After spending some time with my Galaxy Buds+ I wanted to share a few impressions and tips on how to get the most out of Samsung's latest wireless buds.
One of the chief struggles for me was the fact that the buds (out of the box) had quite terrible audio reproduction. Bass was poor, mids and highs were muddled, and overall the Buds+ sounded rather mediocre in comparison to my AirPods Pro. Normally I use medium size eartips as that is my typical size, and indeed the most comfortable configuration for the Buds+ is also using medium size that comes pre-installed out of the box. However, after extensive trial and error, despite the most comfortable fit, I am now certain that to get the most out of the Buds+ one must deviate from the "most comfortable" setup. Because the most comfortable eartips also unfortunately create a pretty poor seal they let in a lot of ambient noise and leak a lot of bass. By moving up a size both in eartips and the rubber fitting rings you create a proper seal that preserves bass and restores proper low extension, at some expense of comfort. This however does not address all of the issues with mids and highs that still sound rather muddled.
While I don't have means of measuring the response curve, from a listening standpoint it sounds like the buds struggle to deliver a proper frequency response out of the box, at least with my ears. To address this I had to adjust the equalizer and move it from Normal to Dynamic. This perhaps makes the buds a bit overly bright but still substantially better than the default response. Ideally, Samsung would offer a custom parametric EQ option for the buds but in absence of this and barring EQ-ing within specific apps, this seems to be the best bet approach for the larger public.
TL;DR To get the most SQ out of Buds+ at some expense of comfort, move up a full size for eartips and rubber fitting rings and change the EQ from Normal to Dynamic (former restores bass and latter improves mids and highs). Doing these changes moves the buds from sounding like a cheap $40 pair of earbuds to performance that generally exceeds that of AirPods Pro.
(Note that all of them are pretty terrible when compared to my WH-1000XM3 over-ear, but I'm only adding this as a sidenote since the comparison is unfair.)
I just got these because I've been doing video and phone calls a lot lately. They are awesome for this purpose. I do wish they had a warmer sound. The dynamic setting is a bit too bright for me.
