8.2 Score
It’s been a long time since we took a look at Xiaomi’s earbuds selection, and only this year, we were offered to review the Xiaomi Buds 5 Pro. That said, these particular earbuds were on my list to review because of the Snapdragon Sound chip running the business. That said, over the past months, I have been daily driving, and we are going to share a bunch of things about these earbuds in this review.
Xiaomi Buds 5 Pro Review
Silver Surfer Called…
… Because he wants his earbuds back – but jokes all aside, these earbuds have that shiny silver casing with both matte and glossy finishes. You could place it at any table, and all it needs is a little light to bounce off, and it looks ornate on a table. Xiaomi is truly learning how to design their buds very well, by tucking those CE engravings on the inner lid of the earbuds and the cute “Designed by Xiaomi” only visible when you open. Love it when a design is thoughtfully done.
Though the glossy finish on this nice, it is a scratch-prone surface. I have already scratched it up, and I genuinely feel bad over it. I highly recommend getting a glossy case because you really need to protect this. On the bottom, you’ll find the USB-C Port, the pair/reset button and a subtle Harman AudioEFX logo, which we will get into later.
The Earbuds…
… offers the same design element as the Xiaomi Buds 5 Pro case, which has this continuity in design. A glossy patch with a matte finish all around, and it has a stem design. Since it uses a stem-type earbuds, your touch and pressure controls are in the stem itself, which I am not of.
The earbuds use normal oval eartips, so finding replacements shouldn’t be hard, and the grey circle you see on the head of the earbuds is the sensor that detects the wear and such.
Specification
Under the hood of this Xiaomi Buds 5 Pro, you are looking at some stellar hardware configuration, and I feel like being made available in this price point is too good to be true:
- Triple Driver Setup: 11mm Dual-Magnet Driver, Ceramic Tweeter and Planar Driver.
- Dual-Amplifier for high and low-frequency units
- Triple Microphone Setup
- Support for ANC
- Bluetooth 5.4 with LE Audio Support
- Snapdragon Sound S7 Gen 1 Processor
- Harman AudioEFX Tuning
The App Experience
The app made for the Buds 5 Pro is the same as any other Xiaomi earbuds. Obviously, once you pair, you get access to a plethora of settings and controls which really elevate the experience. But if you are pairing it with a Xiaomi Smartphone, you do get most of the functions readily available via the Bluetooth Settings app, which is a relief. The first few attempts on iOS didn’t quite work well, but Xiaomi patched an update which then made the earbuds work a lot better.
What I really appreciate is the complete feature set made available through the app because if this were a Samsung earbuds, you best believe, it is not going to play well with Apple devices. So, you get access to Recordings, Gestures, Audio Effects, finding your earbuds, firmware updates and under Additional Settings, you have the in-ear detection, tip test, Dual Connectivity, and automatically take calls. I appreciate this complete slew of features made available.
Special Sauce: Snapdragon Sound Hardware
The biggest, in fact, the first ever earbuds to feature the Snapdragon Sound Hardware, happen to be this very Xiaomi Buds 5 Pro. And sorry to burst your bubble, but it only works best with Snapdragon-powered devices. The earbuds have the Snapdragon S7 Gen 1 chipset driving the audio and taking care of the ANC, Low-latency, high-fidelity, and some AI features, which we take with a pinch of salt, and there’s the XPAN technology.
Now, in a flagship and prim and proper earbuds and headphones, you have processors that handle the audio and nuances better to give the top-shelf experience, like Sony with their QN Processors, and so on. So, in this case, the Snapdragon S7 Gen 1 performs similarly, improving the experience within the earbuds; however, it plays better with a Snapdragon-powered device, which is a shame.
But it also depends on which device you rely on too – we have the Xiaomi 15 and Xiaomi MIX Flip, where both gave different bit rates for the listening experience. Xiaomi did mention that the 15 will get an update for better bitrates, but do take note that the earbuds might sound different on a granular level across different devices.
Sound Quality
Talking about the sound quality of the Xiaomi Buds 5 Pro: the earbuds are set to Harman AudioEFX via the Audio Balance by default – so, without tinkering with the EQ and such, you are getting a pretty surprising wide staging with pretty good instrument presence and a nice dynamic which caught me by surprise. The bass is tweaked a little higher by default, which is not my cup of tea – but it doesn’t affect the clarity in ways you expect from similarly priced earbuds.
We played Know Better by Janelle Monaé – and you can tell the bass is a little strong, which I am not a fan of. But when the instruments kick in at the very end, my oh my, it’s really nice to listen to. You can tweak the earbuds and have access to other EQ presets, but I didn’t like most of them, and the default was pretty okay – and if I do want to tweak, I will go for custom EQ instead, which is what I did.
Songs like 11th Hour by Hailey Knox and anything similar to such genre produced results with heavy bass, and vocals taking a slight back seat, which I didn’t enjoy, when they shouldn’t. But toggle the Adaptive Sound, I must say it improves the sound acoustics based on your ear shape, which is not a feature you see in normal earbuds, and I appreciated it. This song was immediately better with like a better staging presence.
Places where I see earbuds like this excel are in more Pop environments with thumping bass, like listening to Chichinya by Ashniko, Powerhouse by Anirudh, Thicc by Black Caviar and more. The beat drops, and the presence it brings to the listening experience is just tastefully done, and I have spent more time with these Buds 5 Pro this year than any earbuds I have.
ANC Experience
Xiaomi sure did live up to its promise of positioning these Xiaomi Buds 5 Pro as “Pro” earbuds because the ANC is too good for the price. It isn’t kind in the sense that it gradually tunes you in and out of ANC when you toggle, you are going to feel a wee bit of light-headedness, but when it does switch, the cancellation is amazing. No hisses, no low-end issues, none of those ANC issues you get from a lot of the earbuds from this price point, and it has the potential to rival the likes of Sony to a certain degree, might I add.
The ANC can be adjusted granularly from Light to Deep, or you can do the Adaptive mode, which handles it automatically. Transparency mode gives you three sensitivity options, and that’s great because it does a fine job in blending the music with the outside world well. You can converse with your friends without the need to take the earbuds off, and I love that.
Cool Features worth Highlighting
Xiaomi surely did equip some features I never thought I would see in earbuds – such as the ability to voice record through the earbuds and with the phone, which is a feature I never thought I needed until I used it. Thought I might add that use this feature responsibly and not to invade privacy.
Any Setbacks
There are a few setbacks, which I wouldn’t say are a dealbreaker, but it does open the door to users to try the earbuds before the purchase. For one, the fit – I have a distaste for stem-based earbuds, and this one likes to slip a lot out of my ears whilst eating, which gets pretty annoying. And if your ear concha is shallow, then this might not sit well in your ears. The touch and swipe controls on the stems could not get any annoying than it is – because you will have to do a lot of steps to get used to and familiarise yourself with the controls. Even then, get ready to make mistakes from time to time.
One thing that isn’t a setback is the battery life. It is great with hitting numbers over 7 hours for a great listening experience, and you could get a total of about 37-38 hours of battery life, which is ANC and Transparency mode dependent too, which in my case was switching between the ANC and Transparency mode, of course.
Conclusion
For RM 699, it is a lot of dough for these earbuds if you ask me. In fact, a lot of users were taken aback by the pricing, too. But since its launch, the price has gone down a lot, and you could pick them for RM 500 and above. But even at its RM 699 price point, I don’t think any other brands remotely offer what Xiaomi is offering: mainly the Snapdragon Sound, although it only properly supports Snapdragon devices.
The High-fidelity listening experience truly varies depending on your device: we tried this with Xiaomi 14 and it capped at 1.2Mbps lossless, whereas the Xiaomi 15 and MIX Flip support the higher 2.1Mbps lossless. But the fact that a lot of the app features are widely available across iOS and Android devices is the biggest surprise for me. I’m properly impressed.
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