If you’ve ever wanted a remote to control your wireless earbuds, then CMF may just have the product for you. The company recently unveiled its new Buds Pro 2 earbuds and while its design may seem familiar, it adds a long-awaited feature that’s sure to tickle your fancy.
What Am I Looking At?
The Buds Pro 2 is the “highest-end” audio product from CMF, which is Nothing’s budget sub-brand. While the firm has attempted to cram as many of the usual, and even some stand-out, features as possible into this thing, it still manages to within an affordable price range. The earbuds retail at only RM299; while it’s a notable price increase from last year’s RM239 price tag, it’s still within the lower end of the spectrum.
Fans of the brand will notice that it looks very similar to the vanilla Buds, specifically because of the dial. Unlike the regular Buds though, the dial on the Buds Pro 2 case isn’t merely decorative but functions as a smart dial that lets you have control over various functions, which I’ll get into in a bit.
For audio, the buds are equipped with a 11mm driver and a 6mm tweeter combo, along with support for the LDAC codec as well as spatial audio. Despite its consumer-friendly price tag, it still comes with active noise cancellation that’s slightly more powerful than its predecessors, capable of tuning out up to 50dB of noise. Durability-wise, it also gets a minor upgrade from an IP54 rating to IP55 for dust and water resistance.
What’s Good About It?
What everyone is going to be most interested in is obviously the smart dial, so what’s the verdict? To no one’s surprise, it’s an absolute gem of a feature that adds both stylish flair and a practical tool for your daily arsenal. Adjusting the volume using the dial is a lot of fun and very satisfactory as it does have a clickiness to it, but more than that, you can even customise it for other functions through the Nothing X app.
The dial can be pressed as well, which you can set to play or pause media, answer calls, call up the voice assistant, and even change the ANC mode by pressing and holding it. In case you’re worried about accidental pocket presses, you can disable the dial by double pressing and holding.
Another strong point of the earbuds is the battery life, with the brand claiming that they can last up to 11 hours with ANC turned off and 6.5 hours with ANC enabled. The claim definitely holds water as I never had to deal with them dying whenever I kept them on the whole day in the office.
With the charging case, you can get a total playback time of 43 hours, so I found myself charging the case only about once a week even with daily usage. The case takes about an hour to fully charge and it lacks support for wireless charging, while the buds only require a 10 minute top-up to get an extra two to three hours of use out of them.
As for the noise cancellation, they’re definitely a lot better than what you’d expect from RM299 earbuds. Don’t get me wrong, you’re still gonna hear a lot of ambient noise when there’s nothing playing, but with audio playback, the ANC does its job well enough. Dare I say it, the noise cancellation might be one notch above the Nothing Ear (a).
What’s The Catch?
Unfortunately, for an audio product, the biggest weakness of the CMF Buds Pro 2 is the audio quality. With something like Childish Gambino’s “Lithonia” or Noah Kahan’s “The View Between Villages”, it’s pretty obvious that these buds lean heavily towards bass.
It’s a common problem with a lot of budget earbuds where vocals get drowned out and the bass is enhanced a bit too far. Even then, the bass sounds quite muddy and cheap, but it’s slightly remedied when you turn on the Ultra Bass feature in the app.
Then there’s the connection issue. I’ve never encountered these problems with Nothing earbuds but with this one, the audio would occasionally jitter and the earbuds sometimes struggle to accurately and timely switch between two devices through the Dual Connection feature.
Moreover, there’s an odd delay when using the dial for certain functions. CMF says you only need to hold it for one second to switch between ANC modes, but I found that it actually takes three seconds, which isn’t a huge deal but it’s an annoying thing to deal with if you wanna switch to transparency mode to talk to someone.
What’s most irritating about them, however, is the way that the in-ear detection works. The buds will pause any ongoing music when you take out the earbuds, but it won’t automatically resume the playback once you’ve put them back in.
Should I Buy It?
The CMF Buds Pro 2 is certainly a mixed bag, to say the least. You’re actually getting a lot of bang for your buck with how little you’d spend on it, but there are numerous compromises that become obvious the more you use it.
That being said, the brand truly did pack a lot of features, both basic and unique, into something that is arguably affordable for most people. It’s not a perfect product, but if RM299 is really all you can afford, then this might be one of the best options out there.
