Oppo Enco X Review: The Lovechild with Dynaudio

If you notice a pattern among smartphone manufacturers, you’ll see how the brands tend to leverage over well reputable brands to add a certain flare to attract consumers and this started a long while back. But what was initially a plot to team up and come with better products, ended up being a gimmick where the brand would sell their product regardless of if its good or not. We have tried Oppo’s previous audio product like the Enco Q1 – which is still among our favorites. Now, we see their first partnership with Dynaudio, the Danish Audio brand with these true wireless earbuds, the Enco X. So, when Oppo can make excellent product on their own, what exactly does it bring to the table with Dynaudio?

Glad you asked: it’s their lovechild and this is the Oppo Enco X Review.

Minimalistic Design Reminiscent of the Cupertino

It’s beautiful to see Oppo keeping their design language clean and nice – but it can leave an impression that it does look similar to as to what the Cupertino brand we all know, offers really. But that’s alright because in all honesty – there are only few ways to make your true wireless different and in Oppo’s defense, the case is a lot more compact, slimmer, and really nice to carry it in pockets with no added bulk.

The main gripe I have isn’t with the design or build but it’s the type of material they went with – a glossy finish which is like attracting moth to a flame – in this case, scratches are the moth, and the glossy coat is the flame. So, get ready to attract a bunch of little scuffs but before you even purchase, we’d totally recommend picking up a silicon case that costs barely RM10 from Shopee like the one we have here with a loop on the side for you to hook it to any easy to access area.

Oh, and one thing I love about the case, is the magnetic opening and closing – very addictive if you are fidgety.

Comfort-wise

These earpieces have stems, so once again there’s no better reference than the AirPods Pro which has the stem like design that comes out and an earpiece with a rubber tip to sit in-ear as these are Noise Cancelling in-ear Earbuds. Now up till this point, we have been saying that True Wireless Earbuds are very subjective, there are users with ears who would find – like its too small for their ear or its big – but in my case, it was just right. Unfortunately, we couldn’t do a fit test due to the whole COVID restrictions, so we have to put that away for now.

There were some minor adjustments needed – but for the most part, it was as easy as taking it out of the case and inserting it into your ears, voila. I do like the fit and finish, plus you do get extra tips in the box which you can attach to your earbuds – so you can get the right fit. The sizes of the eartips are pretty close to accurate, not as accurate as the Jabra Elite 75t, but most users won’t be reaching out for a third-party ear tips to get it right with these Enco X.

Specification

As I mentioned earlier, the true weight of a collaboration or in this case where we call it the lovechild between Oppo and Dynaudio – is in its hardware and software. That said, these earbuds have two drivers – one 11mm dynamic driver and a 6mm balanced magnetic membrane driver. Now the moment you hear that you might wonder if it is a Balanced Armature like the Edifier TWS6, it does somewhat have the same style of construction in a sense but what Oppo calls it – its just a Dual-Driver Design.

The whole thing is a bit vague but given that we have tried Balanced Armature before, but these drivers are more like Planar Magnetic Drivers made for In-ears of sorts (it’s complicated, I know) – But we wrote about what is Balanced Armature and what difference does it bring in a different article which you can click here to read. As for the rest, you can check out the specification below:

• 11mm Dynamic Driver + 6mm Balanced Membrane Driver
• Bluetooth 5.2 with Binaural Low-Latency Transmission
• Noise Cancelling Modes with Support for Transparency Mode
• Supports 3 Codec: LHDC, AAC and SBC
• 44mAh Battery on each earbuds, 535mAh battery in case
• USB-C Charging or Qi Wireless Charging
• IP54 Rated Headphones

Software Experience

Initially, we were concerned about the earbuds not having an app to be able to control with because earbuds of these caliber usually comes with an application that gives you more control than the ones you already get out of the box. That said, the Oppo Enco X has an app in Play Store called HeyMelody, which allows you to do few more things: to keep your earbuds updated with the latest version, features and fixes, customizing the control of the earbuds on left and right, fit test to see everything is alright, Noise Cancellation settings and finally the Equalizer.

Now right out of the bat, I am going to get the equalizer out of the way because there are extremely limited options for the users to take advantage of. You have the default option and Dynaudio’s own profiles. I do kind of wish that users were given the opportunity to be able to use the graph to be able to create their own presets to suit their personal taste. Rest of the controls such as: limited to setting two taps to choose between the modes and all, has been unlocked with a new update where you can customize the controls a lot better – so thank goodness for that.

Other than that, the app is pretty straightforward to use and friendly enough that you don’t have to turn too many pages of sorts to be able to toggle one thing off or on.

Audio Quality

Now bear in mind that this particular audio test is done with two devices – Sony Walkman NW-A55, Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra and on three different music sources: a local library consisting of FLAC, Spotify on the highest quality and finally Tidal HiFi. Codec-wise majority of the phones support SBC and AAC (for Apple Users) which is implemented on pretty much every android phones you can find but not LHDC (which we will get to it in a bit).

The default sound signature of the Enco X – I wouldn’t call it neutral but its more tuned to emphasize on the bass front, vocal next and other elements finally, to put it in one word, it’s “bright.” Now given that there are two separate drivers to manage two different elements of the audio – that is the dynamic driver for mids and lows, membrane driver for highs – it’s as what you’d expect. Listening to Night Air by Jamie Woon feels very energizing: with the clear vocals I genuinely enjoy and a nice balance of the music surrounding it. The bass is not overpowering which a good sign in our books because having heavy bass doesn’t mean its good audio. In this case, the balance of it just nice.

Now trying a song that has been on a loop for me personally, Rendezvous feat. Miraa May by Col3trane – I have to say that I have to say, this particular true wireless earbuds is the third one in my list I have enjoyed listening to this song. Now there’s a good balance with everything and I can hear a good range, the vocals stand out for the most part and it doesn’t get tuned out by the music itself.

It’s not all perfect though – because despite having enough of everything, the Enco X lacks a little bit of dynamic range and that’s not because it fails to produce, it actually can’t because these drivers can only work well with limited frequencies and anything beyond tends to perform a little short, which is why having another driver helps make up as much as it could, in this case the dynamic driver. If you see some IEMs in the market that labels balanced armature or Planar Driver, you’ll realize it has more than one to make up for the short comings.

The Dynaudio’s sound profile – starting with Simple and Clear sounds sharper with vocals, brings the music a little down and lowers the bass by a lot, it sounds like you are losing a lot of details, but it sounds “balanced.” Warm and Soft on the other hand, has a little bit of bass but not as heavy as default and the sharper vocals sounds a little blunt as in its pleasing.

Now this True Wireless Earbuds support LHDC – if you remember HWA, you’d know this. This particular Low Latency High-Def Audio codec allows users to stream more than the SBC’s rated 320 kbps (LHDC streams at 900kbps, 90kbps short from Sony’s LDAC format) to listen to high resolution audio on the move.

Problem is: There isn’t much device in the market that supports LHDC. Unfortunately, when we were reviewing these Enco X, we too didn’t have devices that actually supports LHDC natively. For now, we will leave this out and when we get one, we will update our findings in another follow up content.

Active Noise Cancelling in these true Wireless earbuds are pretty subtle and does the job when you start playing music. Now, there are two modes: the one we mentioned just now and the Max Active Noise Cancelling – and that one, I wouldn’t recommend because it produces a “hiss” sound which the ANC normal mode doesn’t and does cause discomfort and loses the audio quality a fair bit more. Transparency mode on this is great, and I have no issues with that one and it feels just like as if I do have no earbuds on my ears, I’d say its almost on par with my Sony WF-1000XM3s.

We curated a special Spotify Playlist with Oppo for you to listen to which calms you during these unprecedented times and expresses the potential of these Oppo Enco X, which you can click here to do so.

Conclusion

Oppo Enco X is the crème de la crème in their plethora of true wireless earbuds they have unveiled so far. The question that I get with this earbud just like I do with other earbuds because with so many out there, is that if this is a money well spent? If you ask me, I’d say Oppo can afford to ditch their entire line up and just keep the Enco X because this is pretty much it. Remember we mentioned about trying Oppo’s Enco Q1 before and being impressed by it? We have the same impression here too.

The good clean finish, a nice sounding earbuds solely based on hardware and a software that isn’t too shabby to manage the updates and features. Now, this is the kind of lovechild I expect from a co-created product.

Click here to purchase your own Oppo Enco X: Shopee | Lazada

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Special thanks to OPPO Malaysia for providing us the Enco X for us to do this review.