
This
is a big no-no that a ton of manufacturers still do: they design their
ear interfaces with inserts that come off way too easily. These are no
exception. Within 20 minutes of using these earbuds, I was already using
tweezers to get the ear piece out of my left ear, and it wasn't a
pleasant experience. To combat this, I changed to a smaller size
interface piece so it would have less of a seal but wouldn't get stuck. I
wish I could have a tighter seal, though.
The pros...
Pretty
much everything else is good. Battery life is awesome. Ear feel is
pretty good, not perfect but good enough for consistent long-term use.
The audio quality is phenomenal, almost the quality of a full size set
of headphones. These earbuds also connect to up to 2 devices at the same
time, which is more rare in 2025 than you may expect.
If you'd like to support the site and my work, you can use this ref link to buy the Soundcore earbuds from Amazon.
