Monoprice Horizon TrueWireless ANC Earbuds

Water Resistant Wireless Earbuds Without The Investment

Monoprice Has A Lot Of Audio Products!

Monoprice have been offering a variety of audio products for review, the latest of which is the Horizon TrueWireless ANC earbuds.  They look and function similarly to EarPods but cost half as much, which is nice in such a tiny and easy to lose product. 

This is a quick overview of how well they do their job, and a look at their aesthetics.

Behold The Box

For it is a box of a decent size, and not a waste of packaging materials.  You shouldn’t get a broken product if you have a heavy handed delivery person.  The earbuds and charger are accompanied by three additional pairs of rubber tips of varying sizes as well as an almost comically short USB-C to USB-A.  The seven inch long cable doesn’t take up much space and it is wired for power and data, which is rather nice.

The case itself is slightly larger than a Zippo lighter or a pack of breath mints and can easily be slipped into a pocket.  The weight is also negligible, as it should be.  On the back is a button you can use to unpair the earbuds from a device so you can switch your listening source, or reset the Bluetooth connection because it is doing what Bluetooth does best.  The charging port is on the bottom of the case,

Horizon TrueWireless ANC In The Wild

The battery rating of seven hours listening, five talking or using ANC is more than enough for most trips and the fact that the carrying case can recharge them four times before needing to be recharged.  The recharge time isn’t bad, but running out of juice will definitely mean an interruption in your listening.  Given 10 minutes or so you will have at least an hours playtime back, possibly more.

Pairing is as easy as opening the case and looking at available Bluetooth devices, the light on the front of the case illuminates briefly to alert you of that.  If you run into pairing problems just pop the earbuds back in, press the button on the back for 10 seconds and try again.  At one point I lost the signal to the right earbud, that process resolved Bluetooth being a pain.

You will need to memorize some arcane hand gestures to make use of the Horizon TrueWireless earbuds, a single tap on the right decrease volume, the left increase, while a double tap on either will pause or play a track.  Three taps to the left skips you a track back and three on the right sends you one ahead.  You can also hold your finger to the right earbud for two seconds to activate your phone’s voice assistant, while doing so on the left toggles between ANC and transparent mode.

If you take phone calls, when one comes in you can single tap either earbud to pick it up or press and hold for two seconds to reject the call.  A double tap to either will end a current call, handy for some and never used by others.  The voice quality is acceptable, but not what you might consider great as it lacks many of the enhancements that expensive earbuds offer.

Audio Quality

The quality of the microphone is also evident when using active noise cancellation.  When it works it is effective at drowning out or quieting the noise of traffic while still letting enough through to give you some awareness of your surroundings.  There were several times that ANC needed to be toggled on and off again to convince it to mute your surroundings to the best of it’s ability, almost as though it sets a ceiling based on the noise around you when enabled.  Wait for a truck to drive by and then toggle ANC on for the best experience.

Playback is good, the drivers may be smaller than an over the ear style headset but they also have the advantage of more direct access to your ear canal.  They are battery powered Bluetooth headsets, so they won’t be able to blast out tunes at an immense volume but they can certainly give you a good listening experience without setting the volume on your phone to maximum.

The IPXx5 rating means you should be fine using these on a run, a little rain will not penetrate to cause any harm but you should not even think about splashing around in a pool with them.  With the right rubber tips installed for your ears, they are rather secure and didn’t seem to want to fall out while walking or a quick run to catch the bus.

Finale

For $60 you get a proper pair of wireless earphones that offer ANC and a small case that holds a big charge and that does make the Horizon TrueWireless earbuds interesting.  The cost is the lack of additional features, there is no adaptive EQ nor enhanced voice capture technology.  The Qualcomm cVc 8.0 echo cancelling/noise suppression and the Adaptive aptX codec both do a good job and the bass is decent but if you are used to $200 earbuds you are going to notice a difference.

As with other wireless earbuds, losing one breaks the other but now it would only be a $60 mistake instead of over $100.  If you are looking for a pair of running earbuds or are prone to losing tiny objects, then Monoprice’s Horizon TrueWireless earbuds make a lot of sense.