Soundcore Liberty 5 review: Excellent daily driver earbuds

Soundcore’s Liberty 5 wireless earbuds are, in many respects, exactly what I’ve come to expect from the Anker-owned brand. They’re a midrange set of noise-canceling buds that do almost everything you could ask of them, and at $130, they’re still very affordable, especially when you compare them to Apple’s AirPods Pro 2 ($249).

Soundcore says it has made several improvements over the previous model, including the company’s best ANC system so far. On the other hand, some features have been pulled: There’s no longer head-tracked spatial audio or heart rate monitoring. Here’s what you can expect from the Liberty 5.

Design

By now, Soudcore fans are very familiar with the brand’s design approach, and the Liberty 5 has all of the big hallmarks, including stem-based earbuds, a charging case with a sliding lid, bar-style LED indicator, and wireless charging, and the earbuds have good protection from dust and water (IP55).

You get a choice of four colors, and inside the box is a short USB-A to USB-C charging cable, along with a generous five sizes of silicone eartips (six if you include the preinstalled mediums).

Soundcore has kept the pressure-based squeeze-to-click gestures on the earbud stems that it introduced on the Liberty 4 (which are similar to the controls that Apple uses on its AirPods 4 series). Soundcore added a swipe gesture for volume control on the Liberty 4 Pro, but the Liberty 5 still uses squeeze-to-click for volume adjustments.

Comfort, controls, and connections

Generally speaking, while I find stem-style earbuds a bit less secure than their stemless cousins, they’re more reliably comfortable for more people. I’m not alone in thinking that — Samsung switched to a stem-based design for its Galaxy Buds Pro 3 for exactly that reason.

The Liberty 5 are no exception to this generalization. With the default eartips, I found them very easy to wear for long periods. And just in case you’re unsure of which eartips to use, the Soundcore app will help you find the ones that ensure optimal ANC and sound quality (only you can tell if they’re also comfy enough).

I really like the squeeze controls. They offer a precision you just can’t get from touch controls, and they’re accessible even if you’re wearing gloves. Thin gloves. They’d be a bit easier to use if the stems were tubular instead of flat oval, but that’s just nitpicking on my part.

The controls are fully customizable within the Soundcore app, with four gestures per earbud (single-, double-, triple-click, and a long-press option). There’s even an optional smartphone camera trigger option, but strangely, it can only be associated with the single-click gesture.

New for the Liberty 5 is the option to mute the mics when on a call with a single click. It’s handy, for sure, and you get a confirmation tone immediately, plus one every 20 seconds while you remain on mute. Just keep in mind that there’s no other confirmation of your muted status — iOS’s phone app won’t adjust its mute button state to match the state of the earbuds.

Helping out with music control are wear sensors, which almost instantly auto-pause and resume your tunes when you remove or replace an earbud.

With Bluetooth 5.4 and Google Fast Pair, connecting the buds is a breeze on Android and iOS. Wireless range is about average: 20-30 feet indoors, depending on obstacles, and further if you’re outside, and I didn’t notice any dropouts during my testing.

Bluetooth Multipoint works very well, and I’m thrilled that Soundcore has adjusted its app so that you can see all of your previously paired devices, letting you select the ones you want to be active. Even better: Soundcore has fixed a limitation where you had to decide between Multipoint and LDAC codec support. Now you can run both simultaneously, something that competitive models from EarFun (e.g, Air Pro 4) can’t do.

However, the Liberty 5 (in fact, all Soundcore products so far) lack Bluetooth Auracast compatibility. If that matters to you (and I think, increasingly, it will matter to all of us), the EarFun may be worth a look.

Sound quality

Out of the box, the Liberty 5 sound good, with plenty of bass response thanks to the dual sound tubes that Soundcore added to the acoustic architecture. To my ears, however, there’s a lack of sparkle in the high end, and the midrange feels a bit lacking. If, after giving them a listen, you feel the same, I strongly recommend using the Soundcore app’s two personalization features: HearID and the sound preference test. It takes about 10 minutes to do both, but it’s absolutely worth it.

The resulting change to the EQ addressed all of my concerns — preserving that punchy bass while enhancing both the mids and highs.

I could have achieved this manually — there’s an option to adjust the equalizer on your own or via presets (lots of presets!) — but the app’s built-in personalization made it much easier.

I still ended up making tiny tweaks: a bit more bass and a hair less in the highs, but overall, I was really impressed with the results.

Soundcore has included three Dolby Audio presets (Music, Podcasts, and Movies) for supposedly more immersive sound. They offer mild enhancements, but once I dialed in the EQ based on HearID and the preference test, Dolby’s processing didn’t provide significant improvements, so I kept it turned off.

For those of you with Android phones, by all means, enable the LDAC codec in the app. In quiet conditions (and when playing a lossless source of audio), you can hear more detail and nuance compared to the standard AAC codec used by iPhones.

Noise canceling and transparency

The Liberty 5 have Soundcore’s best ANC (according to Soundcore), which can dampen down nearby voices better than previous models. I found this really hard to verify compared to the Liberty 4 Pro. My sense is that while the Liberty 5 may be slightly better at killing off the higher frequencies associated with voices, they’re a little worse (than the Liberty 4 Pro) at dealing with lower frequencies. So this may come down to personal preference based on the sounds that bug you the most.

I think what matters most, however, is that both models have really good noise cancellation — you’ll be very happy regardless of which way you go.

The Soundcore app lets you tweak the ANC strength and there’s also a wind-reduction mode that, as its name implies, helps cut down on wind noise when noise canceling is on.

Transparency has also come a long way. The Liberty 5 isn’t quite at the AirPods Pro level of magical transparency, but it’s now so close that unless you use the feature constantly, I think it’s more than good enough for most folks.

Call quality

Soundcore is one of the most reliable brands for wireless earbuds calls. The Liberty 5 continues that tradition with excellent masking of background noise and good reproduction of your voice, especially in quieter conditions.

You can enable an automatic side-tone mode, which switches the buds into transparency mode as soon as you take or place a call. This helps a lot in terms of being able to hear your own voice, though don’t expect it to perform as well as normal transparency mode. When on a call, the mics have to do more work, reducing the fidelity of the transparency effect to maintain a high quality for your callers.

Battery life

Soundcore pegs battery life on the Liberty 5 at 12 hours of playtime with ANC turned off and 8 hours with ANC enabled. When you include a fully charged case, the total rises to 48 and 32 hours, respectively.

My limited testing suggests that these numbers are accurate, but the usual caveats apply: if you listen louder than 50% volume, if you’re in a very noisy environment, or if you turn on LDAC, these numbers can fall sharply — by as much as 30%.

Still, Soundcore provides a quick-charge feature that provides 5 extra hours (maximum) for 10 minutes of charging, so you won’t likely find yourself without power for very long.

Conclusion

Soundcore gets so many things right with the Liberty 5 wireless earbuds, you need to take a fine-toothed comb just to find any flaws. I highly recommend them. As for the absent extras, like head-tracked spatial audio and heart rate tracking? If you really want them, check out the Beats Powerbeats Pro 2, but be prepared to pay for the privilege.

At the moment, the Liberty 5’s biggest weakness is price. If you’re not a big bass head, you can get a very fine set of earbuds, like EarFun’s Air Pro 4, for a regular price of $90. With constant discounts on Amazon, you can often find them for as little as $60. Given the current economic situation, which could change at any moment, it puts a lot of pressure on Soundcore.

Still, I expect Soundcore will push hard to remain competitive on price, so if you don’t need to buy immediately, maybe wait and see what the next few months bring.