Samsung Galaxy Buds2 Pro Review

The Samsung Galaxy Buds2 Pro buds offer great call quality and exceptional user experience while maintaining good sound quality. If you're not willing to drop hundreds of dollars on a pair of earbuds but still want the best bang for your buck, these are the right pair for you.

Performance Comparison

Sound Quality

These earbuds sound good. They're balanced, clear, and loud. To assess them, we assembled a team of audio experts to listen to a wide range of genres — from pop romps and soaring classical sets to twangy country tragedies, jazz, rap, hip hop, and R&B. Ultimately, we rated the Galaxy Buds2 Pro a bit better than average.

Their sound signature is bright rather than warm, offering more clarity and detail than a smooth, relaxed feel. The balance of bass, mid, and treble creates a neutral, natural profile, though high frequencies can sound tinny, sharp, or hollow at times, especially at high volumes. For example, in “The Recipe” by Kendrick Lamar, the opening screech of landing gear is piercing at the 0:05 mark, and the snare drum throughout the song “Swimming Pools” can sound overly sharp.

That said, when they work, they work well. “Drops of Jupiter” by Train sounds full and expansive, with clear, bright instrumentation and warm, punchy kick drums at 0:50. While the mid-frequency tones are smoother, with more depth than the treble, they lack the fullness of the bass range. The upper end can sound strained, which we noticed in “Out Alpha the Alpha” by Megan Thee Stallion and “J.S. Bach's Cello Suite No 1” performed by Yo-Yo Ma.

The bass frequencies sound good enough, thumping and booming adequately in songs like “Poetic Justice” by Kendrick Lamar. But they have the muddy, indistinct quality that can result from overlapping frequencies. It's not rich, warm, or defined enough to create a well-rounded and nuanced sonic space to explore. At higher volumes, the bass gains power but can feel clunky.

Soundstage

An earbud's soundstage describes how the music appears to be situated around you in three-dimensional space. Due to their small size and in-ear design, earbuds often struggle to reproduce the experience of live music, where sounds emanate from various instruments spread across a stage in front of you.

As technology advances, some earbuds are beginning to offer a more immersive audio experience, making it seem as though your music is coming from the world outside of your earbuds. The Galaxy Buds2 Pro earbuds manage this, allowing the music to move out of your head while remaining somewhat confined.

They don't ascend beyond their humble reality, a small set of in-ear speakers. Still, you can place instruments in various locations around you and hear and appreciate them across frequencies. In Mejia's “Feel Right,” the rhythmic bass groove is full and clearly defined against the high vocals and the electronic instrumentation at the 2:22 mark.

Each set of earbuds has a unique blend of bass, mid, and treble frequencies, and the relative volume is higher for some frequency bands than for others. This is their frequency response curve, shown above alongside the GearLab House Curve. Our House Curve is the sound mix that offers the best listening experience for most people in our experience. The two curves are very similar, with only minor differences. We use our Brüel & Kjaer Type 5128-B Head Simulator, which we've nicknamed “Darwin”, along with its companion software, SoundCheck, to generate these curves.

User Experience

The Samsung Galaxy Buds2 Pro earbuds are incredibly comfortable and secure, making it easy to take your music with you. To evaluate how easy they are to use, we asked a dozen testers to try them on for size, and our expert test team wore them during long days in the office, commutes, and workouts. Here's what we found.

Comfort

These earbuds come with three silicone tips to adjust their fit. All of our testers found a comfortable setup. It helps that these earbuds have a matte gel coating that makes them far more pleasant to the touch and less severe against your ear than most. They feel light and airy, perching in your ear rather than crash-landing there. Some earbuds create pressure points that drive us to the brink. That's not an issue with the Samsung Pro buds. We have no trouble wearing them for hours at a time.

Stability

Due to their lightweight design and comfort, these earbuds can feel unstable at times. They proved themselves during testing though, passing our headbanging and handstanding stress tests. After that, we feel confident enough to wear them mountain biking, where a runaway earbud would be very hard to recover. Their ingress protection rating of IPX7 means that you can (theoretically) immerse these buds in up to a meter of water. We haven't tested this, but it gives us confidence to wear the Pro buds when it's raining lightly or we're sweating heavily.

Customization

The Pro earbuds' operating system is trickier than their fit. To start, the Wear App isn't supported by Apple products. You can pair them with a Mac or iPhone via Bluetooth, but then you won't be able to access the earbuds' numerous features. The app allows for manual equalization (EQ) adjustments to the frequency response curve, letting you customize the treble, mid, and bass levels. There are only six settings though, fewer than other options we've tried. That said, the sound is pretty darn good already.

There is an active noise cancellation and an ambient sound mode, which pipes in ambient sounds so you can be aware of your surroundings. They also have a voice detection feature that lowers the volume automatically when you start speaking so you can carry on a conversation.

The 360 audio feature is a surround sound function that's meant to make your experience more immersive. It isn't very effective compared to similar features in other earbuds. You can also access some of Google's AI features with the right device, including a real-time language translation assistant. The app also includes a fit check to ensure optimal sound and noise cancellation, and a location feature to help you find misplaced earbuds.

Connectivity

During our in-house evaluation of connectivity, one of our testers had some trouble pairing the Galaxy Buds2 Pro with her iPhone after they had already been paired with an Android, having to “forget” the connection on one device before pairing with another. One thing worth mentioning is the sensitivity of the touch controls. While not a technical issue with connectivity, the same tester found that she accidentally paused or skipped songs multiple times throughout the day when doing things like putting on glasses or pulling on a sweater. However, beyond this, we did not experience very many connectivity problems when using these earbuds. To compare our experience with a larger crowd, we looked at 1-star Amazon user reviews and kept note of each one that mentioned connectivity-related issues. We used this number to find a percentage of negative feedback out of the total number of user reviews. The Buds2 Pro fared relatively well, with a reported rate of connectivity issues of just 0.25%. These earbuds are a great choice for interruption-free listening if you plan to use them with a single primary device and are ok with the extra-sensitive touch controls.

Noise Cancellation

When it comes to active noise cancellation (ANC) and passive noise isolation, these earbuds are in the middle of the pack. They perform adequately, but the difference between them and the top-ranked models is noticeable, affecting our focus during work and holding us back from fully immersing ourselves in the music.

We're surprised that the Pro earbuds don't perform better here since the previous version, the Samsung Galaxy Buds2, are much more effective. The ANC dampens noises below 2,000 hertz by 15 to 20-odd decibels, which helps, but it's not enough to block out the world.

For high-frequency sounds, passive noise isolation is more effective since earbuds physically block noises like earplugs. The previous Galaxy Buds2 blocked between 25 and 40 decibels in the treble range, while the Pro version struggles to crack 30 decibels, muffling a narrower frequency range. The difference is noticeable.

Still, as you can hear in the video above, the earbuds do a decent job of quieting the mid and high-frequency sounds in a noise cafe. Turning the ANC on can make high-pitched noises more noticeable. If you're playing music, you'll mask more of the noise, but the experience is hardly immersive.

Check out the graph above, which shows how many decibels the earbuds block passively and with ANC activated. As is expected, the ANC is more effective with consistent, low-frequency noises, while passive isolation works better for higher frequencies. The issue is that it's not blocking enough noise across the board. We'd like to see both lines hitting higher marks.

Battery Life

We test battery life by streaming music at 75% of the maximum volume until each set gives up the ghost. While the Galaxy Buds2 Pro earbuds achieve a respectable score for their 7.5-hour battery life, they don't live up to Samsung's 8-hour claim. The half-hour difference though is unlikely to drastically impact daily use.

Even if you need a full 8 hours for your shift, a fully charged case will provide another three charges. That's roughly 32 hours of use on the go. You'll need to wait for the earbuds to power up, but a quick 5-minute charge will give you a full hour of listening time.

Call Quality

We don't mind making calls with the Galaxy Buds2 Pro whether in a busy office or a quiet room. They isolate your voice from background noise fairly well. To test this, we recorded male and female testers reading from a script, then played the recording through a speaker in the Bruel and Kjaer 5128-B head, and listened to what the earbuds picked up in both quiet and noisy environments.

When it comes to the Subway stress test, none of the earbuds fare particularly well. It's not a great place to take a phone call. Yet, the man's voice pleasantly clear. We're able to hear some slight tapping in the background while the woman speaks woman's but we're able to catch every word clearly. All told, the Galaxy Buds 2 Pro did better than most in this test.

Again in our office call quality test we're able to hear both voices clearly with only a very light tapping that's well masked in the background of the call.

In a still room, both male and female voices were loud and clear, despite some occasional clicking or tapping sounds, which didn't affect overall clarity.

Should You Buy the Samsung Galaxy Buds2 Pro?

If comfort is your top priority, these earbuds are an excellent option. Only a few other options can compete, and they all cost more. We also enjoy the listening experience and sound profile the Samsung Buds2 Pro offer. Their impressive waterproofing and secure fit make them ideal for active users. While Samsung's flashier features, like the 360-degree audio with head tracking didn't impress us, the essential components are solid. But, if you need top-of-the-line noise cancelling to focus on music or your work, these aren't your best bet.

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